Ancient Woodland in Crawley

I recently came across Natural England’s open data map of ancient woodland in England.

Ancient woodland is one of those terms which gets thrown around without regard for its clear legal definition. It does not mean woodland that has been there forever, but rather land which has been continously wooded since 1600AD.

This is important, because the UK is one of the most deforested countries on the planet. We’re not supposed to be a land of rolling fields, but rather of dense woodland. In fact, much of what we’ve grown to consider ‘natural’ in England is the result of centuries of human intervention in the environment, George Monbiot has written about this quite extensively.

This deforestation goes back a long way, I recall reading somewhere that the level of cultivated open farmland in England during the Iron Age was roughly comparable with what the country had at the start of the First World War. So, if we were to use a longer-timeframe for ancient woodland (the longest possible being the end of the last Ice Age), it’s unlikely that many locations would qualify.

This is particularly true in Sussex, which at one time was the industrial heart of England (there was a good piece on this in the Crawley Museum newsletter a year or two back), only ending when the area ran out of trees to use as fuel.

Despite 77 years of growth, Crawley is still surrounded by significant amounts of ancient woodland. This is particularly true of the forest of Worth (which Center Parcs was trying to develop a couple of years ago). At one point Worth was England’s largest parish, this was because the area was largely uninhabited and as a hunting ground for royalty in Anglo-Saxon times, it was to provide a place for worship during these hunts that St Nicholas’ Church was constructed and why today Crawley plays host to one of the oldest churches in the country.

On the town’s boundary, this woodland is most heavily concentrated to the South-East, which helps to explain why development attempts have been largely concentrated to the West of the town, South at Pease Pottage (with some pretty shady behaviour by Mid Sussex enabling them to build on an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) and heading out East of Crabbet Park.

Unsurprisingly, most of the ancient woodland left within the borough itself is concentrated around the town’s parks, although interestingly mostly concentrated on their peripheries.

However, smaller parcels do exist within the neighbourhoods and despite the use of tree preservation orders, at least twice during my time as a councillor, have cowboy developers gone in and cleared ancient woodland before submitting a planning application thinking that this would get around the planning objections.

Unsurprisingly, riling up the planning authority was not in fact the genius move that they thought that it was, but despite taking enforcement action, the powers available to penalise developers for such behaviour remains very limited and once the ancient woodland has been lost it can never be regained.

Ultimately, with this, as with a number of other planning areas, to protect local assets and encourage development which enhances committees, we need planning authorities to be equipped with greater carrot and stick powers for dealing with developers within their areas.