people
Lots in common
Kate Ashbrook
“It drives me mad,” Kate Ashbrook says, “when a nature organisation produces a magazine, and on the first page you’ve got the editor saying: ‘Well, we’ve got some lovely walks in this magazine and it’s going to be springtime and the May blossom is about to come out…’” She sighs. “Total rubbish—drivel. That’s your frontpage—that’s your window!”
For Ashbrook, general secretary of the Open Spaces Society (OSS), the biggest story in the British countryside isn’t blossom—the place, as she sees it, is a site of struggle. She rails against the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whose record she says is “littered with broken promises”, for failing to conserve Britain’s historic paths or to defend the public’s right to access common land. Instead, this task apparently falls to the OSS, Britain’s oldest conservation charity.