Chris Baines
| John Christopher Baines | |
|---|---|
| Born |
4 May 1947 Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England |
| Known for | Environmentalist author, broadcaster, environmental campaigner |
Chris Baines is an English naturalist, one of the UK's leading independent environmentalists. He is a horticulturalist, landscape architect, naturalist, television presenter and author.
Baines grew up in Sheffield, South Yorkshire. He worked in the local parks department when he left school, and then studied horticulture and landscape architecture at university.
After an early career in landscape contracting, including several years of greening desert landscapes in the Middle East and community landscaping on UK inner-city housing estates, Baines taught landscape architecture at post-graduate level until 1986, when he was awarded an honorary personal professorship at Birmingham Polytechnic in Birmingham.
In 1980, he was one of a group of local environmentalists who co-founded the Urban Wildlife Group (now the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country), the first of a series of such urban conservation organisations to appear in the UK that year. This was the beginning of a burgeoning urban wildlife movement with which he has always had a close association, and he remains Vice-President of the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country.
Through most of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Baines focused on television broadcasting, and presented The Big E, Saturday Starship, Pebble Mill at One and several other networked series. The BBC TV programme Countryfile evolved from his original regional series "Your Country Needs You" and Baines was one of Countryfile 's early presenters.
Baines built the first wildlife garden ever allowed at Chelsea Flower Show in 1985, and in the same year his television programme Bluetits and Bumblebees, and his book, How to Make a Wildlife Garden, inspired many people to begin gardening with wildlife.
The Wild Side of Town, which accompanied a five-part television series of the same name, won the U.K. Conservation Book Prize in 1987. His other books include four-story books for young children. His investigative environmental series for children, The Ark, won the International Wildscreen Award in 1987. Also in 1987, Chris recorded an album, The Wild Side of Town, with the folk-rock Albion Band and then toured the U.K., raising money for the British Wildlife Appeal.
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