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‘God's earth will be sacred’: Religion, Theology, and the

Open Space Movement in Victorian England

ELIZABETH BAIGENT

Rural History / Volume 22 / Issue 01 / April 2011, pp 31 - 58

DOI: 10.1017/S0956793310000130, Published online: 07 March 2011

Link to this article: [Link]

How to cite this article:

ELIZABETH BAIGENT (2011). ‘God's earth will be sacred’: Religion, Theology, and the Open
Space Movement in Victorian England. Rural History, 22, pp 31-58 doi:10.1017/
S0956793310000130

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Rural History (2011) 22, 1, 31–58. 
C Cambridge University Press 2011 31
doi:10.1017/S0956793310000130

‘God’s earth will be sacred’: Religion,

Theology, and the Open Space
Movement in Victorian England

ELIZABETH BAIGENT
Wycliffe Hall, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX2 6PW, UK
[Link]@[Link]

Abstract The Victorian open space movement is accounted for variously by

nostalgia, progress, and a changed conception of national identity, but explanatory
factors are generally understood in secular ways which take little account of the
pervasive influence of contemporary Christianity. These explanations overlap with
discussions of nineteenth-century leisure which stress its links with secularisation.
Christianity however was a significant motivation for some open space campaigners
whose theology explained how nature was to uplift those who experienced it. This
paper considers the Commons Preservation Society, founded in 1865; the pre-
servation of Epping Forest for recreation between 1865 and 1880; and the forest’s
management in the 1880s and 1890s. It argues that although histories of the
Commons Preservation Society and the Epping Forest campaign describe them in
secular, rational terms, many prominent campaigners were motivated by religion,
in the sense of orthodox Christianity. Practical religion significantly affected the
development of mass recreation for the poor in the forest. Explanations of the open
space movement which ignore religion thus seem inadequate.

‘I should often be sad, if I did not know God cared for England, its people, and its
commons’.1 Thus Octavia Hill, one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent open
space campaigners, revealed in 1878 the irreducible connections between her Christianity
and her work to open the English countryside for the recreation of the nation’s people.
A year earlier, in 1877, Hill’s fellow Anglican and open space campaigner, Reverend
H.R. Haweis, declared that ‘religion and recreation . . . meant to a certain extent the same
thing – both meant to be born again’.2 Two prominent Victorian church people thus
proclaim the centrality of religion to arguments about preserving the English countryside
for recreation. Yet despite their claims, and despite the importance of religion to Victorian
society in general, religion and theology are strikingly absent from most explanations of
the Victorian open space movement. If orthodox religion is mentioned in discussions
of nineteenth-century recreation, the two are generally presented as competitors if not
antagonists.3 This essay attempts to bring together two hitherto separate bodies of
literature, namely that on secularisation and that on the open space movement, where
they intersect around the topic of recreation. It considers the place of religion and
theology in the Victorian open space movement with particular reference to the Commons
Preservation Society from 1865 to about 1880, when it was involved in the battle to

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 32 Elizabeth Baigent

save Epping Forest, which was won with the Epping Forest Act of 1878, and to the
management and use of the forest in the subsequent two decades.

Religion, secularisation, and the Victorian open space movement

Most analyses of the Victorian open space movement ascribe its initiation and success
to anti-modernism and nostalgia,4 although an increasing minority sees it as modern,
democratic, and progressive.5 Many from each camp agreed that the preservation of
significant landscapes, which were overwhelmingly rural, was linked to a changing
understanding of national identity.6 But these explanatory factors, of nostalgia, modernity
and national identity, are generally interpreted in modern ways, which take no account of
the ‘sense of the divine rule and governance in life which through much of the nineteenth
century was almost instinctive with a vast number of people in this country, of whatever
class of society’.7 Many nostalgics mourned a lost golden age of faith, religious certainty,
and the parish as the cornerstone of a healthy and stable community.8 Modernists saw
a future of spiritual fulfilment as well as freedom from material want,9 while for many
Victorian Britons national identity encompassed knowledge that theirs was a Christian
nation, its history a narrative of divine providence, and its future to be made in a Christian
image.10 Most analyses of the open space movement, however, exclude the religious
content of the explanations which they offer for it.
There are several possible reasons for this. One is that the most influential
contemporary account of the early preservation movement, George John Shaw Lefevre’s
English Commons and Forest (1894), is written from an entirely secular point of
view.11 Another is that even in 1860 Octavia Hill commented on her contemporaries’
‘tendency. . .to think our faith cramps our labours and narrows our hearts’, so that the
religious content of any open hearted and liberal work might go unremarked at the time
and hence later as well.12
Among later historians the main reason for the exclusion of religion from analysis of
the open space movement may be the ‘secularizing trend which lies behind any discussion
about [nineteenth-century] leisure patterns’, including open air recreation, and because
‘the values associated with secularised mass entertainment eventually triumphed’ over
those associated with religion.13 The end of Victoria’s reign also saw the ‘discrediting of
socio-religious work’ which had tried to civilise the Victorian poor by providing them
with uplifting leisure activities, including those carried out in the open air.14 While
histories of leisure and the civilising mission have not, in consequence of secularisation,
ignored religion, histories of the open space movement generally have. It is true that
religion’s decline roughly coincided with preservationism’s growth, and that urbanisation
and industrialisation, which were associated with secularisation, also underlay the open
space movement, by providing the threat against which open land needed to be defended,
and the city dwellers and factory hands who needed it for recreation. Urbanisation and
industrialisation made it possible for bodily exercise out of doors to be regarded as
transcendental in a way rarely encountered in societies where people depended on such
exercise for their living.15 However, it does not follow that secularisation was necessary
to preservationism, or that orthodox religion should be excluded from discussions of it.

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 33

In practice, however, it is, and with some justification. ‘Nature-worship’ was for some a
substitute for orthodox Christianity, being ‘embraced by members of a generation that was
losing its Christianity but retaining a conditioned need for metaphysics’.16 Thus, on the
individual level, Leslie Stephen renounced orders in the Church of England in favour of
the ‘ethics of Wordsworth’:17 and at a wider scale ‘social citizenship’, which included open
space arguments, ‘filled the vacuum left by the increasingly obvious fact that the churches
and chapels were never going to evangelize the urban masses’.18 Patriotism or socialism,
which included elements of preservationism, were other possible substitutes for orthodox
Christianity, ‘the religion of socialism’ being actively proclaimed in the 1880s and 1890s
for example.19 A revalorised nature could be antithetical to Christianity: Wordsworth’s
capacity to evoke a potent (quasi) religious feeling in response to nature declined as he
embraced orthodox religion;20 and, on a more general scale, religion opposed on principle
or feared as a competitor the leisure activities which went with revalorised nature.21
Where organised religion used leisure, including open air leisure, as a secular means to
spiritual awakening, the means frequently became the end.22 A loose chain of argument
thus emerges: preservationism relied on a revalorisation of nature; the revalorisation
depended on industrialisation and urbanisation; industrialisation and urbanisation were
associated with a decline in religion; the decline in religion left a gap in people’s time,
which could be spent on leisure, including that spent out of doors, and a vacuum in
their hearts and language, which could be filled by a spiritualisation of nature itself, or of
country or people understood in part as linked to nature.
By contrast, Avner Offer argues that in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
‘The root source of the moral valuation [of nature] was religious impulse’, partly because
‘Middle-class sensibility learned to react to the outdoors with religious arousal between
1780 and 1830’, and partly because the natural rights argument from Rousseau onwards
claimed land as a gift from God.23 During that period questions about the ownership of,
use of, and profit from land were therefore religious, and works about them contained a
religious message which is ‘concealed from our generation but perfectly audible to [the
writers’] own’.24 Moreover, while secularisation is indisputable, it is also true that the
English preservation movement began when Christianity was vibrant and has continued
into a time when some claim it has proved surprisingly tenacious.25 This raises the
question of whether orthodox religion was just a bystander in the early open space
movement and a casualty of its success, or whether it was the mainspring of activism
for some preservationists. When nature is described as transcendent or as a ‘sanctuary’;
natural places are called ‘sacred’, ‘consecrated’ or ‘desecrated’; visits to natural beauty
spots are ‘pilgrimages’; nature is ‘teacher’ or ‘companion’; or when nature is to be
‘saved’ by a ‘deliverer’, were the writers or speakers regarding nature as a substitute
for Christianity, or as part of an orthodox Christian worldview?26 This essay considers
the case.

Theology, nature, and Romanticism

There are several reasons why interesting connections might exist between Christianity
and the Victorian open space movement. In the Victorian empire, religion meshed with

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 34 Elizabeth Baigent

science and utilitarianism in a complex ideological mix in debates about the exploitation
and/or conservation of nature, and the same might be true at home.27 Although histories of
British Victorian religion ignore preservationism, they routinely state that Romanticism,
to which the experience of nature as transcendental was central, transformed religious
thought, language, and practice in the century.28 This is particularly associated with
the Tractarians, Christian Socialists, and those high and broad church Anglicans whose
central doctrine was the incarnation (Christ’s taking of human form). This, they believed,
had sanctified the whole of creation and it underlay their use of flowers and plants to
decorate churches, their use of natural metaphors to describe religious life, and their
sacramental understanding of nature expounded notably in John Keble’s very widely
read Christian Year of 1827.29 Keble’s theology of nature relied not on the transcendence
of nature but on the immanence of God. He believed nature to be a force for good not so
much in itself, but for the Christian lessons it embodied and the opportunity it gave for
grace. Nature was a visible symbol and sign of the invisible world and offered Christians
a grace akin to that of the sacraments.30
It is often suggested that Romanticism and the consequent revalorisation of nature
played a far smaller role in Victorian evangelical theology and practice. Enjoyment of
nature threatened Sabbath observance, and the use of natural materials to decorate
churches seemed ‘pure heathenism’.31 Since the atonement was their central doctrine,
many evangelicals saw the world, including open space, as sinful, and as a source of
temptation or at least distraction. The idea of harmonious natural beauty sat ill with the
image of life as struggle with evil, while emphasis on the word made evangelicals less
moved by nature’s visual richness, and less convinced by arguments for a sacramental
view of nature.32 By the later nineteenth century, however, evangelicalism had been
touched by a Romantic appreciation of nature. For some evangelicals, nature gained
sanctity by association with religious experiences. For others, it gained importance as
an analogy for life in its God-given fullness, or as a fitting stage for the performance of
the sanctified life.33 The evangelical Keswick movement preached natural sanctity and
personal holiness from within the quintessential Romantic landscape.34 Evangelical Bible
women distributed flowers to the poor, believing that flowers had intrinsic religious value
as gifts from God and manifestations of God’s promise to his people.35 The poems and
hymns of Frances Ridley Havergal awakened the sensibilities of many evangelicals to
nature.36 Evangelical historicist premillennialists, who looked forward to the ‘restitution
of all things’, rejoiced in the natural world as a foretaste of a glorious renovated earth.37
Since post-Romantic Christians of so many stripes found in nature a model of, a means
to, or a foretaste of, salvation for individuals and society, it is reasonable to hypothesise
that Christianity significantly affected Victorian attitudes to nature and its preservation.
As well as being affected by Romanticism, nineteenth-century English Christianity
developed an understanding after about 1830 that the kingdom of God was to be built
on earth, not experienced only after death. The right ordering of society thus became a
pressing religious and sometimes theological question.38 Since many open spaces were
saved for the recreation of the urban poor, whose plight lay at the heart of the condition
of England debate, it is reasonable to hypothesise that many Christians saw the problem,
their response to it, and the solution as religious. Moreover, however far fetched they

