Marion Shoard

Life and career

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 and University College London 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 in May 2017.

The Theft of the Countryside

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.

The Theft of the Countryside led to renewed focus on whether steps should be taken to protect the countryside against industrial agriculture.

This Land is Our Land

First published in 1987, followed by an updated edition in 1997 with a foreword by George Monbiot, Shoard's second book focuses on land ownership and the legacy of much of the UK’s land having been in the possession of a relatively small number of people for a long period of time. It attempts to anaylse the scope of landowners’ power over the social structure of the countryside and beyond, contrasting the situation with that abroad. Shoard proposes a general right of access and a form of green land taxation in Britain.

The book, which was made into a Channel 4 documentary, is regarded a key text on the subject.

A Right to Roam

Published in 1999, Shoard’s third book explores the history of access to the countryside in the UK and abroad. It discusses the possible impact and drawbacks of the partial right later enacted in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 passed by the Labour government under Tony Blair. A Right to Roam was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and won the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild’s book of the year award. Nine years later Shoard also won that body's lifetime achievement award.

A Survival Guide to Later Life

In 2004, Shoard wrote a guidebook for older people and their relatives. It was prompted by Shoard's experience struggling to find independent and indepth advice after her own mother fell ill.

Published articles and essays

In the 1980s, Shoard wrote regular columns in Environment Now magazine and the Today newspaper as well as frequently for The Times, The Guardian and History Today.

Landscape protection

An early essay by Shoard suggested that moor and upland enthusiasts had a disproportionate amount of leverage over landscape policy. In The Theft of the Countryside and articles in The Times, Shoard argued lowland landscape required greater protection, in part through national parks. She also suggested they be created in Scotland and Northern Ireland, which then had no national parks.

Shoard has also argued landscapes are harder to protect than buildings, discussed the way in which children use the countryside, and the impact of place on the work of poets such as Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas.

In 2002, Shoard wrote an essay entitled "Edgelands", which was the first work to identify a landscape Shoard calls "a netherworld neither urban or rural … the hotchpotch collection of superstores, sewage works, golf courses and surprisingly wildlife-rich roughlands which sit between town and country in the urban fringe". The essay identifies the characteristics of the edgelands, discusses the threats that face them and argues they should be greater celebrated. The essay won the Outdoor Writers and Photographers Guild’s Award of Excellence for the best one-off feature in 2003 and its principles have been adopted by nature writers such as Robert Macfarlane and in academia. In 2004, Shoard co-authored a report on the urban fringe for the Countryside Agency.

In an essay in 1976 Shoard argued that recreation ought to play a greater role in promoting countryside conservation. An essay by Shoard in 1998 questioned the assumptions underlying the debate about greater public access. At the time of the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, Shoard wrote extensively about the ideology of the proposed legislation and its possible limitations.

This Land is Our Land charts the struggles over land rights in Britain and abroad, explores the ways in which land owners currently wield power, and the effectiveness of measures which seek to protect the public interest in land such as common land, public footpaths and conservation designations. Shoard puts forward proposals for a new land tax modelled on that advocated by the American radical Henry George, as well as a general right of access to the countryside which would overturn the present law of trespass.

Age issues

As well as her 2004 book, A Survival Guide to Later Life, and the forthcoming How to Handle Later Life (2017), Shoard speaks and writes about issues affecting older people. In 2005, Shoard claimed "[g]overnment at both national and local levels is one of the worst perpetrators of age discrimination", with particular reference to the reduction by two-thirds in the number of NHS beds for elderly people with long-term disabling conditions over the last quarter of the 20th century.

Shoard has argued against a change in legislation which would sanction assisted suicide, writing that:

Institutionalising the killing of elderly people would diminish the sanctity of life in our society as a whole. In particular, it would further undermine the position of elderly people who need care, whether or not their lives are threatened. Our treatment of our seniors is already a national scandal. The care they receive in care homes and in their own homes leaves much to be desired. What these citizens need is a thorough-going programme of help and support and a radical improvement in their status in society, not a licence to be killed.

Shoard was involved in the London Area Forum and National Advisory Council of the Alzheimer's Society, and sits on the Society's Quality Research in Dementia forum, which evaluates applications for research project funding. Shoard has argued a major shift in perceptions of the disease, and those who live in care homes, is needed.

In 2005, Shoard proposed a new charter for carers of older and disabled people, calling for more transparency about the part they play in sustaining the health service. “The decision to become a carer can transform a person’s life just as dramatically if not more so than becoming a parent," she claimed.

Shoard has questioned the extent to which faith groups pay attention to the needs of many of the older members of their congregation. In 2006, Shoard analysed new research into isolation among older people of faith.

Recent campaigns

Shoard fought to prevent building on May Hill in Gloucestershire and the erection of a grid of polytunnels over an area of countryside frequented by the Dymock poets. She led campaigns in Dorking, Surrey, to stop Mole Valley district council reducing a day centre and Strood in Kent to stop Medway council moving Strood public library and selling off the site for housing.