The Victorian who still makes our lives naturally better

Most of us enjoy a bracing walk in the country and fondly remember time spent playing in the street or local park as a child.But the rigours of modern life mean we are spending less and less time enjoying these simple pleasures.

Now a new theory, Nature Deficit Disorder, claims that the dangers of not embracing the great outdoors may be far more damaging than we had ever imagined. The flickering lure of the computer screen and a dramatic increase in the amount of traffic on our roads has greatly reduced children’s opportunities to get outside and play.

This, coupled with easy access to calorie-rich fast food, helps explain, in part, the obesity epidemic engulfing the UK. But proponents of Nature Deficit Disorder believe our increasing disassociation with nature could be the cause of other symptoms – reduced use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses.

Nature Deficit Disorder is still not generally regarded as a medical condition, but the very fact that it is now being discussed is down to the work of one of the most extraordinary women of the 19th-century.

For the work of Octavia Hill still exerts a huge influence over how we perceive a functioning modern society. Hill was a Victorian reformist – but this phrase hardly does justice to her work. She was in essence a fearless human rights activist and prototype social worker.

She devoted her life to providing support and instilling pride and dignity to those locked in to a vicious cycle of poverty in London’s cholera-ridden slums and, as such, is credited as the pioneer of social housing.

Her compassionate work helped create 15 housing schemes serving more than 3,000 people in the capital at a time when the notion of social housing simply did not exist. A key part of her approach was to recognise the importance of natural open spaces as a means to deal with the rigours of tough daily life.

She insisted on children having time to play in the green spaces littering around the smog-engulfed capital, famously declaring these oases as “open-air sitting rooms for the poor”.

But as the Octavia Hill Method (as her then ground-breaking approach was known) developed, she went one step further and started saving these green spaces from the rampant advances of the late Industrial Revolution. Hill is now credited with the creation of green belts that form a defensive green ring around our major cities.

Hill realised the importance of economic power to buy land as it became available. With like-minded individuals Sir Robert Hunter and Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, she set up the National Trust. That this much-loved institution, which rightly or wrongly is still sometimes seen as a bastion of the middle-class, should have such radical roots may be something of a surprise.

But Hill no doubt would be delighted in the way the organisation has evolved to now protect large swathes of our countryside and coastline while enabling these precious places to be easily enjoyed by all.

Because most people have spent time outdoors courtesy of the Trust – typically during a school trip to a stately home or dodging the worst of the British summer in a tea-room.

Matthew Oates, the National Trust’s wildlife adviser, believes our growing dislocation from nature is a real cause for alarm.

He explains: “Nature Deficit Disorder isn’t something we readily want to believe in, but there is growing evidence that it’s real, and big. We all need vitamin N, kids and adults – it energises us. The truth is that in nature we belong! Octavia Hill was a visionary, a woman way ahead of her time. She realised that social deprivation wasn’t merely a matter of little money and poor housing, but of removal from nature. She led people back into nature. She’s needed today.”

In this, the year marking the centenary of Hill’s death, the National Trust has launched an amateur photo competition, Your Space, to encourage people to embrace the natural world by taking pictures of the green spaces she fought so hard to protect.

So next time you head outdoors, consider Hill’s words: “We all need space; unless we have it we cannot reach that sense of quiet in which whispers of better things come to us gently.”

Entries for the Your Space competition should capture the relationship between people and green spaces. For more information, visit www.nationaltrust.org.uk/yourspace