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 35

might seem to the non Christian, the theologies sketched above gave at least some
Christians what secular arguments for open space lacked, namely an explanation of how
nature was to solve the problem of the poor. Secular arguments routinely claimed that
the experience of nature would improve the poor, but Nature’s alleged capacity to uplift
often rested on presumptions that, once poor people had seen middle class people in an
open space, they would emulate them, or that poor people indulged in ‘low and debasing
pleasures’ only for want of rational and wholesome alternatives.39 In the first case, nature
was reduced to a space for observation and for the operation of an ill-defined ‘kind
of mimicry’ or ‘cultural osmosis’,40 and, in the second, nature became effect rather than
cause: that is, spending time in nature or gardening was the effect of an inherent preference
for rational pursuits, nature based activities being inherently no more praiseworthy than
other improving pastimes.41 Set against these ill argued secular hopes that nature would
improve the poor were well founded fears that unrespectable recreations blossomed
in open spaces.42 In urban parks, shrubberies harboured prostitutes and homosexuals;
lawns enabled the drunken, verminous, and dissolute to stretch out and sleep; and along
avenues flirting or soliciting were rife.43 At the seaside misrule and immorality constantly
threatened,44 while the countryside invited mixed sex bicycling and rambling by the
immodestly dressed.45 While later open space campaigns were concerned with remote
places which attracted mainly bourgeois visitors and where in consequence such moral
concerns were less pressing, the earliest campaigns focused on preserving metropolitan
commons for the poor, which spaces presented the same moral dilemmas as did parks and
seaside. In the face of these moral dangers, Christian theology, unlike secular arguments,
supplied for some believers a mechanism by which time spent in nature might redeem
the poor.
It is important to elaborate what is meant by ‘religion’, ‘religious people’, and
‘Christian’ in this essay. Public observation of religion was so widespread at the time of
the early preservation movement that it is not used here to distinguish Christian from non
Christian, although it usefully reveals denominational allegiance or theological preference.
Similarly arguments are not here considered religious simply because Christians advanced
them. If a Christian claimed that time spent in nature improved the morality of the poor,
this is here considered a secular argument unless a specifically theological mechanism was
posited for the improvement, notwithstanding any further hope that morality might at
least prepare the ground for religious conviction. Nor does the use of religious language
here by itself qualify an argument as being religious: expedience, habit, or the simple
lack of a convincing alternative to religious language for the discussion of non material
matters led people to co-opt God in support of what were really secular arguments
for preservation.46 The Romantic aesthetic argument, for example, that a beautiful and
characteristic country place should be enjoyed almost as an act of worship, was the
essentially the same whether a Christian described the area as a manifestation of God’s
bounty or a means of grace; a nature spiritualist described it as place sacred to Nature; or
a nature patriot described it as the wellspring of national or regional identity.47 Similarly,
the argument that beautiful spaces needed state protection from what Canon Rawnsley
described as ‘private greed, miscalled enterprise’ was the same whether made by secular
socialists railing against capitalism, or Christians who regarded such greed as a sin, who

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 36 Elizabeth Baigent

thought ‘beauty and the sense of it [came] from God’, and who considered caring for
beautiful spaces a Christian duty. In this essay, therefore, people are cited as ‘religious’
or ‘Christian’ only if their rationale in preservationist arguments was consistently and
explicitly based on scripture or Christian doctrine, and if it incommoded or demanded
changed behaviour on the part of the middle classes as well as of the poor. ‘Church’ is
used here to mean the Church of England, as opposed to non conformism. I have found
no involvement by Roman Catholics in campaigns for preservation, although in areas
where that church was better represented, particularly among the elite, Roman Catholics
might well have been involved and this would bear further enquiry. ‘Poor people’ here
encompasses the rural poor in villages in Epping Forest and the much more numerous
urban poor of East End parishes from which Epping Forest was readily accessible. They
and their role in the campaign to save Epping Forest are analysed at length elsewhere and
not discussed here.48

The Commons Preservation Society and Epping Forest

The Commons Preservation Society, the earliest British preservation society, was founded
in 1865 to keep commons open for public recreation.49 One of its earliest successes was
at Epping Forest, extensive wooded and semi-wooded tracts of land which were the
remaining wastes of the one much more extensive royal forest of Essex. The preservation
of Epping Forest became a popular campaign in the 1860s and 1870s when attempts
to enclose it for urban development gathered pace. Being accessible from the East End
of London, it was heavily used by East Enders for recreation. Since those East Enders
epitomised the nation’s degraded poor, the campaign to save the forest for their use
took on a national character. After a protracted battle in the law courts, parliament, City
meeting rooms, local town halls, and in the forest itself, the forest was secured as open
space in 1878 and its management vested in a board of conservators largely appointed
by the Corporation of the City of London. The Corporation had campaigned with the
Commons Preservation Society to save the forest and, under the Epping Forest Act of
1878, was required to buy all open forest land which it did not already hold, and to manage
it in the public interest.50
The Commons Preservation Society was founded by George John Shaw Lefevre,
a London barrister and Liberal Member of Parliament, who had ‘no known religious
opinions’.51 He was joined by John Stuart Mill, whose upbringing had famously excluded
any religious elements; Henry Fawcett, whose ‘politics owed nothing to religion’ and
who seems to have been a non believer; George Grote, Mill’s pupil, who fought to keep
clerical influence out of education at University College, London; and T. H. Huxley, the
self identified ‘agnostic’.52 This not a promising start to the argument that religion was
important to the open space movement, and there was indeed a strong utilitarian, that is,
rationalist and secular, element to the Commons Preservation Society. Many utilitarians
had favoured enclosure in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing for
‘improved’ agriculture to feed a growing and urbanising population. However, by the
1860s, with free trade in food and an increasingly urbanised population, the utilitarian
argument swung towards preserving land unenclosed, especially near cities, for mass

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 37

recreation. Many who joined Shaw Lefevre in the Commons Preservation Society were
free traders and some were members of the Cobden Club.53 Many also promoted reform
to land tenure, taxation, and use, considered in secular, rational ways.54
However, Romanticism and emotion crept into the arguments of even the most
rational Commons Preservation Society members. Shaw Lefevre’s pronouncement that
happiness was greatest where ‘no class was divorced from the soil’, and his and Commons
Preservation Society member Robert Hunter’s evocation of a Saxon golden age of equity
and commonality before the imposition of the Norman Yoke, ‘the original sin of conquest’,
owe more to emotion than reason.55 Many Commons Preservation Society members
were also members of the Alpine Club, which epitomised the ascription of transcendental
values to nature.56 For some Commons Preservation Society mountaineers, such as Leslie
Stephen, nature was a substitute for conventional religion; but for others, such as Edward
North Buxton, Philip Lawrence, and Robert Hunter, it was fully compatible with it.57
When Hunter, a lifelong devout churchman who in youth had considered taking orders,
declared that ‘spiritual health’ was fostered by experiencing nature, he evidently intended
this health to be fully compatible with religious faith.58
There were several other influential members of the Commons Preservation Society
whose Christianity was far from nominal. A survey of the Commons Preservation Society
in 1868–9, at the height of the Epping Forest campaign, shows that the president
was William Cowper (later William Cowper-Temple), a moderate evangelical, and the
chairman was Andrew Johnson, a very committed churchman. The executive committee
included the brothers Edward North and (Thomas) Fowell Buxton, devout evangelicals;
Thomas Chambers, a low church sabbatarian; Thomas Hughes, a Christian Socialist; and
Charles Pollock, an active churchman. The secretary was James Hole, a non-sectarian
Christian. The Archbishop of Canterbury lent his support as a committee member.59
These men carried more weight in the Commons Preservation Society, which recruited
selectively among the influential, than they would have done in a mass movement;60 but
to make the case that religion was important to the early open space movement we must
go much further than simply adducing the religious life of some Commons Preservation
Society members. The writings of Commons Preservation Society supporter Octavia
Hill provide an important insight.61 Hill had been shown her social mission by F.D.
Maurice, founder of Christian Socialism, who declared that ‘society is not to be made
anew by arrangements of ours, but is to be regenerated by finding the law and ground
of its harmony, the only secret of its existence, in God’.62 Hill had deeply imbibed this
message and, whether in essays, lectures, or letters, assumed that her audience shared a
Christian worldview.63
A single theology underlay her work in housing, for tenants, and for open space. It
rested on the centrality of the incarnation, which sanctified the whole of creation, and on
two passages from scripture. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’ prescribed the Christian’s
duty to all people, a duty which would transform neighbour, self, and the society in which
both existed. ‘Man does not live by bread alone’ made it part of that duty to bring beauty,
including natural beauty, into the lives of all, particularly, although not exclusively,
the poor.64 Hill’s essay on ‘Open Spaces’ invites the reader to observe a squalid inner
London court, describing the degraded residents and their surroundings with a frankness

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 38 Elizabeth Baigent

and precision born of familiarity. Something must be done about this not because the
underclass challenges public health or public order, but because ‘every one of those living
beings. . .is a child of God’.65 Wealthier Christians must thus attend to their material and
non-material wants, the latter being primarily for open space. Such open space may be in
urban churchyards, where the bodies of the dead ‘mingle quietly with the dust and feed
the trees and the daisies, keeping the resting place of the dead one also for the weary and
the poor’.66 Or it may be in the commons. Here any:
Separate right is subordinated to the good of all. . .which when owned together and stretching away
into loveliest space of heather or forest becomes the common possession of the neighbourhood,
or even of the Country and Nation. . .. It will give a sense of common possession to succeeding
generations. . . It will be a link between the many and through the ages, binding [all] into one
solemn joyful fellowship, which neither time nor outward change can destroy.67

Nature and people, rich and poor, living and dead are creatures of God, one in God, and
in fellowship with each other; the bodies of the dead feed the living plants; living and dead
people rest in the same sacred, natural space; the poor take their place as of right alongside
the rich as inheritors of the earth and in the fellowship of the saints. The preservation
of open space for recreation is for Hill, then, a theological matter of establishing the
kingdom of God on earth and specifically in England, and rejoicing in the fellowship of the
saints.
Hill’s radical interpretation of Christian obligation entailed both social justice and a
reverence for nature: ‘if you try to accept the duty [to your neighbours] as our Lord
showed it. . .all God’s children will be dear to you, and His earth sacred’.68
Hill is now notorious for her support of the Charity Organisation Society which
approved only that charity which conduced to bourgeois morality,69 but a close reading
of her work shows her to have had a strikingly radical and subversive conception of
charity in the Christian Socialist tradition. She described as ‘thoughtless charity’ the
giving of doles which left the rich easy in the enjoyment of the bulk of their money, free
from further care about the recipients, the relationship between them one of patronage
and dependence. Such charity degraded donors as much as recipients, while thoughtful
charity elevated both. The example she cites of this transformative, radical charity is the
open space movement. Having besought the rich to abjure giving thoughtless doles she
asks:

