@lewis-winks.bsky.social “Trees in and around school grounds offer vital shade during heatwaves like the one we’ve just experienced, while also benefiting wellbeing, improving air quality, enhancing biodiversity and enriching outdoor learning opportunities.... www.theguardian.com/education/20...

Bit late to this - added it to my reading list and promptly went festivaling - but this is very good and shows why the politics of land needs to return and be at the heart of 'Manchesterism'. Without it we can't really achieve a lot of Burnham's aims; the politics of the physical needs to return.

‘“Manchesterism is the end of neoliberalism,” Burnham has declared in one of his campaign videos. If this is to be so, a reckoning is needed not only with neoliberalism’s privatisation of public services, but also of land itself.’ righttoroam.substack.com/p/why-manche...

I’m not saying the debate in the U.K. has moved to the right, but Ed Miliband is basically seen as Pol Pot for aiming for a climate target first agreed to by…I think Theresa May’s government? Definitely Johnson’s. And this chat is going on during the middle of a record-breaking heatwave

I joined Tony Hawks for his new Radio 4 series, exploring the link between access and play for @righttoroam.bsky.social . We discussed how patterns of ownership, rights and restrictions interact to present barriers in England today. Give it a listen! www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

A tale of two heatwaves... 🏊‍♀️Spain: ensure everyone has access to cool water by heavily discounting municipal lidos; ⛔England: shut off all access to the reservoir in case the public consider swimming! @righttoroam.bsky.social

We're honoured to have filmed with students from Churston Ferrers Grammar School to help create a Dartmoor focused entry for the global #Docathon film competition, answering questions from the young film makers about what made access to #Dartmoor so important. www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeLo...

If you're looking for reassurance as to why you ditched X, give this article by Jonathan Liew a read, and then share it with someone who's still there: share.google/CKBEgYExzX2y...

Today has been the hottest day in May on record with Kew Gardens provisionally reaching 34.8°C - exceeding the previous highest May temperature in the UK by a full 2 degrees Celsius🌡️ This heat would be exceptional in the UK even in mid summer, let alone in May📈

While all eyes are on Farage, we're overlooking something even worse: the building of the very tight and truly vile operation that is Restore Britain. This excellent essay/report by Simon Pearson should wake us up to the threat - and to what exactly it is. simonpearson1.substack.com/p/tory-30

Obscured by our most iconic landscapes are 'shadow places': counterpoints to the carefully-curated and bucolic countryside. Confronting the interwoven demands of nature recovery and ecological literacy requires us to look to the relationships which shape our land - warts and all. 🧵1/

This is a perfect illustration of when space opened by a radical social movement becomes neutered and watered down by those who believe 'it's not political'. Pretending you want to create space, while editing out the components which discomfort you is doubling down on the initial injustice.

Good news for children as well as headteachers - now the government should get on with introducing social media prohibition for under 16s. Mobile phones to be banned in schools in England under new plans share.google/U8EgPVpD058x...

Delighted to go on BBC Politics South yesterday and talk about the @righttoroam.bsky.social amongst other things. Sweden has had this law of “public access to land” for decades, Scotland introduced it in 2003, its time we did the same in England.

There is a viral video going around on X and Facebook which has been seized on by the far-right. It claims to show a young British Asian destroying a dry stone wall. But as so often with such ragebait, the video isn't what it seems. Here is my, probably forlorn, attempt to correct the record.

Off (& excited) to the London premiere for Our Land Documentary - we need to change our relationship to land access. In these times of multi-crisis, land use & responsible access has never been so important. It affects us all. It’s going to be lively.

This kind of thing at Substack (including their Nazi problem and trans hate problem) are why my newsletter is at Ghost.org and always has been. Andrew Tate is a spectacularly vile human being accused of numerous violent crimes against women and hugely corrosive for young male minds.

MASSIVE numbers on the Together march against the far right today. Right to Roam has been marching with the Folk Against Fascism bloc - Morris dancers reclaiming rural English traditions from the far right The countryside is for everyone!

The lion and the unicorn. A sentiment as apparent and as urgent today as it was for Orwell in the 1940s.

VICTORY! Government to open up the Land Registry - bringing to an end a thousand years of secrecy shrouding who owns England. I’ve been campaigning for this for ten years: the new Land Use Framework, published later today, makes it government policy. 1/ www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Great news. Dartmoor is an ecological disaster zone masquerading as a National Park, as its ecosystems have been grazed out by sheep. Now this must change.

This is a great news story. But it's also an interesting access story; revealing of how we talk, and think, about access rights. Nightjar are an 'amber' list species. They're ground nesters. And they roost in the sorts of habitats which often overlap with existing access land in England and Wales.

