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Hansterley Forest as heritage? Week 2 Leiden MOOC Heritage Under Threat

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Edited by Steve Bamlett, Sunday, 15 Apr 2018, 08:19

Steve Bamlett

Steve Bamlett

 · 11 days ago

I moved to the village of Hamsterley in County Durham in 1990 and from thence till I moved to the town of Crook, about 5 miles away in 1996, visited the Forest frequently with my dog. Even those short periods create a sense of a heritage to be valued and I wanted to write about my relationship to Hamsterley Forest. The official Forestry Commission website is:

https://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/infd-6vyg9a

The website shows how this wide forest on the edge of the Northern Pennine moors and Dales has begun to embrace a primary function as a site for tourists, earning money from a widening set of franchised enterprises - mountain-biking and bike hire - and a forest drive route serviced by a fee.

The Forest is a site of economic production - producing a range of pines - but for the area served as a place of rest and leisure sport. Across it run routes which connect to older moor roads and the remnants of ruined houses.

Throughout the period of living here the forestry Commission has been under threat of privatisation - and various attempts by successive governments have been resisted, but not without the absence of micro changes which make increasing parts of it marketable. Each change makes it more available to management for and by private commerce, not least by the invitation to franchised ventures.

What though of the needs that the free access to this vast area offered to local people?

I chose to write about this because it is not until recently that I learned that the Forest was born of a project of local and national government tin the 1930s to utilise the huge army of working men made unemployed from mines and heavy steel industries thrown out of work by industrial change - another heritage under threat but an urban one.

What strikes me is that the heritage of the Hamsterley Forest is in part a product of urban unemployment and early attempts to create local social and cultural capital from the decline of a culture supported by economic capital. Yet this aspect of the county's heritage is not explained in the forest itself.

And County Durham remains a region of relatively higher unemployment than the national average. And the huts around which I used to walk in its centre and which looked like the remnants of a prison camp where once part of a means of organising alienated labour by further alienating it.

See Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamsterley_Forest

Steve


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