Are there no great gifts of open spaces to be made for the rich and poor to share alike in the time to
come – spaces which. . .will come to [the recipient] as an inheritance he possesses as a Londoner or
an English child; most likely being taken, like light and air, straight from God, and not in any way
tending to remind him of men’s gifts, still less to pauperise him.70

This is radical stuff, since the rich are asked to give in a way that will not earn them
the gratitude of the poor, and will bring rich and poor into a relationship of equals.
For Hill open space is a gift from God. Its right use brings rich and poor into right
relation under God as his equal children, and into contact with each other since they
are to ‘share alike’ the open space. Its possession as of right, by all, is part of a vision
of a Christian Britain, coming as it does as in her essay ‘A word on good citizenship’.71

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 39

There are in Hill occasional hopes that the experience of nature will conduce to some
intermediate, secular good, such as sobriety.72 But these should not obscure her much
more fundamental theology of nature, or the fact that it was so radical. The same theology
produced the same social and environmental vision in other Christians. For example, the
headmaster of Clifton College in Bristol, Reverend J. M. Wilson, explained his mission
to the poor, as part of which open space was secured for recreation, with the simple
statement: ‘We had clear social ideas for the Church. . .[a] belief that the Kingdom of
God might be brought very near’.73 The same understanding of land as a gift of God
rather than any human intermediary led evangelical Edward North Buxton to refuse
to have his name commemorated in Epping, Hatfield, and Hainault forests which he
was instrumental in saving for recreation.74 This vision of a harmony between God,
people alive and dead, and nature, contrasts with the secular characterisation of nature
where the ruling principle was one of competition, where people were locked in struggle
with one another and with the rest of nature.75 Both views could lead to involvement
in open space campaigns, as Commons Preservation Society members Hill and Huxley
epitomise, and both need considered treatment in discussions of that movement. Similarly
the religious theological view that natural places were the equal inheritance of rich and
poor, to be shared equally by rich and poor, differs strikingly from the view that natural
beauty belongs to the right sort of people (the enlightened middle class) and should be
preserved for them as a refuge from the wrong people (the degraded poor).

The campaign to save Epping Forest

In his influential book, which set the tone for most subsequent discussions on commons
preservation, Shaw Lefevre presented the campaign to save Epping Forest, like other
commons battles, as a triumph for the Commons Preservation Society’s rational argument
and steady legal and parliamentary work.76 This was true, but the campaign also
rested heavily on emotion, aesthetics, and morality. Those who advocated enclosing
Epping Forest claimed that the use of the forest for both material goods, such as
pasture and firewood, and recreation made it the locus of dangerous working class
independence and lack of restraint. The forest had traditionally been vilified as the
haunt of suicides, criminals, loafers, prostitutes, and gypsies.77 It was the setting for
nude or semi-nude mixed bathing in its many ponds and for Sunday evening parades
of flirting young people.78 On bank holidays and fair days, trains and horse brakes full
of working people arrived bent on unrestrained enjoyment. In short, it was the place
for indecencies ‘shocking to contemplate’.79 Happily, enclosure would ‘check. . .irregular
and. . .demoralising tendencies’80 and ‘waste’,81 as well as ending unprincipled attacks on
the rights of property owners to do as they chose with their own land.82
On the side of enclosure, and voiced by churchmen among others, were thus various
moral arguments, but although ‘Popular Protestantism. . .identified the Christian ethical
ideal with the moral inhibitions of the middle classes’,83 these moral arguments had
no theological or properly religious basis. Many prominent enclosers, like the rector of
Loughton, Reverend J. W. Maitland, were members of the Church of England, and

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 40 Elizabeth Baigent

unsurprisingly so, since both clergymen individually and the church as a whole were
dependent on rents. This class aspect of the church was picked up by John T. Bedford,
the City of London’s most public and, according to his own accounts, most influential
advocate of preservation, who regularly expatiated on the churchmen and church bodies
who, along with temporal peers, wanted to rob ‘the people’ of the forest. He was not
anti-religious, being elsewhere content to adduce religious arguments for preservation,
and neither was his argument: rather he saw himself as the people’s champion against
‘great men’, including church dignitaries.84
On the preservationist side, a few voices adduced materialist arguments for keeping
open the forest: the rural poor depended on gathering fuel and grazing animals there. Such
voices included parish priests who knew the material needs of their poor parishioners,
as well as John Maynard, a local working class radical and son of a Baptist minister,
who wrote a blistering attack on enclosure.85 These local voices were, however, lost in
the national clamour to save the forest for the aesthetic, health, and spiritual/religious
benefits it brought to the urban poor.86 Since working class involvement in the campaign
was limited, the motivation of local bourgeois preservationist ‘champions of the people’
was particularly pertinent, and these champions included a remarkable share of devout
Christians who regarded the question to a significant extent as religious.87 Some local
champions were also Commons Preservation Society members, so this local campaign
was not wholly separate from the national one, but its methods, tactics, and language
were quite different.88
Prominent in the local battle for the forest’s preservation, and in its later management,
were members of the Buxton family, particularly the brothers Sir (Thomas) Fowell and
Edward North Buxton and their cousin Andrew Johnson. They were all local residents,
evangelicals, and believers in the ‘practical Christianity’ which underlay much church
led social work in the later nineteenth century.89 The three were active, for example,
in London hospital work and the Abbey Street Sunday Schools, Bethnal Green.90 But
unlike their conservative evangelical contemporaries, the Buxtons combined practical
Christianity with Liberal and later Labour politics and radical views on the relationship
of rich to poor, and people to land which spanned generations. The first Sir Fowell
Buxton, for example, was the abolitionist who unequivocally stated ‘That the natives
[of Africa] have a right to their own lands’.91 A domestic servant, Mrs Dora Punchard,
remarked of Lieutenant Colonel Edward North Buxton, of Wallsgrove House, Epping
Forest, ‘Although I didn’t like the attitude of most of the gentry, I did like the Buxtons.
Col. Buxton. . .and his wife Sybil [were] so understanding of people. They didn’t look
down on you.’92
Of the Buxtons particularly involved in the Epping Forest campaign, it was said
of Fowell Buxton, in a striking echo of Hill’s thoughtful charity, that the poor and
marginalised ‘were never to him mere objects of pity, but individuals with lives and
interests of their own’.93 When Governor of South Australia he startled contemporaries
by inviting Aboriginal people to official receptions, taking pains to understand their
land tenure system and explain it to Europeans whom he exhorted to make amends for
injustices. He continued his grandfather’s work for black people, slaves, and ex-slaves,
and extended his interest to the welfare of colonised Asian peoples.94 Edward North

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 41

Buxton was equally unconventional in his very early advocacy of shooting big game
with the camera, not the gun, because of a duty of stewardship to the whole natural
world.95 Fowell and Edward North Buxton opened their Essex estates, Warlies and
Knighton, to the public, at personal cost. In an echo of Hill’s scriptural understanding of
neighbourliness, Fowell Buxton’s ‘neighbours and friends’ were all whom he came into
contact with. On:

Winter days on the ice at Warlies. . .his ponds were always thrown open to the public, with the
result that his own expert skating was often rudely interrupted by the crowds of skaters from the
town. The keeper was sternly forbidden to turn holiday-makers out of his woods, or prevent their
picking his primroses. He would invite the trippers on the green at Warlies down into the park or
garden.96

This is reminiscent of Hill’s principle that rich and poor were to share land, even when
to do so affected one’s personal pleasure. The brothers’ religious understanding of the
relation of rich and poor, people and land was demonstrated on their joint golden wedding
anniversary when they donated land in Epping Forest for public recreation and gave New
Testaments to estate workers, inviting them to a party.97
Another prominent local campaigner was Sir Antonio Brady, who in 1871 organised
the biggest public protest against enclosure and established the Forest Fund to defend
the open forest. He was a devout high churchman for whom ‘it was a great thing to
enable [working men] on a summer’s evening to enjoy the fresh air of heaven, and, if it
so pleased them, to look up from Nature to Nature’s God’.98 He saw the campaign for
preservation as an extension of his East End church mission work.99 Brady had earlier
worked with Reverend Septimus Hansard, Rector of Bethnal Green and a local champion
of the preservation of Epping Forest, to open the Bethnal Green Museum, as part of their
Ruskinian vision that the poor would awaken to religion by experiencing beauty, whether
man made or natural.100 Like Octavia Hill, Hansard was a Christian Socialist and, like
Reverend Haweis cited earlier, opposed the Lord’s Day Observance Society with its
narrow and unimaginative views on recreation.101
For some local campaigners religion seems to have been largely a cloak of respectability.
John T. Bedford, for example, rejoiced in ‘the enjoyment of tens of thousands of those
who, but for Epping Forest, would scarcely know how beautiful God made the world’.
But he eagerly pointed out the shortcomings of the clergy and I have found no evidence of
his religious attachment.102 Unlike Edward North Buxton who scorned a forest memorial,
Bedford was always ready to accept recognition and is commemorated in the Bedford Oak
in the forest.103 However particularly at the local level in Essex, but also at the national
level of the Commons Preservation Society, it is clear that many preservationists were
impelled by active religion, a conception of Christian duty, and a theological vision of
nature and the land. The preservation movement was not a religious movement, and, just
as it drew support from radicals, liberals, and conservatives, city and country dwellers,
men and women, it appealed to active and nominal Christians, agnostics, and atheists.104
Histories of the movement are, however, incomplete if they take no account of religion in
the mix of motives for preservation.

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 42 Elizabeth Baigent

Religion and the conflict of access and preservation in Epping Forest

If theology affected the preservation movement in general, religion in a more practical
sense was heavily involved in the debate over how Epping Forest, once preserved, should
be used and by whom. Conflict was sensed among preservationists between nature and
people, although the conflict was in reality between the right and the wrong sort of people.
Preservation campaigners regularly claimed to be acting in the interests of ‘the nation’
or ‘the people’, but some people’s interests were privileged over those of others. There
was an almost unanimous sense among Epping Forest’s preservers that nature must
be protected from both enclosing capitalists and local village loppers whose activities
rendered landscape and trees ‘unnatural’. Both enclosure and lopping were outlawed
when the forest was saved and the conservators henceforth had the duty to preserve the
‘natural aspect’ of the forest. There were no middle class religious objections to this,
although John Maynard, the radical dissenter, argued forcefully against it.105 The split
between the religious and the secular at Epping Forest was over its use for recreation.
Many preservationists, especially middle and upper class ones, dreaded trippers and
excursionists.106 Transcendentalism, being ‘individualistic, introspective, escapist and
exclusive’ was threatened by mass tourism,107 and some preservation societies from the
start favoured preservation over access.108 Access was to be for the right sort of people who
did the right sort of things. ‘A landscaped citizenry. . .depends for its self-definition on a
vulgar other, an anti-citizen whose conduct, if not open to re-education, makes exclusion
necessary’. The vulgar other was the bad tourist and the archetypical bad tourist was
the cockney or East Ender: noisy, vulgar, and dedicated to urban pleasures even in the
countryside.109 Epping Forest was one of his favourite haunts.110
Among those who were at least ambivalent towards trippers were church people, for
example Canon Scott Holland who wrote that:

Once a year the vast, blind, welded masses that have coagulated into cities, let themselves loose,
to swarm out over sea and land, for the brief rapture of a Summer Holiday. . .Whenever the trip
comes in, Wordsworth is gone.

