The announcement of the appointment by the Minister of Town
and Country Planning of a Committee to make recommendations on the whole question of National Parks coincides to the day (most appropriately) with the publication by the Cambridge University Press of Sir Norman Birkett's Rede Lecture on "National Parks and the Countryside." It was an unusual subject to choose for that particular lecture (Sir Norman's immediate predecessors were, I believe, Sir Max Beerbohm on Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forbes on Virginia Woolf), but Sir Norman was able to quote to considerable effect two Cambridge lovers of the countryside—and of the Lake District, the lecturer's own favourite resort, in particular— William Wordsworth and G. M. Trevelyan, and there was certainly no danger of the innovation being looked askance at. As he observed, there is some uncertainty as to what National Parks are and are not. His lecture dispels all misunderstanding on that point.
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