Here are all the National Parks and AONB in the country. If you could create another National Park/ AONB what area would you nominate?

by OceansOfLight

11 comments

  2. I wouldn’t create another national park, I’d just improve on the ones we have. We need to reforest much more of the Lake District, Peak District and the North York Moors.

    If the North York Moors in particular had more trees, the city of York would have better protection from its frequent flooding problem so it’s a win-win for the environment and for us.
    And trees are beautiful.

    Hopefully we do that.

  3. From Hereford to the Shropshire Hills AONB needs to be designated a National Park. Stone circles, 1000 year old bridges, Farms unchanged for 100’s and 100’s of years. Now I’ve said this, the developers will start looking…

  4. I think the place most worthy of national park status would be Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, the Isle of Purbeck and Poole Harbour.

    The protection that comes with being a NP could really help that entire area.

    Certainly to me more worthy of NP status than the South Downs.

  5. Not sure how to categories it, as it’s not an area of natural beauty as the landscape is effectively completely man made due to the draining of the area for agriculture use

    But as someone’s who grew up in the Devon and then moved to West Yorkshire.

    I once ended up having to briefly visit that section of East anglia between Ely, Downham Market, Wisbech, march & Littleport.

    It was so different to any other part of the UK I’d visited with the flat open spaces, the small villages around junction in drainage canals and rivers. One morning I was driving along this B road on a bank above one of the bigger drainage canals, where you could see for miles, with the sun starting to shine, no clouds, a little bit of mist on the fields. It was movingly beautiful, not akin to anything I’d seen before in England.

  6. My heart is saying the West Northamptonshire Uplands (not at all biased), but my brain is saying something like the National Forest or possibly the Trent Valley further north in the Midlands as its severely lacking National Parks and AONBs (probably for good reason though).

    Respectfully, if the Lincolnshire Wolds can become an AONB then any of those I mentioned certainly can too.

  7. Honestly anywhere. Although there is a noticeably huge gap between the Peak District and London.

    But what’s really important is not just the size, it’s the sheer lack of quality.

    Much of our iconic landscapes are little more than heather-strewn moors or sheep farms. We need to take nature seriously and give it a real chance to recuperate.

  8. The key qualifiers for a National Park are firstly that the area has outstanding scenic beauty on a national/international level, and secondly that the area offers leisure opportunities to enjoy said scenic beauty. So walking, climbing, kayaking, birdwatching, coasteering etc not Alton Towers or Chester Zoo.

  10. What does national park even mean in the UK really? People still live there, build there, set fires there, roads there etc

    I always imagine “national park” to be a protected wilderness where humans can’t just develop and have to protect but look at all those in the south east of England lol.
    The south downs and surrey hills are as destroyed, heavily farmed on and built all over as much as any non national park

  11. Saddleworth Moor. It’s got parts that are Nat park or Nat trust designated but the peat bogs are a huge natural resource for carbon capture and should be protected at all costs. It’s also ruggedly beautiful and tells a story of our ancestry with random buildings and ruins dotted throughout for the people who lived there and farmed the peat in previous centuries.

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