His solution, as a Christian Socialist, was not to exclude the masses, but to show the
middle classes how to coexist with them:

Avoid those few chosen spots, consecrated to them: and not a trace will you find of them. Not an
‘Arry will be heard to cry; not a giggle of M’ria will reach you. . .[you will] not even guess that. . .all
London is streaming past, with lunch-baskets and bottled beer.111

This more resembled apartheid than the ‘sharing alike’ which Hill had advocated, but it
was not a wish to exclude ‘the masses’. Many of the most prominent Christian campaigners
for the preservation of Epping Forest, however, went much further and unequivocally
welcomed trippers, of whom there were huge numbers: 100,000 people on the Whitsun
bank holiday in 1903 for example.112 Although no doubt many religious people shunned
the places where trippers congregated, religious institutions and people led the campaign
to open the forest as much as possible to them, even, as we have seen in the example of
Fowell Buxton, when this impinged on their own enjoyment.

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 43

The campaign over access reached a climax in 1881 when the Great Eastern Railway
sought to extend its line through the forest to make more of it accessible by train. Led by
evangelical Edward North Buxton, the conservators supported the plan, considering that
their statutory duty to facilitate public enjoyment of the forest overrode their statutory
duty to preserve its natural aspect.113 Buxton’s rationale was that the conservators
were ‘content to abide by the opinion of the ministers of all denominations resident
in the east of London who may be trusted to speak for the children and the poor’,
and that opinion resolutely favoured extension.114 A petition for railway extension was
signed by 700 clergymen, ministers, and representatives of Sunday Schools, Bands of
Hope, and temperance societies, in the north and east of London.115 The proposal was
eventually defeated after opposition from, among others, middle class residents116 and the
Commons Preservation Society.117 But it showed that some preservationists subordinated
class preferences to religious principles to make them remarkably sympathetic to
excursionists.118 While Edward North Buxton commiserated with those who deprecated
the ‘sometimes boisterous mirth of the London contingent’ in the forest, he concluded:

Much as one sympathises with the pursuits of contemplative persons seeking solitude, it was not
intended to be kept for their exclusive benefit. Our chief care must be for the single annual holiday
of the artisan, his tired wife and smoke-filled children.119

The railway extension was therefore welcome.

There were further examples of Christians welcoming all. Edward North Buxton’s
guide to the forest sought to lead more people to its little known spots, and he hoped,
in vain as it turned out, that his book would have a cheap edition so that it was not
only the middle class who could enjoy those spots.120 To Fowell Buxton, ‘the Bank
Holiday trippers in Epping Forest were never “drunk”’ only “amusing themselves”’.121
Octavia Hill, generally regarded as ‘inexorably moralistic’,122 found bank holiday throngs
‘undisciplined but heartily happy’. Admittedly Epping Forest was crowded, and the
throngs carried ‘London noise and vulgarity into woods and fields’,123 but rather than
condemning them, the middle class should ‘Look at the happy family groups. . .watch
the joy of eager children. . .notice the affectionate father bringing out the pot of ale to the
wife’, and put themselves in their shoes. ‘To us [middle-class people] the Common or
forest looks indeed crowded with people, but to them [working class who live in cramped
and greenless conditions] the feeling is one of sufficient space, free air, green grass, and
colour’. And she adopts the Christian position of condemning the sin but not the sinner:

In spite of [the throng], and in spite of the really bad sights to be seen at every public-house on the
road, in spite of wild songs and boisterous behaviour, and reckless driving at night, which show
how sadly intoxication is still bound up with the idea and practical use of a holiday to hundreds of
our people, how much intense enjoyment the day gives!124

For the Christian Hill these were ‘our people’, not some alien others.
A Christian understanding of nature thus had at least the potential to be non-elitist. For
the Christian, God was the ultimate point of reference and, while he might be immanent
in nature, people, made in his image, were not to be sacrificed for nature’s benefit. Thus,
conceding that wild flowers would probably suffer from railway expansion, Edward North

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 44 Elizabeth Baigent

Buxton pointed to poor children and, using a Biblical text, said simply, ‘They are more
important than the lilies of the field’.125 For the secular nature mystic, by contrast, nature,
or more often Nature, was the ultimate point of reference, or in the words of secularist
Edward Aveling the ‘eternal comforter’,126 and for some this justified keeping the masses
from desecrating it.
Natural history societies, whose prime concern was with nature. were amongst the most
vocal opponents of the railway extension,127 and their prioritising of nature foreshadowed
spiritualist-geographer Vaughan Cornish’s declaration that ‘the quietness of the scene is
essential, for only in quietude can Man hear the voice of Nature and receive its message of
eternal truth’.128 While some secular open space campaigners divided people into citizens,
who knew how to behave, and anti-citizens, who did not, some Christian campaigners
had their sights on the kingdom of God where all were equal citizens. We should not
argue from these examples to a general secular versus religious divide on questions of
access, but they do show one influence of religion on the preservation debate.

Religion and working class recreation in the forest

Religious attitudes certainly changed how Epping Forest was used for recreation after
its preservation. Some types of leisure came into conflict with religion. The national
movement against animal cruelty, including cruel sports, drew support from upper
middle class Christians who hoped that civilising manners would incline the masses
towards religion.129 In Epping, Edward North Buxton had an uncharacteristically class
specific attitude to animal cruelty. Although he elsewhere advocated that middle class
big game hunters should change their ways, in Epping he led the conservators to clamp
down on working class poachers, because their small bore weapons left wounded deer
to die a protracted death, and to ban the annual Londoners’ deer hunt, while he and
his middle class companions shot deer in the forest with large bore weapons as part of a
scientific culling programme.130 His son Gerald, however, promoted animal welfare with
the family’s characteristic imagination and sympathy with the poor. Many locals offered
donkey rides to trippers and, to counteract the animals’ suspected neglect and overwork,
Buxton gave five shillings for every donkey that passed a veterinary examination at the
Theydon Bois Flower and Vegetable Shows which were held at Birch Hall, his house in
the forest. The effect was dramatic and soon all the donkeys passed. Poor people often
complained that middle class animal welfare activists took no account of the fact that
they were forced by economic circumstances into treating their beasts cruelly.131 Gerald
Buxton’s solution to possible animal cruelty demanded a change to his own behaviour,
in the form of opening up his house to the poor and paying for a vet and for fit donkeys,
as well as alterations in the behaviour of the poor. This is something that seems to have
characterised religiously inspired behaviour.132
Working people often mistrusted attacks on their traditional sports because ‘too
rarely were alternative recreations provided which were as attractive as those under
attack; humanitarians often disapproved of light-hearted recreation altogether’.133 By
the time Epping Forest had been saved for recreation, however, Anglican and even
some nonconformist churches and chapels had modified or abandoned their Puritanism

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 45

enough to promote modern, mass alternatives to traditional pastimes.134 In the forest this
led to the flourishing of the group outing. Such outings often conduced to respectability
as the potentially wayward were always supervised.135 While trade union, works, or
cooperative society outings were common in industrial regions, in Epping Forest outings
were commonly led by churches, Sunday schools, religiously inspired charities such as
the Ragged School Union, and temperance organisations of a Christian bent.136 In the
forest such groups were typically provided with a basic tea, use of an earth closet, and
harmless recreations such as swingboats, roundabouts, donkey rides, or coconut shies,
in ‘retreats’.137 These were large, simple, timber or corrugated iron pavilions, mostly
erected as commercial ventures which depended heavily, although not exclusively, on
church patronage. One, the Shaftesbury Retreat, at Staples Hill in Loughton, was erected
for the exclusive use of the evangelically inspired Ragged Schools.
Whether the new group outings were as attractive as traditional recreations was a
matter of personal taste. They were certainly used by the middle class, often religious
leaders of the organisations, to enforce desirable behaviour: outings to forest retreats
were offered as rewards for regular attendance at Band of Hope meetings for example.138
Retreats, which did not serve alcohol, compelled their patrons to temperance and in
their heyday they took so much trade from pubs that the latter opened temperance tea
gardens as annexes.139 In 1870 Octavia Hill had ‘feared, all day, they [her tenants on their
outing] would wander off to the public house’, but the risk was minimised in the forest
after retreats opened.140 At least some retreats led by example in Sabbath observance:
the Shaftesbury Retreat and the Forest Retreat at Buckhurst Hill were among several
Sabbatarian places of refreshment in the forest, although their impact is unknown. While
the new mass recreation coexisted with harmless traditional pursuits such as gathering
blackberries, apples, and sweet chestnuts,141 they became direct competitors with others.
Children who were not allowed to go to the traditional Wanstead Flats Fair because of the
rough people and fighting there, instead went to retreats for Sunday school outings.142
But whatever the respective merits of the new and old leisure opportunities, the new daily
tide of mass visitors undoubtedly represented a democratising of leisure and its extension
down the social scale in a process in which religious organisations were very important.143
Many pavilions could cater for several hundred at a sitting, and William Riggs claimed
that, to cope with demand from church, Sunday School, and Ragged School outings, his
High Beach Retreat could provide tea for three to four thousand children at a time.144
Locals remember hundreds of children coming each day in the summer holidays to the
Shaftesbury Retreat.145 This was mass tourism indeed, and the tourists were literally the
great unwashed, whose bodies ‘were not accustomed to soap and water’, and who left
‘unspeakable deposits of filth and litter’ when they left.146
The actions of churches and other religious organisations were often exemplary. For
example, six hundred children from the Cripple Department of the Ragged School Union
went on a group outing to the forest in 1889.147 Yet it is questionable whether group
visitors experienced much of what the middle classes understood as ‘nature’. Retreats were
actually in wooded areas, unlike pubs which were in villages round the forest, so retreat
visitors did at least glimpse nature.148 However a distinctly jaundiced retreat proprietor
described their ‘paper hats, face-masks, [and] noise-makers’ as they ‘literally crammed’

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 46 Elizabeth Baigent

into the retreats.149 There was not much here of serenity and less of solitude. But, as
Octavia Hill pointed out in passages cited earlier, it was unreasonable to expect poor
people to experience nature in the same way that the middle classes did. She was alert to
the fact that, while the middle classes might need time away from their desks to conquer
mountains, what poor people needed, engaged as many of them were in unremitting
physical labour at home and work, were ‘outdoor sitting-rooms’.150 So when poor people
simply sat in groups chatting, or stretched out and dozed in easily accessible bits of Epping
Forest, and when their children shrieked and charged about in the unaccustomed space,
nature was meeting their needs for recreation just as much as it did those of middle class
people when they strode about alone and quiet.

