Moore is the director of the West Midlands National Park Lab at Birmingham City University, a pioneering project that imagines a future in which the whole region, including Birmingham, Coventry and the Black Country, is a type of national park.
‘When I show people this, they think it’s Mordor’: the architect viewing the West Midlands as a national park Birmingham City University thinktank imagines new approach to urban areas and land use across the region.
And plans for new national parks in the UK can be contentious: in Wales, for example, proposals for a new national park in the north of the country have been met with local outcry.
She accepts that getting an official designation for the park, under current national park laws, is unlikely.
It would probably require a change in law – the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 was designed to exclude urban areas to protect nature.