Across England, we are shut out of the majority of our woodland: so much of that which is off limits is used for pheasant shooting or private commercial forestry. Support @righttoroam.bsky.social & join a local group trespass! Time for access reform. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Very happy to be representing @righttoroam.bsky.social as a member of this new rewilding alliance, and to have authored its launch report: The Welsh Way to Wild. 1) Read the report and sign up to the mailing list at: rewildingalliance.cymru 2) Give the alliance a follow: @cynghrairalwylltio.cymru

When campaigners argue for public access to the countryside, the debate is often cast as though access itself is an exceptional imposition on private rights. Yet in commercial contexts, the right to exclude is seen as "central to the business model"... www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Green majority of more than 4500, Labour in third place. Absolute calamity for Keir Starmer. And a complete failure of McSweeney’s electoral philosophy. The idea of relying on an anti-Reform vote coalescing behind Labour just collapsed entirely.

The attempted silencing of Palestine Action by proscribing is stuff of both satire and nightmare. Now all charges against protestors should be dropped and the ban repealed so that democracy can do its job of acting as a conscience for those in power with none. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live...

This May sees the release of Our Land - a feature length documentary film about the Right to Roam campaign, directed by Orban Wallace. www.youtube.com/watch?v=est-...

The daft thing is that with Proportional Representation there'd be no need for this self-destructive war within Labour. It could split into its component parts - left and right - and people could vote for what they wanted. It's only First-Past-the-Post that forces these irreconcilables together.

Exciting news: this May sees the national release of OUR LAND. A beautiful documentary feature film about the @righttoroam.bsky.social campaign, directed by Orban Wallace. Trailer here 👇 www.youtube.com/watch?v=est-...

Good morning. Let's make a collective resolution: this will be the year in which we start to turn things round.

National or regional (GLA) government needs to liberate London’s river system for walking too. Try walking the Roding between Barking Creek & Redbridge?! Impossible where it offers the most benefit in statistically low walking areas. Try the Ravensbourne; canalised/buried even in most green spaces!

It seems the first of the new 'nine river walks' the Government announced in place of a real access policy... won't actually create any new access? They're just upgrading the existing path and adding some signs and benches. A really rubbish level of ambition. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Government's proposed new National River Walk a damp squib says @openspacessociety.bsky.social -it's not new, but on existing rights of way. Priority should be green paper on access to nature, and new legislation. www.oss.org.uk/new-national... @ramblers.org.uk @naturalengland.bsky.social

The Government has announced the first of their ‘nine new river walks’: a section of the River Mersey near Stockport. Yet what’s being presented as a national breakthrough is, in reality, a set of long-overdue local council upgrades to existing riverside paths. A skim through the details... 🧵

This Telegraph article is a distillation of the horseshit propping up the idea of a 'rural v urban culture war'. 'BBC ACCUSED OF METROPOLITAN BIAS TOWARD RURAL BRITAIN' it claims, citing a poll commissioned by the Regional Moorland Association (i.e. gamekeepers) www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

The River Dart in spate flowing through (and over!) Totnes following heavy & prolonged rainfall. And this is one week past spring tides!

The Government have today announced an Access Green Paper which will consult on how to ‘strengthen the public’s legal right to access’. This is welcome - but further delay isn't: Labour MPs & access NGOs are united on the need for access legislation now. @righttoroam.bsky.social comment:

Tonnes of topsoil heading seaward, washed out by rainfall from the River Dart Catchment, South Devon. With heavy rainfall events becoming more frequent as a result of climate breakdown, leaving fields bare at this time of year is a recipe for literal disaster.

ChatGPT’s signature writing style is everywhere now, and I hate it. It reminds me of when we tried mixing all the beverages at the soda fountain in middle school. We didn’t actually create the perfect drink, we just made a cloying monstrosity that lost everything good about its constituent parts.

Why Your House Is Full of Stuff You'll Never Use.

Trees high on Dartmoor have been deliberately poisoned. Perhaps an act rooted in frustration and of sorrow at the passing of an unfettered time... but an act of ecological vandalism nonetheless. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

@ebenmyrddin.bsky.social repping wild camping at the Basecamp stage at Kendal Mountain Festival.

A real joy to be at Kendal Mountain Festival with @righttoroam.bsky.social and friends -- raising our voices for equitable access to nature.

Wild camping: we won the battle on Dartmoor, now what? Listening to @lewis-winks.bsky.social, @maryannochota.bsky.social & Aila Taylor discussing extending the right to wild camp in England - at Kendal Mountain Festival, in (appropriately enough) a very big tent

'the abandoned paper mill was actually a deeply contaminated and highly radioactive former frack waste treatment plan' Hard to overstate the enduring filth released by fossil fuel extraction

Great trespass along the River Dart today to kick off @righttoroam.bsky.social's 9 river trespasses in November - protesting the inadequacy & unworkability of the Govt's 9 river walks pledge We trespassed in an estate owned in the Cayman Islands & later met up with kayakers from Friends of the Dart

Over 200 charities, businesses & organisations have signed our open letter to Keir Starmer asking him not to weaken the laws protecting National Parks and Landscapes. We're so thankful to everyone who added their name 💪 This letter represents millions of people and shows that #NationalParksMatter

Very excited to share that I'm writing a new book, THE GHOSTS OF CHALK COUNTRY - about the loss of England's chalk downland: a tale of flowers, fascism & freedom. To be published by @wmcollinsbooks.bsky.social in April 2027: www.thebookseller.com/rights/willi... Website: ghostsofchalkcountry.org