Conclusion
Although there is much truth in Shaw Lefevre’s classic history of the Commons
Preservation Society and the Epping Forest campaign which give central place to his
radical secular reformism, this is not the whole story. Religion governed the entire public
lives of Commons Preservation Society activists such as the Buxton brothers, Andrew
Johnson, and Octavia Hill, and in the local campaign to save Epping Forest, which Shaw
Lefevre scarcely mentions although he attended some of its meetings, motives were mixed,
but religion was highly important.151 After the forest was saved, how it was managed,
why nature was valued, and how it was to be experienced were all affected by the action
of churches and church-related charities, and of the conservators led by Edward North
Buxton whose motivations were religious. In other early open space and preservation
movements, too, religion seems to have been important. The Kyrle Society, formed in
1875 or 1876 to ‘Bring Beauty Home to the Poor’, was premised on the Biblical notion
that ‘man does not live by bread alone’, and was significantly affected by Christianity
and Christian Socialism in the persons of Miranda and Octavia Hill, Miranda being its
founder. Religion seems to have been much more significant in Kyrle campaigns for open
space than in the society’s artistic endeavours.152 The legal adviser to the society’s open
spaces subcommittee was Robert Hunter who, as seen above, was a devout churchman.
For him, as for Hill, open space work was a contribution to the establishment of a Christian
Britain where social justice and natural beauty coexisted. He was ‘a high minded servant
of the State, a lover of the people, and a great-hearted Christian gentleman’.153 The
National Trust was founded in 1895 by Hunter, Hill, and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley,
an Anglican priest.154 Rawnsley saw his preservation work as Christian:

I believe strongly that the law of Christ and the love of Christ should embrace and govern the whole
round of active practical life – the social as well as the intellectual, the commercial as well as the
political; the life of action as well as the life devotional and doctrinal; the hours of recreation as well
as the hours of labour.155

The aims of the National Trust resonated with different people for different reasons, but
their Christian underpinnings were clear in the minds of the founders. The modern focus
on secular motives for the early preservationist movement seems then in danger of having

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 47

imposed a modern understanding of nature and society on Victorian people whose ‘sense
of divine rule and divine presence’ was quite different.
This discussion also supports recent work which stresses the importance of nature for
at least some evangelical Anglicans, exemplified here by the Buxton family. They were
admittedly atypical evangelicals, but their involvement in preservationism suggests that
we should be open to the surprising variety of Victorian evangelical views.156
Just as the Buxtons were atypical evangelicals, so Hill, Rawnsley, Brady, Hunter,
and the others named here may have been atypical broad or high churchmen and church
women in considering their preservationism to be central to their Christianity. To say that
Christianity was important to preservationism is not to argue that preservationism was
a central plank in Victorian Christianity. Green politics, being to some extent counter-
cultural, were central neither to mainstream religion nor to mainstream secular culture.157
In all strands of mainstream Christian theology the salvation of people takes priority
over the preservation of nature, and ultimate satisfaction is to be found in the creator,
not in creation.158 Nonetheless, for some nineteenth-century Christians the preservation
movement was a tangible expression of the view that Christianity was not ‘an escape
into a realm of make believe, but a way of life that relates God to human experience’,
including the experience of nature.159 Further, a right relationship with God entailed a
right relationship with all of creation, that is, with all people and with the natural world.160
There was no one Christian understanding of the land, or nature, or its preservation,
or the recreation carried out in it, or indeed much else.161 Moreover just as Christian
advocates of enclosure elided bourgeois respectability with Christian ethics, so Christian
preservationists dressed their class based elevation of nature in theological garments. The
theology that suggested God was immanent in all creation could not readily explain why
he was more immanent in nature than elsewhere. Yet while Stuart Headlam, a Christian
Socialist and Septimus Hansard’s curate at Bethnal Green, aroused no opposition when
he introduced The Christian Year to his parish discussion group or took poor parishioners
on country walks, he came to grief with the church hierarchy when he suggested that God
was in music halls.162
Class and religion meshed in other aspects of the land question. While preservationism
was often associated with the elite and to some extent the church, land nationalisation,
taxation of unearned increment, and land tenure reform were associated with lower
middle or upper working class nonconformists.163 This would bear further investigation.
Certainly nonconformists were remarkable by their absence in the campaign for Epping
Forest and in the Commons Preservation Society and early National Trust, all of which
were dominated by people from the Anglican elite.164 The only non-elite voice which
articulated opposition to enclosure in Epping Forest, that of John Maynard cited above,
was from the dissenting tradition and he rested his argument on clear class based
lines, both of which factors may explain his surprisingly small involvement in the main
campaign for the forest.165
Ultimately, the social and spiritual/religious impact of the open space movement was
less dramatic than preservationists of all stripes had hoped. The response to nature’s
appeal proved far from universal. To the bemusement of many middle and upper class
open space campaigners, many poor people remained warmly attached to the grubby

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 48 Elizabeth Baigent

urban streets which were home, and either declined to spend time in nature, or tried
to recreate urban life within it. The East End children who brought hooters to Epping
Forest were followed by adults with concertinas and, later, portable gramophones.166 The
inadequacy of secular arguments for the uplifting effects of nature was in effect admitted
by the imposition of seaside bylaws and park regulations to enforce the respectability
and civilisation which nature alone somehow failed to bring.167 The inadequacy of
theological arguments was shown by the many poor people who liked open space but
declined to be guided thence to organised religion. Some admitted that the transformatory
power of nature had been significantly overstated: ‘It is not, after all, every man or
woman who is susceptible to scenery’.168 There were also numerous attempts to explain
away the, as yet, limited transformation of those people who had experienced open
space. Secular commentators suggested that poor people needed more education, or
more experience, before they would manifest the appropriate ‘exultation in Nature’.169
Religious commentators conceded that poor people who had enjoyed nature did not on
the whole embrace organised religion in consequence, but might believe, with Canon
Rawnsley, that ‘in the last day the Christ will own as His faithful servants many who
never knew Him’.170
The optimists, or wishful thinkers, depending on one’s point of view, whether secular
or religious, who strove to keep nature open for the poor are ultimately more attractive
than those who argued that the inappropriate poor did not deserve nature (‘Are these “the
people” for whom Epping Forest is to be preserved?’ thundered one such, who evidently
thought that the people needed to do better before they were ‘given’ the forest171 ) or
that those who had not already been transformed by nature should henceforth be kept
out of it (‘The imposition of a small toll [on entry to part of Epping Forest] would be
a great safeguard [against contact with the unrespectable poor]’ suggested another172 ).
Moreover, the testimony to the actions of open space campaigners is the landscape
itself. The main point here, however, is not a judgement about success or failure,
but the argument that Christianity was a significant motive for many preservationists,
and that explanations of the open space movement are incomplete if they take no
account of it. Environmental historians have recently drawn attention to the isolation
of their subdiscipline from other types of historical enquiry, and have suggested that its
explanations can be impoverished and its scope narrowed as a result of such isolation.173
This essay attempts to connect the history of the open space movement in Victorian
England with histories of contemporary religion, leisure, and secularisation, with the
hope of enriching and enlarging the scope of the explanations each offers.

Acknowledgements
Earlier versions of this paper were given at the Royal Geographical Society’s 2009
conference and the Anglo-American 2010 conference. I am grateful to conference
participants and to Keith Snell and Brian Harrison for subsequent comments.

Notes
.
1. Octavia Hill, Octavia Hill’s Letters to Fellow-Workers 1872–1911, ed. Robert Whelan
(London, 2005), p. 104.

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 49

2. Cited [Link] Brian Harrison, Peaceable

Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1982) p. 123; Haweis opened
London graveyards for recreation, see Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Haweis, Hugh Reginald’, in
H.C.G. Matthew and B.H. Harrison, eds., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
(Oxford, 2004).
3. Chapter 3 in Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom; Douglas A. Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’ in
M. Daunton, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (Cambridge, 2000), Volume 3,
pp. 745–807.
4. B. Cowell, ‘The Commons Preservation Society and the Campaign for Berkhamsted
Common, 1866–70’, Rural History, 13 (2002), 146; e.g. Martin Wiener, English Culture
and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (Cambridge, 1981); G. Murphy, Founders of the
National Trust (London, 1987, 2nd edition 2002), preface to 1987 edition; Jan Marsh, Back
to the Land: The Pastoral Impulse in England from 1880 to 1914 (London, 1982); H. Newby,
ed. The National Trust: The Next Hundred Years (London, 1995); D. Cannadine ‘The First
Hundred Years’, in Newby, National Trust, pp. 11–31.
5. See e.g. Paul Readman, ‘Preserving the English Landscape, c.1870–1914’, Cultural and
Social History 5:2 (2008), 209–10; Alun Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in
Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, eds, Englishness, Politics, and Culture, 1880–1920 (London,
1986); David Reeder, ‘The Social Construction of Green Space in London Prior to the
Second World War’, in Peter Clark, ed., The European City and Green Space: London,
Stockholm, Helsinki, and St Petersburg 1850–2000 (Aldershot, 2006) pp. 41–67; David
Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998), especially part 1; Alun Howkins, ‘What
is the Countryside For?’ Revue française de civilisation britannique, 14: 2, (2007), 167–80;
Peter Mandler, ‘Against “Englishness”: English Culture and the Limits of Rural Nostalgia,
1850–1940’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (6th series) 7 (1997), 155–75.
6. See e.g. Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’; Howkins, ‘What is the Countryside
For?’; David Lowenthal, ‘Nature and nation: Britain and America in the Nineteenth
Century’, History Today, 53:12 (2003), 18–25; Paul A. Readman, ‘Landscape Preservation,
“advertising disfigurement” and English National Identity, c.1890–1914’, Rural History,
12:1 (2001), 61–83; Matless, Landscape and Englishness; Stephen Heathorn, ‘An English
Paradise to Regain? Ebenezer Howard, the Town and Country Planning Association and
English Ruralism’, Rural History, 11 (2000), 113–28; Catherine Brace, ‘Looking Back: The
Cotswolds and English National Identity, c.1890–1950’, Journal of Historical Geography,
25:4 (1999), 502–16.; M. Hall, ‘Affirming Community Life: Preservation, National Identity
and the State, 1900’, in C. Miele, ed., From William Morris: Building Conservation and
the Arts and Crafts Cult of Authenticity, 1877–1939 (London, 2005), pp. 129–57; Guy A.
Robinson, ‘A Kind of National Property?’ in Ian D. Whyte and Angus J.L. Winchester,
eds, Society, Landscape and Environment in Upland Britain, Society for Landscape Studies 2
(London, 2004); A.D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford,
2003); Cannadine ‘The First Hundred Years’ ; Thomas Christopher Smout, ‘The Alien
Species in 20th -century Britain: Constructing a New Vermin’, Landscape Research, 28:1
(2003), 11–20. Mandler, ‘Against “Englishness”’ provides a critical review. For a German
comparison see Thomas M. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation
and German Identity 1885–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004).
7. Bernard M.G. Reardon, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age (London, 1995), p. x.
8. Reardon, Religious Thought; B. Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism
on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988); Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’,
p. 786; David E.H. Mole, ‘The Victorian Town Parish: Rural Vision and Urban Mission’, in
D. Baker, ed., The Church in Town and Countryside (Oxford, 1979), pp. 361–71. Parish work
was linked to revalorising nature by Octavia Hill (Letters to Fellow-Workers, 1883 letter,
pp. 176–7; ‘Open Spaces’, pp, 105–151 in Octavia Hill, Our Common Land and Other Short
Essays (1877), p. 140).

