![]() ![]() ![]() This lust for national purity (a mono-ethnic, mono-cultural Britain) pre-dates the construction of whiteness at the wake of the transatlantic slave trade. ![]() Naturally, any non-white person is figured as a trespasser as soon as they dare to set foot inside its boundaries. It is a dangerous dream weaponised by nationalists, from folk musician Cecil Sharpe in the nineteenth century to the rhetoric of the pro-Brexit UK Independence Party and its former leader Nigel Farage in recent years, using folklore and fear tactics to permeate the British psyche and coax the public into believing that a mythical, white ‘idyll’ is the place where Britain’s national purity can be found. That ‘memory’ is not really a memory at all, but a nostalgic dream of a white, virgin landscape void of people of colour. One big reason for this is the fact that rural Britain holds a meaningful space in Britain’s collective memory. ![]() But if these spaces are the pride of Britain, why did a Ramblers Report reveal that Britons of BAME backgrounds made up only 1% of National Park visitors in 2020? The green and pleasant land, rural Britain, with its valleys and orchards, rolling hills and chocolate box villages, can be best encapsulated in the National Parks which stretch from Snowdonia in the West to Loch Lomond in the North. ![]()
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