Abstract
A SURVEY of the scenic qualities of the coasts of England and Wales has been made by Mr. J. A. Steers at the instance of the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. The results are embodied in a map accompanying a paper in the Geographical Journal of July–August 1944. The greater part of the coastal scenery is classified as of good or very good quality, with exceptional quality mainly in parts of Wales and Cornwall. Comparatively little, outside certain industrial areas, has been ruined; but Mr. Steers notes the frequent occurrence of bad scattered development marked by huts and bungalows on parts of the East Anglian coast and elsewhere, including, no doubt, coasts in the south-east, an area for the time excluded from the survey. Only a few stretches of coast-line up to the present are under the National Trust, and it is evident that steps will need to be taken speedily, not only to check undesirable building, but also to ensure access to the coast-line. Nor must the coast-line be considered in any rigid conception: in many parts it is a zone, and not a coast, that must be protected. Mr. Steers argues that the many problems relating to the maintenance of our coast-line from both a scenic and also a physical point of view should be the work of a national organization.
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Coasts of England and Wales. Nature 155, 298 (1945). https://doi.org/10.1038/155298b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/155298b0