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 50 Elizabeth Baigent

9. Avner Offer, Property and Politics 1870–1914: Landownership, Law, Ideology and Urban
Development in England (Cambridge, 1981), p. 346. In H.G. Wells’s utopia, for example,
leaders were to be spiritually pure and religiously reverent (H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia
(London, 1905) cited in Offer, Property and Politics, pp. 334–5).
10. John Wolffe: God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843–
1945 (London, 1994); A.D. Smith, Chosen Peoples; Donald Horne, God is an Englishman
(Sydney, 1969).
11. G.J. Shaw Lefevre, English Commons and Forests: The Story of the Battle for Public Rights
(London, 1894), 2nd edition; Baron Eversley, Commons, Forests, and Footpaths (London,
1910).
12. Letter to Emma Baumgartner, 19th Aug 1860, cited in Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill (London,
1990), p. 69.
13. Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, pp. 125–6; Steve Bruce, Religion and Modernization:
Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis (Oxford, 1992); Steve Bruce,
Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford, 1996); S. Bruce, God is
Dead: Secularization in the West (Oxford, 2002); Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’; Dominic
Erdozain, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion
(Woodbridge, 2010).
14. Helen E. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, 1870–1914 (London, 1976), p. 239.
15. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, p. 1; D. Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban
Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanisation (Oxford, 1985), pp.
54–5; Offer, Property and Politics, p. 336; Piers J. Hale, ‘Labor and the Human Relationship
with Nature: The Naturalization of Politics in the Work of Thomas Henry Huxley, Herbert
George Wells, and William Morris’, Journal of the History of Biology, 36:2 (2003), 249–84.
16. Offer, Property and Politics, p. 335.
17. Offer, Property and Politics, p. 333; Alan Bell, ‘Stephen, Leslie’, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography; G.B. Tennyson, ‘The Sacramental Imagination’, in U.C.
Knoepflmacher and G.B. Tennyson, eds., Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley,
1977), pp. 370–90. Peter C. Gould, Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the Land,
and Socialism in Britain 1880–1890 (Brighton, 1988), pp. 18–19, 21.
18. Gould, Early Green Politics, chapter 2; Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, p. 9.
19. Wolffe, God and Greater Britain, pp. 12, 16; S. Yeo, ‘A New Life: The Religion of Socialism
in Britain 1883–1896’, History Workshop Journal, 4 (1977), 5–56; ‘The nascent “religion of
socialism” of the 1880s was thoroughly permeated by the religion of nature’, Offer, Property
and Politics, p. 343.
20. Reardon, Religious Thought, pp. 267–8. Darwin experienced the reverse process. J.A.
Campbell, ‘Nature, Religion and Emotional Response: A Reconsideration of Darwin’s
Affective Decline’, Victorian Studies, 18:2 (1974), 159–74.
21. Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’; Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, pp. 123–56; William Pickering,
‘Religion – A Leisure-Time Pursuit?’, in David Martin, ed., A Sociological Yearbook of
Religion in Britain (London, 1968), pp. 77–93. For bicycling as alternative to religion see
Offer, Property and Politics, pp. 347–8; D. Rubenstein, ‘Cycling in the 1890s’, Victorian
studies 21 (1977), 47–71; John Wigley, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday (Manchester,
1980). For football as an emotional substitute for religion see Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’,
p. 803 and Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, p. 234.
22. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, p. 16.
23. Offer, Property and Politics, p. 329.
24. Offer, Property and Politics, p. 344; Henry George, Progress and Poverty (London, 1879)
online edition, no pagination, chapter 43; Gould, Early Green Politics.
25. C.G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization 1800–2000
(London, 2001); C.G. Brown, Religion and Society in Twentieth–Century Britain (Harlow,

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 51

2006); Jane Garnett, Matthew Grimley, Alana Haris, William Whyte, and Sarah Williams,
eds., Redefining Christian Britain: Post-1945 Perspectives (London, 2006); Grace Davie,
Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing without Belonging (Oxford, 1994).
26. Nature as sanctuary in ‘Introduction’, in Knoepflmacher and Tennyson, Nature and the
Victorian Imagination, pp. xvi–xxiii. Nature as companion and teacher in E.N. Buxton,
Epping Forest (London, 1923), p. 21. Nature as desecrated see e.g. Canon and Mrs Rawnsley
cited in E.F. Rawnsley, Canon Rawnsley: An Account of his Life (Glasgow, 1923), p. 239
and James Bryce cited in John Ranlett, ‘“Checking nature’s desecration”: Late-Victorian
Environmental Organization’, Victorian Studies, 26 (1983), 197–222. Ranlett speaks of nature
as ‘revered’, compares campaigners to the Good Samaritan, and cites a contemporary who
thinks that nature needs to be ‘saved’ by a ‘deliverer’ (pp. 201, 222, 209). But see, for example,
Gould, Early Green Politics, p. 19 for nonreligious use of words such as ‘shrines’, ‘pilgrims’,
‘soul’, and ‘eternal comforter’.
27. Wapulumuka O Mulwafu, ‘The Interface of Christianity and Conservation in Colonial
Malawi, c.1850–1930’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 34:3 (2004), 298–319; Sujit
Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific,
1795–1850 (Cambridge, 2005); Georgina H. Endfield and David J. Nash, ‘Nature and
Society : Missionaries and Morals: Climatic Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Central
Southern Africa’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 92:4 (2002), 727–
42; James Beattie and John Stenhouse, ‘Empire, Environment and Religion: God and the
Natural World in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand’, Environment and History 13 (2007),
413–46.
28. For histories of religion in Britain in the nineteenth century which make no mention of
connections with the open space movement see e.g. Reardon, Religious Thought; Hugh
Mcleod, Religion and Society in England 1850–1914 (Basingstoke, 1996).
29. W. A. Barrett, Flowers and Festivals, or Directions for the Floral Decoration of Churches
(London, 1868).
30. Tennyson, ‘The sacramental imagination’.
31. Philippe Vervaecke, ‘Les loisirs dominicaux contestés: La Lord’s Day Observance Society et
le respect du “Sabbath”’, 1831–2006’, Revue française de civilisation britannique 14: 2 (2007),
135–145; Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, pp. 123–56; Wigley, Victorian Sunday; Beverly
Seaton, The Language of Flowers: A History (London, 1995), pp. 12–14; Rawnsley Canon
Rawnsley, p. 205.
32. Reardon, Religious Thought; O. Hill, ‘The Kyrle Society’, The Magazine of Art (1880),
210–1.
33. Reardon, Religious Thought; D. Bebbington, Holiness in Nineteenth-Century England
(Carlisle, 2000); David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the
1730s to the 1980s (London, 1989).
34. M.A. Smith, ‘William Pennefeather,’ in T. Larsen, D.W. Bebbington, Mark A Noll, and
S, Carter, eds, Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals (Leicester, 2003); Melvin E. Dieter,
The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, N.J., 1996).
35. Mark Smith, ‘The Mountain and the Flower: The Power and Potential of Nature in the
World of Victorian Evangelicalism’, in Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon, eds, God’s Bounty?
The Churches and the Natural World (Woodbridge, 2010). I am grateful to Dr Smith for
prepublication access to his essay.
36. A. Atherstone, ‘Frances Ridley Havergal’s Theology of Nature’, in Clarke and Claydon,
God’s Bounty? I am grateful to Dr Atherstone for prepublication access to his essay.
37. Martin Spence, ‘The “restitution of all things” in Nineteenth-Century Evangelical
Premillenialism’, in P. Clarke and T. Claydon, eds. The Church, the Afterlife and the Fate of
the Soul (Woodbridge, 2009) pp. 349–59.
38. Reardon, Religious Thought, pp. 11–12, 154.

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 52 Elizabeth Baigent

39. S.M. Gaskell, ‘Gardens for the Poor’, Victorian Studies 23 (1980) 479–501; Brian Harrison,
Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–1872 (London,
1971), pp. 320–23; quotation from the Report of the Select Committee on Public Walks,
Parliamentary Papers 1833 cited in Geoffrey Tyack, Sir James Pennethorne and the Making
of Victorian London (Cambridge, 1992), p. 88.
40. Neil MacMaster, ‘The Battle for Mousehold Heath, 1857–1884: “popular politics” and the
Victorian Public Park’, Past and Present 127 (1990), 117–54, p. 119; Nan Dreher, ‘The
Virtuous and the Verminous: Turn-of-the-century Moral Panics in London’s Public Parks’,
Albion 29 (1997), 246–67, p. 253; Reeder, ‘The Social Construction of Green Space’, p. 42.
41. Julia Matheson, ‘Floricultural Societies and their Shows in the East End of London 1860–
1875’, London Gardener 8 (2002–3) 26–33; Gaskell, ‘Gardens for the Poor’; Tyack, Sir James
Pennethorne, p. 95.
42. Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, p. 17; Martin Hewitt, ed. Unrespectable Recreations,
Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, Leeds Working Papers in Victorian Studies 4 (2001).
43. Dreher, ‘Virtuous and Verminous’.
44. John K. Walton, ‘Beaches, Bathing and Beauty; Health and Bodily Exposure at the
British Seaside from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century’, Revue française de
civilisation britannique 14:2 (2007), 117–134; John K. Walton, ‘Respectability takes a Holiday:
Disreputable Behaviour at the Victorian Seaside’, in Hewitt, Unrespectable Recreations,
pp. 176–193.
45. M. Monacelli, ‘Les anglaises et la bicyclette au XIXe siècle: les raisons d’un loisir contesté’,
Revue française de civilisation britannique 14:2 (2007), 97–115.
46. I am grateful to Brian Harrison for these two points.
47. Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature.
48. Elizabeth Baigent, ‘A “splendid pleasure ground [for] the elevation and refinement of the
people of London”: An Historical Geography of Epping Forest 1860–1895’, in Elizabeth
Baigent and R.J. Mayhew eds., English Geographies 1600–1950: Historical Essays on English
Customs, Culture, and Communities in Honour of Jack Langton (Oxford, 2009).
49. Shaw Lefevre, English Commons and Forests; Eversley, Commons, Forests, and Footpaths.
50. For a full account see Baigent, ‘A “splendid pleasure ground”’.
51. Allen Warren, ‘Lefevre, George John Shaw’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Mss at Haddo House, Aberdeenshire support this. I am grateful to Lord Aberdeen for
permission to consult these papers. F.M.G. Wilson, A Strong Supporting Cast: the Shaw
Lefevres, 1789–1936 (London, 1993).
52. J. S. Mill Autobiography (London, 1873); Lawrence Goldman, ‘Fawcett, Henry’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography; Adrian Desmond, ‘Huxley, Thomas Henry’ Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography; Joseph Hamburger, ‘Grote, George’, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography.
53. Members of both the Commons Preservation Society and the Cobden Club included George
Shaw Lefevre, Edward North Buxton, Henry Fawcett, and Thomas Henry Farrer. A.C.
Howe, ‘The Cobden Club’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Other Commons
Preservation Society free traders included Thomas Hughes (Charlotte Mitchell, ‘Hughes,
Thomas’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography); Andrew Johnston (The Times, 18th April
1910); George Burney (G. Burney, Epping Forest to be Saved without a Corn Tax! (Milwall,
1872); Robert Hunter (H. Rawnsley, ‘A National Benefactor – Sir Robert Hunter’, Cornhill
Magazine (February 1914, 230–39); and Octavia Hill, ‘The Future of our Commons’,
pp. 175–206 in Hill, Our Common Land, pp. 181–2). For the link between open space
and free trade in Epping Forest in particular see Buxton, Epping Forest 1923 edition, p. 15.
54. Mill’s interest in land reform is well known. G.J. Shaw Lefevre; The Game Laws (London,
1874); G.J. Shaw Lefevre, English and Irish Land Questions: Collected Essays (2nd edition
London, 1881).

