In the early 1960s Michael Dower, who has died aged 88, was an early proponent of a “joined-up” countryside. As a town planner at the Civic Trust he grew to realise what a contested space it is, with many interests fighting their corners, whether for farming, access, nature, beauty or community.
Legislation and organisational structures encouraged separation and disharmony between the various sectors. He sought to dispel this by connecting people and ideas, believing that a successful, sustainable future for the countryside could be achieved only by all the various interests working together.
At the Civic Trust he pioneered the idea of Conservation Volunteers, bringing young people from different backgrounds together to demolish eyesores, in the form of structures left over from the second world war.
His book Fourth Wave: The Challenge of Leisure (1965) examined the impact of car-borne access to the countryside, following the waves of industrialisation, expanding railway networks and car-based suburbs: “Now we see under the guise of a modest word the surge of a fourth wave which could be more powerful than all the others. The modest word is leisure.”
Its insights contributed to the 1968 Countryside Act, expanding the role of the National Parks Commission and renaming it the Countryside Commission. Local authorities were empowered to create country parks that town-dwellers could access more easily.
The previous year Michael had gone to the Dartington Amenity Research Trust (Dart), founded by the Dartington Hall Trust in Devon with him as director, to study recreation and tourism in relation to country and town life. The trust carried out research on the consequences for resource planning, rural land use, heritage conservation and the needs of rural communities, and so building on the idea of the joined-up countryside.
In 1985, he was appointed chief executive of the Peak District National Park. At the time several national parks were deeply unpopular with their resident communities, who felt they were hostile to local needs and concerned only with visitors and conservation. Indeed, when Michael arrived in Bakewell to take up his post there were signs saying: “Abolish the Peak Park.”
His response was unusual but highly effective – to listen to the park’s detractors. In this way he found solutions to the vacuum of confidence. Within two years the park was pioneering a scheme to pay farmers to carry out environmental management, supporting businesses to make and market goods reflecting the area’s distinctive character, setting up a Peak Park Trust to restore and manage historic buildings and championing affordable housing for local people.
This proved to be a turning point for national parks – “lived-in” working landscapes, necessitating jobs, services and housing for the people living there.
In 1992 Michael became director general of the Countryside Commission. He brought the same wide-ranging vision and determination to bear, taking account of all the things that matter in the countryside, as for instance the creation of the National Forest as a way of both planting millions of trees and encouraging regeneration, new jobs and vigour for the old coalfields and industrial areas of parts of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Staffordshire. He continued to innovate in agriculture, pioneering ideas that are now reaching fruition in the Environmental Land Management Schemes (ELMs) scheme to pay farmers for delivering things that benefit the public.
In the years leading up to the toppling of the Romania’s last communist leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, in 1989, Michael had campaigned in a personal capacity against his regime’s sacking of villages by creating a twinning scheme between Romanian and British villages.
When he left the Countryside Commission in 1996 he became visiting professor at the University of Gloucester and campaigned for rural communities the length and breadth of Europe, inspiring a new movement to sustain the environmental, heritage, economic and social values that give such distinctive character to rural life. He did this by acting as convener for a number of initiatives ranging from the European Council for the Village and Small Town (Ecovast) to the European Rural Parliament (ERP).
Born in Hampstead Garden Suburb, north London, Michael was the son of Pauline (nee Trevelyan), whose father had been a Labour education minister under Ramsay MacDonald, and John Dower, the author of the 1945 white paper that led to large parts of the 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act. After John’s death Pauline became a member of the National Parks Commission, overseeing them in their early days.
From the Leys school, Cambridge, Michael went to study estate management at St John’s College at the university, graduating in 1956. His national service three years earlier was memorable for rescuing people and cattle from the east coast floods.
After gaining a town planning diploma at University College London he worked for the London county council (1957-59) and then went to the Civic Trust (1960-65). There he met Nan Done on a working party. They married in 1960 and had three sons, John, Dan and Alex. In Ireland he worked on tourism and amenity planning (1965-67), and then came the call to Dartington.
In retirement, Michael and Nan moved from Cheltenham to Beaminster in Dorset where Michael embraced localism and the power of local connections, helping to form the Dorset Climate Action Network. He thought globally and acted locally, inspiring community projects to plant trees, encourage renewable energy and involve schoolchildren.
He is survived by Nan, his sons, four grandsons and a granddaughter.
• Michael Shillito Trevelyan Dower, public servant and conservationist, born 15 November 1933; died 7 November 2022
