oursin | Chartered Streets, Clouded Hills, and freedom to walk on England's Mountains Green

Defra scraps England deadline to register thousands of miles of rights of way (the Right to Roam was a cause dear to my fubsy interwar progressives' hearts, ho-hum):

A deadline for registering historic rights of way is to be scrapped after a warning that the looming cutoff date could result in the loss of thousands of miles of footpaths. The last government set a deadline of 2031 for all rights of way in England to be added to an official map, after abandoning a previous commitment to scrap the policy. Once recorded as rights of way and added to the definitive map, paths are protected under the law for people to use.... Campaigners, who are trying to protect 40,000 miles of paths which are missing from the official map, hailed the move as a “fantastic step.” Landowners condemned it as the latest attack on farmers.... Some of these paths, which are well-used by walkers, cyclists and equestrians, date back hundreds or even thousands of years, but are not officially recorded or protected.

Plus, Campaigners call for right to roam on edges of private farmland in England and Wales, to avoid traffic.

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Birmingham City University thinktank imagines new approach to urban areas and land use across the region:

Moore is the director of the West Midlands National Park Lab at Birmingham City University, a pioneering project that imagines a future in which the whole region, including Birmingham, Coventry and the Black Country, is a type of national park. She accepts that getting an official designation for the park, under current national park laws, is unlikely. It would probably require a change in law – the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 was designed to exclude urban areas to protect nature. And plans for new national parks in the UK can be contentious: in Wales, for example, proposals for a new national park in the north of the country have been met with local outcry. Moore is more interested in using her idea to change the way people think about landscape in urban areas, and in putting the region on the map for a commitment to greenery.

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Chelsea flower show garden to champion Britain’s endangered rainforests:

I’d say, embrace the charm of imperfection in your garden – like a wonky tree – and choose plants that suit your climatic conditions. If it’s damp and dark, why not celebrate a clump of moss? It feels fabulous underfoot. Add features like ponds and focus on native plants to give wildlife a real boost.

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The story of the Gloucester shipwreck was too important to stay submerged. Here’s how academics, museum curators and the discoverers of the Gloucester wreck brought it back to the surface - interesting, but one sees all over that page 'sponsored by Elsevier', so not noted for making knowledge freely accessible ahem ahem.

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A different kind of ecological niche in decline: ‘It’s not just a dancefloor’: the precipitous decline of UK nightclubs. Or maybe it's just finding another space to occupy: daytime events specially laid on by music promoters for the over-30s.