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 53

55. Shaw Lefevre, English and Irish Land Questions, p. 70; Cowell, ‘Berkhamstead Common’,
p. 158; Quotation from Offer, Property and Politics, p. 339.
56. David Robertson, ‘Mid Victorians amongst the Alps’, in Knoepflmacher and Tennyson,
Nature and the Victorian Imagination, pp. 113–136. Members of both the Commons
Preservation Society and Alpine Club included James Bryce, Edward North Buxton,
and Leslie Stephen. C. Harvie, ‘Bryce, James’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography;
Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Buxton, Edward North’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
57. L.W. Chubb and G. Murphy, ‘Hunter, Robert’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; G.
Avery, ‘Lawrence, Penelope’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Murphy, Founders
of the National Trust, pp. 22, 32–5, 118.
58. Robert Hunter, ‘The Movements for the Inclosure and Preservation of Open Lands’, Journal
of the Royal Statistical Society 60, 2 (1897), 403.
59. Commons Preservation Society: Report of Proceedings 1868–9 (London, 1869). I am grateful
to Worcester College, Oxford, for permission to consult this source. Charlotte Mitchell,
‘Hughes, Thomas’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Wigley, The Victorian Sunday;
J.M. Ludlow, ‘Thomas Hughes and Septimus Harding’, Economic Review, July 1896; Peter
T. Marsh, ‘Tait, Archibald Campbell’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; J.M.
Rigg and Hugh Mooney, ‘Pollock, Sir Charles Edward’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography; M. Hewitt, ‘Hole, James’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; A.F. Pollard
and H.C.G. Matthew, ‘Temple, William Francis Cowper’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography.
60. Ranlett, ‘“Checking Nature’s Desecration”’, pp. 197–222 for interests of early
environmentalists. Religion is mentioned only in connection with Sabbatarianism (p. 207).
61. Hill’s Commons Preservation Society work related largely to lands in Kent and Surrey rather
than Epping Forest, even though she had briefly lived at Loughton in the forest. Gillian
Darley, personal communication, 2003, and Octavia Hill, pp. 27–8. Hill’s Letters to Fellow
Workers contain numerous references to open space campaigns in Kent and Surrey.
62. F.D. Maurice, The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice: Chiefly told in his own Letters, F.
Maurice, ed. (2 volumes, London, 1884), volume 2, p. 137 cited in Reardon, Religious
Thought, p. 150.
63. Hill, Letters to Fellow-Workers.
64. ‘The Future of our Commons’, pp. 179, 191–2; Octavia Hill, ‘The Kyrle Society’, The
Magazine of Art (1880), 210–12.
65. ‘Open Spaces’, pp. 110–11 (originally a lecture to the National Health Society in 1877).
66. ‘Open Spaces’, pp. 105–51.
67. ‘The Future of our Commons’, pp. 205–6.
68. ‘Effectual Charity’, p. 173 and cf. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 168.
69. C.L. Mowat, The Charity Organisation Society 1863–1913: Its Ideas and Work (London,
1961).
70. ‘A Word on Good Citizenship’, pp. 88–104, in Hill, Our Common Land, p. 94.
71. ‘A Word on Good Citizenship’.
72. Hill, Our Common Land, p. 2, cited in Offer, Property and Politics, pp. 346–7.
73. Cited in Meller, Leisure and the Changing City, pp. 141, 118, 151. Canon Rawnsley, co-
founder of the National Trust, was the first chaplain to this mission in his youth. G. Murphy,
‘Rawnsely, Hardwick Drummond’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
74. G. Buxton, ‘The Late Mr. E. N. Buxton and the Preservation and Restoration of Three
Essex Forests’, The Essex Naturalist 21:1 (1924), p. 14.
75. Hale, ‘Labor and the Human Relationship with Nature’, pp. 257–69.
76. Shaw Lefevre, English Commons and Forests; Eversley, Commons, Forests, and Footpaths;
and see H.W. Peek and J. M. Maidlow, eds, Six Essays on Commons Preservation: Written in
Competition for Prizes (London, 1867). E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London, 1991)

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 54 Elizabeth Baigent

and Antony Taylor, ‘“Commons-stealers”, “land-grabbers” and “jerry-builders”: Space,

Popular Radicalism and the Politics of Public Access in London, 1848–1880’, International
Review of Social History, 40:3 (1995), 383–408 are the only real exceptions and neither is
well informed. See full discussion in Baigent, ‘A “splendid pleasure ground”’.
77. For suicides see e.g. ‘Dreadful Occurrence in Epping Forest’, Jackson’s Oxford Journal
(26th August 1837); ‘The Mysterious Tragedy in Epping Forest — Inquest’, The Morning
Chronicle (21st December 1858). For murders see e.g. ‘Confession of the Murder of a Woman
in Epping Forest’, The Caledonian Mercury (17th July 1863); ‘The Epping Forest Murder
— Examination of the Prisoner’, The Illustrated Police News (22nd June 1878). For gypsies
see e.g. ‘The “gypsies” of Epping Forest’, Daily News (27th August 1874). For prostitution
see e.g. ‘The Epping Forest Commission’, Daily News (11th November 1875).
78. Miss Minnie Roberts cited in Georgina Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids:
Memories of Epping Forest 1900–1925 (Woodford Bridge, 1987), p. 57. Reid, ‘Playing and
Praying’, p. 762.
79. ‘The Epping Forest Commission’, Daily News (11th November 1875).
80. D.W. Coller, The People’s History of Essex (Chelmsford, 1861), pp. 486–7.
81. Loughton vestry minutes, 1st April 1875, cited in P. Thompson, ‘The Willingales of
Loughton’, Essex Naturalist 21 (1926), p. 159.
82. ‘Epping Forest’, Daily News (12th February 1872); ‘Epping Forest’, Daily News (15th July
1873); ‘Epping Forest’, Daily News (12th February 1872); ‘Mr. Lowe on Epping Forest’,
Daily News (28th September 1872); ‘Epping Forest’, The Times (8th July 1871); ‘The
Preservation of Epping Forest’, The Times (12th February 1872); ‘Epping Forest’, Lloyd’s
Weekly Newspaper (19th November 1871); J.T. Bedford, The Story of the Preservation of
Epping Forest (London, 1882); ‘Epping Forest’, The Times (3rd August 1869).
83. Reardon, Religious Thought, p. 21.
84. See e.g. ‘The Encroachments on Epping Forest’, Reynolds’s Newspaper (29th October 1871);
Baigent, ‘“A splendid pleasure ground”’, for the campaign as a populist, not a class, battle.
85. See e.g. Letters from Reverend A. F. Russell, The Times (11th and 24th November 1884).
86. At Mousehold Heath, poor commoners fought for their common rights, which benefitted
them materially whilst having deleterious aesthetic effects, but were defeated by the
corporation, its middle class supporters, the church, and the Commons Preservation Society,
and the common became a park. MacMaster, ‘Mousehold Heath’.
87. For commons protests with greater spontaneous working class involvement see Robert Allen,
‘The Battle for Plumstead Common’, South London Record 1 (1985), 16–20; Robert Allen,
‘The Battle for the Commons: Politics and Populism in mid-Victorian Kentish London’,
Social History 22 (1997,) 61–77; MacMaster, ‘Mousehold Heath’. Taylor, ‘“Commons-
stealers”’ argues otherwise for Epping Forest but contains several serious errors of fact.
See P. Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1848–1914
(Cambridge, 1991) for populism.
88. The Commons Preservation Society needed local commoners in order to mount legal
challenges to enclosure, but its relationship with locals could be problematic, as at Mousehold
Heath (MacMaster, ‘Mousehold Heath’) where their aims were quite different, and at Epping
Forest where sharp words between local and national preservationists were exchanged in the
press after the battle was won; see Baigent, ‘“A splendid pleasure ground”’ for recriminations.
89. Fowell Buxton ‘gave much thought to church affairs on the practical side’, in G. W. E.
Russell, Lady Victoria Buxton: A Memoir, with some Account of her Husband (London,
1919), p. 114; Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’, p. 796 for ‘practical Christianity’ as a stimulus to
Christian social work.
90. G. Morgan, The History of Fifty Years Work of the Abbey Street Sunday Schools,
Bethnal Green (Bethnal Green, 1890), pp. 9, 10, available at [Link]
[Link]/book_files.htm, consulted 22nd April 2010; The Times (31st July 1866).

