National Links

Green open spaces are at threat all over the UK. The Government has recently announced proposals to use Green Belt land for commercial development. Below are details of national organisations fighting to protect playing fields and the Green Belt. SEAM is in contact with these organisation. You may care to give your personal support.

  • Campaign to Protect Rural England - We campaign for a beautiful and living countryside. We work to protect, promote and enhance our towns and countryside to make them better places to live, work and enjoy, and to ensure the countryside is protected for now and future generations.

  • Fields in Trust (FIT) From sports pitches to children’s playgrounds, bicycle trails to country parks we make sure that all kinds of outdoor spaces are safeguarded forever. Right now we protect 1281 spaces all across the UK and with your help we can do even more.

Our vision is to ensure that everyone – young or old, able or disabled and whether they live in an urban or rural environment – has access to free, local outdoor spaces for all kinds of sport, play and recreation.

  • Open Space Society The Open Spaces Society was founded in 1865 as the Commons Preservation Society.* It is Britain’s oldest national conservation body. Its founders and early members included John Stuart Mill, Lord Eversley, Sir Robert Hunter and Octavia Hill. The last two founded the National Trust in 1895 along with Canon Rawnsley. Our principal work includes helping our members protect their local common land, town and village greens, open spaces and public paths, and answering their queries. We advise the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and National Assembly for Wales on applications for works on common land, and we are notified by local authorities whenever there is a proposal to alter the route of a public right of way. We campaign for changes in legislation to protect paths and spaces. We have always been at the forefront of the campaigns to protect common land. In 1986 the Common Land Forum, comprising all the interests in common land, recommended that there should be a public right to walk on all commons coupled with management of the land. (All commons have a landowner, ranging from a public body to a private individual.) The then government backed the forum’s proposals for legislation and promised to introduce such a law – but it broke the promise. More than a decade later, we won the right to walk on all those commons which previously had no access, subject to certain restrictions, under the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000.