Marion Shoard
| Marion Shoard | |
|---|---|
Shoard speaking at a rally in Sussex, 2011
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| Born |
Marion Shoard 6 April 1949 Redruth, Cornwall |
| Residence | Strood, Kent |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | St Hilda's College, Oxford |
| Occupation | Writer, campaigner |
| Website | marionshoard |
Marion Shoard (born 6 April 1949) is a British writer and campaigner. She is best known for her work concerning access to the countryside and land use conflicts. In 2002 she became the first person to give a name to the "edgelands" between town and country. Since 2004 she has also worked in the field of older people's issues.
Shoard was educated at Clarendon House Grammar School in Ramsgate, Kent and St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she read zoology, before studying town and country planning at Kingston-upon-Thames Polytechnic (now Kingston University).
She worked for four years at the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) before writing her first book, The Theft of the Countryside (1980). The book triggered debate over the conflict between modern industrial agriculture and the conservation of the UK's countryside. In 1987 Shoard published This Land is Our Land, which examined the history of the relationship between landowners and the landless and proposed it be altered. The same year Shoard presented a documentary on the same subject, Power in the Land.
Shoard continued campaigning, teaching planning at the University of Reading, University College London and Anglia Ruskin University and writing articles for newspapers and magazines. An updated edition of This Land is Our Land was published in 1997.
In 1999 Shoard published A Right to Roam, which explored how a general right of access to the UK's countryside might work. In 2002, her essay on edgelands was the first to name and set forward the characteristics of an emergent landscape on the urban fringe.
After Shoard's mother fell ill in the 1990s, she wrote a guidebook, A Survival Guide to Later Life, offering advice to older people and their carers. A new book, How to Handle Later Life, will be published on 1 September 2017.
Shoard's first book was an attempt to explain how farming was transforming the countryside by chronicling the loss of landscape features and wildlife diversity. It explores the impact of subsidies on such change and food over-production. Shoard proposes a variety of planning control extensions, the designation of new national parks and measures to repair damaged landscapes.
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