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 55

91. Letter of 17th January 1834 cited in C. Buxton, Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton,
Baronet, with Selections from his Correspondence (London, 1848), p. 361.
92. Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids, p. 24. Edward North Buxton (1894–1957) was
grandson to the Edward North who was active in the Commons Preservation Society and,
like him, was verderer of the forest. Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage, and Knightage (London,
various edns).
93. Russell, Lady Victoria Buxton, p. 115.
94. P.A. Howell, ‘Varieties of Vice-Regal Life with Special Reference to the Constitutional
Role of the Governors of South Australia, 1890–1927’, Journal of the Historical Society
of South Australia, 3 (1977), 15–48; Peter Howell, personal communication, 29th
June 2000; E. Baigent, ‘Buxton, Sir Thomas Fowell’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography.
95. Both brothers were fellows of the Royal Geographical Society and Edward North
was a knowledgeable natural historian. Baigent, ‘Buxton, Edward North’; Buxton,
‘The Late Mr E. N. Buxton’, pp. 12–14; James R. Ryan, ‘Photography, Geography,
and Empire 1840–1914’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London,
1994), pp. 144–5; Howell, ‘Varieties of Vice-Regal Life’, p. 27. Edward North
Buxton aimed to stop indiscriminate slaughter of game, rather than to stop hunting
completely.
96. Russell, Lady Victoria Buxton, p. 114.
97. Russell, Lady Victoria Buxton, p. 114. The breadth of their evangelicalism is shown by
Fowell Buxton’s refurbishing of the Lady Chapel at Waltham Abbey and the building of
St Thomas’s Church, Upshire, near Warlies, in 1901–2. Both projects exhibited an artistic
discernment unusual amongst evangelicals. James Bettley and Nikolaus Pevsner, Essex,
Buildings of England, p. 801; Daniel Wackett, personal communication, 18th September
2009. He also commissioned a crucifix (Howell, ‘Varieties of Vice-Regal Life’, p. 27). The
donated land was at Oak Hill, Theydon Bois, and Yardley Hill, Sewardstone. Baigent,
‘Buxton, Edward North’.
98. ‘The Epping Forest Fund’, Daily News (1st February 1877).
99. E. Baigent, ‘Brady, Sir Antonio’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; W.H. George,
Sir Antonio Brady (1811–1881): Civil Servant, Fossil Collector, and Philanthropist of West
Ham, Essex (Barking, 1999); A. Brady, ‘The humble. . .address and petition of the inhabitants
of the East End of London, in public meeting assembled, on Wanstead Flats 8th July 1871’
(Stratford, 1871).
100. Brandon Taylor, Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public 1747–2001
(Manchester, 1999).
101. Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, p. 140.
102. ‘The Saving of Epping Forest – The Late John T. Bedford’, City Press 3rd March 1900;
biography of the Bedford family, typescript, Corporation of London Records Office. I am
grateful to Dr Anita McConnell for these two sources. Bedford, The Preservation of Epping
Forest.
103. Henry Hawkins, London’s Great Legacy: Epping Forest described by Pen and Camera (London,
n.d. 1895?), pp. 16 and 127.
104. Offer, Property and Politics, chapter 20; Murphy, Founders of the National Trust; Cannadine,
‘The First Hundred Years’; Ranlett, ‘“Checking nature’s desecration”’.
105. Baigent, ‘“A splendid pleasure ground’”.
106. Catherine Brace, ‘A Pleasure Ground for the Noisy Herds? Incompatible Encounters with
the Cotswolds and England 1900–1950’, Rural History 11:1 (2000), 75–94; Howkins, ‘What
is the Countryside For?’
107. Offer, Property and Politics, p. 348.
108. Murphy, Founders of the National Trust, p. 105.

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 56 Elizabeth Baigent

109. Matless, Landscape and Englishness, pp. 62, 68; G. Stedman Jones ‘Cockney and the Nation
1780–1988’, in D. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones, eds, Metropolis London: Histories and
Representations since 1800 (London, 1989), pp. 272–324.
110. For descriptions of East Enders in Epping Forest see Arthur Morrison, To London Town
(London, 1899). Morrison was familiar with the East End and latterly lived in the forest at
Loughton. I am grateful to Richard Dennis for this reference.
111. Henry Scott Holland, A Bundle of Memories (London, 1915), pp. 241–2, 246–7, cited in
Offer, Property and Politics, pp. 348–9.
112. Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids, p. 7.
113. Robert Hunter, The Epping Forest Act 1878, with an Introduction, Notes, and Index by R.
Hunter (London, 1878).
114. ‘Epping Forest E. N. Buxton’ The Times (3rd February 1883).
115. ‘Epping Forest’, The Times (12th February 1881).
116. ‘Epping Forest’, The Times (14th February 1881); ‘Epping Forest’, The Times (25th
November 1881).
117. ‘The Epping Forest Railway’, The Times (12th March 1883).
118. ‘The Epping Forest Railway Bill. House of Commons, Monday, March 12, Division Railway
defeated’, The Times (14th March 1883).
119. ‘Epping Forest and the Great Eastern Railway’, Daily News (29th December 1880).
120. Epping Forest, (preface to 1923 edition).
121. Russell, Lady Victoria Buxton, p. 115. Baigent, ‘Buxton, Sir (Thomas) Fowell’.
122. David Owen, English Philanthropy 1600–1960 (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), p. 387 cited in
Whelan, ‘Preface’ to Hill, Letters to Fellow-Workers, p. xxvii.
123. Cited in Darley, Octavia Hill, pp. 172–3.
124. Hill, ‘Our Common Land’, pp. 2–4.
125. ‘Epping Forest and the Great Eastern Railway’, Daily News (29th December 1880).
126. E.B. Aveling, National Reformer (27th July 1879), cited in Gould, Early Green Politics,
p. 19.
127. ‘Epping Forest’, The Times (22nd February 1881).
128. National Parks and the Heritage of Scenery (London, 1930), pp. 24–5; Cornish did not
dispense with God altogether, unlike many other nature mystics, but his was not an orthodox
Christian God (Matless, Landscape and Englishness, p. 86).
129. Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, p. 127.
130. His grandfather Fowell Buxton the elder’s support for the Royal Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals ‘did not intrude upon his game-shooting’ (Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom,
p. 148). Morrison, London Town, p. 32 describes a particularly cruel way of poaching deer
in the forest.
131. Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, p. 149.
132. Mrs Minnie Roberts, cited in Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids, p. 35. Cf.
Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, p. 149.
133. Peaceable Kingdom, p. 155
134. For example, boys’ clubs, mothers’ meetings. Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’, pp. 797–8.
135. Walton, ‘Respectability takes a Holiday’, p. 177.
136. Lilian L. Shiman, ‘The Band of Hope Movement: Respectable Recreation for Working-
Class Children’, Victorian Studies, 17 (1973), 49–74. Morrison, To London Town, mentions
informal groups of costermongers and an organised party of engineers and shipwrights as
examples of non church ‘beanfeasters’, the former drinking at a pub (pp. 10–11).
137. Mrs Minnie Roberts cited in Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids, p. 67; Bernard
Ward, The Retreats of Epping Forest (Loughton, 1978).
138. Mrs A.E. Martin cited in Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids, p. 21; Shiman,
‘Band of Hope’.

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 Religion, Theology, and the Open Space Movement in Victorian England 57

139. Ward, Retreats of Epping Forest, p. 11.

140. Darley, Octavia Hill, p. 175.
141. Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids, pp. 54–5.
142. Mrs Constance Haggar cited in Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids, pp. 20–1.
143. Reid, ‘Playing and Praying’, pp. 746–7.
144. Ward, Retreats of Epping Forest.
145. Mrs Minnie Roberts cited in Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids, p. 65.
146. Sidney Riggs cited in Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids, pp. 21–2.
147. ‘Cripples in Epping Forest’, Daily News (25th August 1899).
148. Ward, Retreats, p. 4.
149. Sidney Riggs cited in Green, Keepers, Cockneys, and Kitchen Maids, pp. 21–2.
150. My italics. She uses the phrase frequently e.g. ‘Open Spaces’, pp. 108, 114.
151. For example, public meeting in Shoreditch Town Hall (‘The Preservation of Epping Forest’,
Daily News (10th December 1874)).
152. For Kyrle Society artistic work which seems to have been free from religious motivation see
Elizabeth Crawford, ‘Wilkinson, Fanny Rollo’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and
R.M. Mitchell, ‘Barrington, Emilie Isabel’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. For
Kyrle social work which was religiously motivated see Krista Cowman, ‘Beavan, Margaret’
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Anne Anderson and Elizabeth Darling, ‘The Hill
Sisters: Cultural Philanthropy and the Embellishment of Lives in Late Nineteenth-Century
England’, pp. 33– 50 in Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth, eds, Women and the
Making of Built Space in England 1870–1950 (Aldershot, 2007) give a feminist and secular
interpretation of the society. Octavia Hill, ‘The Kyrle Society’, The Magazine of Art (1880),
210.
153. Rawnsley, ‘A National Benefactor’, p. 239.
154. Rawnsley, Canon Rawnsley; G. Murphy, ‘Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography.
155. Crossthwaite Parish Magazine cited in Rawnsley, Canon Rawnsley, p. 58, and see p. 184.
156. It was said of the younger Fowell Buxton’s faith that, ‘Though of the Evangelical type, it
had a character of its own’ (Russell, Lady Victoria Buxton, p. 116); Spence, ‘The “restitution
of all things”’.
157. Mandler, ‘Against “Englishness”’, and Gould, Early Green Politics.
158. Some more radical contemporary theology would, however, dispute that satisfaction entails
a right relationship with all of creation.
159. Mervyn Stockwood, cited in Garnett et al., Redefining Christian Britain, p. 99.
160. Hill.
161. Hill condemns the Quakers’ sale of Bunhill Fields burial ground for building, and praises
the Church of England’s opening of inner city graveyards for recreation (‘Open Spaces’).
162. Frederick George Bettany, Stewart Headlam: A Biography (London, 1926), pp. 2–13, 37–8;
John Richard Orens, Stewart Headlam’s Radical Anglicanism: The Mass, the Masses, and
the Music Hall (Urbana, Ill., 2003); Stewart D. Headlam, Fabianism and Land Values: A
Lecture Given to the Fabian Society 23 Oct 1908 (London, 1908). His interest in nature was
primarily in radical land questions inspired by Henry George, when he again went against
his class.
163. J.A. Hobson, ‘The Influence of Henry George in England’, Fortnightly Review, 68 (1897),
836–42, pp. 841–2 cited in Offer, Property and Politics, p. 197.
164. One would expect to find fewer nonconformists than Anglicans given the religious allegiance
of the population as a whole, and given the over representation of Anglicans in the elite who
dominated the early National Trust and Commons Preservation Society. None the less, there
are even fewer nonconformists than one would expect. There are none at all for example
amongst the founders of the Trust and the committee of the Commons Preservation Society

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 58 Elizabeth Baigent

reviewed for this paper. The early National Trust, Commons Preservation Society, and other
preservation societies kept membership dues high to encourage the right sort of person, and
sometimes actively discouraged the support of ordinary people. Readman, ‘Preserving the
English Landscape’, pp. 199–200; Cowell, ‘Berkhamstead Common’, p. 148.
165. The labouring Willingale family also opposed enclosure but by deeds, not words (Thompson,
‘The Willingales of Loughton’). The elder Willingale and Maynard appeared together in just
one reported public meeting about the forest (‘Excursion of the Epping Forest Preservation
Society to Loughton’, Daily News, 20th September 1867).
166. Mandler, ‘Against “Englishness”’, p. 171; Offer, Property and Politics, p. 349; Matless,
Landscape and Englishness, p. 68; Morrison, To London Town, p. 5.
167. See e.g. Tyack, Sir James Pennethorne, ch. 3.
168. Lady Bell (Florence E.E. Bell), At the Works: a Study of a Manufacturing Town (London,
1907), p. 126, cited in Offer, Property and Politics, p. 349.
169. Charles F.G. Masterman, The Condition of England (London, 1909), p. 203, cited in Offer,
Property and Politics, p. 349.
170. Canon Rawnsley, cited in Rawnsley, Canon Rawnsley, p. 65.
171. ‘The “Gypsies” of Epping Forest’, Daily News (27th August 1874).
172. Letter to The Times (7th April 1882).
173. Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, ‘The Problem of the Problem of Environmental History:
A Re-reading of the Field’, Environmental History 12 (2007), 107–130; A. Hornborg, J.
McNeill, and J. Martinez-Alier, Rethinking Environmental History (Lanham MD, 2007);
Timothy Cooper, ‘The Politics of Environmental History’, Journal of Historical Geography
36 (2010), 349–52.

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