ABOUT
Meet the current team
Nadia Shaikh
A naturalist and conservationist, Nadia has devoted her life to repairing our relationship with nature.
She joined Right to Roam in 2021 after 14 years in the nature conservation sector, convinced that mainstream 'nature protection' wasn't involving people in a meaningful way and that the connections between enclosure, land ownership and our devastating biodiversity loss were too big to ignore.
She now lives in Scotland where she enjoys roaming free, rock pooling and kayaking. She covers the campaign’s operations, events, and work on social justice.
Jon Moses
Jon is a writer and campaigner. He has published features, essays and profiles on environmental and other issues for The Guardian, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Lead, The Great Outdoors and in 2024 co-edited Right to Roam’s book, Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You.
He joined Right to Roam in 2021 after completing a doctorate in GeoHumanities and realising he knew almost nothing about where he actually lived. A lengthy river trespass followed, and he’s never been the same since.
Jon focuses on policy, communications and our ground campaign.
Guy Shrubsole
Guy is an award-winning author, land justice activist, environmental campaigner and moss nerd.
In 2019, he wrote the bestselling book Who Owns England? and was the co-founder of Right to Roam in 2020 with Nick Hayes. His 2022 book The Lost Rainforests of Britain highlights the relationship between access and ecological restoration, and won the 2023 Wainwright Prize for Conservation.
With a background working for Friends of the Earth, DEFRA and Rewilding Britain, Guy leads much of our political strategy and lobbying effort.
Amy-Jane Beer
Amy is a biologist, nature writer and campaigner. She’s a Country Diarist for The Guardian and a columnist for British Wildlife.
She contributed to the 2018 People’s Manifesto for Wildlife as minister for Social Inclusion and Access to Nature. Her most recent book The Flow: rivers, water and wildness won the 2023 Wainwright Prize for nature writing .
Amy joined us in 2022, and focuses on outreach, landowner liaison, river access, dog policy and creative direction. She has a PhD in the metamorphoses of sea urchins. That’s right.
Lewis Winks
Lewis is a researcher, writer and campaigner.
He specialises in nature connection, cultural and behavioural change, and has a background working in the environmental and outdoor education sector.
He joined Right to Roam having spearheaded the fight to defend wild camping rights on Dartmoor and founded the umbrella campaign The Stars Are For Everyone in 2022.
Lewis supports the research and communications side of the campaign, making use of spatial data to illuminate the problems, and to advocate for creative solutions to improve access.
Jess Day
Jess joined Right to Roam after several years spent walking over a thousand miles alone along some of the UK's greatest trails.
She documented the process on her popular Instagram channel @shoes_full_of_feet; encouraging people to step outside their comfort zone, embrace being a beginner, and to overcome fears and self-built barriers.
After the outdoors became such an integral part of her life, Jess decided it was time to take action and better advocate for nature and our access to it – which led to her joining the campaign in 2024 as communications specialist. It is thanks to her love of long-distance trails that she can usually be found unshowered, in a tent, in the middle of nowhere, taking the meaning of ‘remote worker’ to a whole new level.
We have a Parliament of Owls to advise, inspire, challenge and oversee our work.
.png)
Nick Hayes
Nick is an award-winning writer, illustrator and land justice campaigner and whittler of startling candleholders.
In 2020 he co-founded Right to Roam with Guy Shrubsole and published The Book of Trespass, followed in 2022 by The Trespasser’s Companion: a field guide to reclaiming what is already ours. In 2024 he co-edited Right to Roam’s latest book, Wild Service: Why Nature Needs You.
Caroline Lucas
Caroline Lucas was two-time leader of the Green party and MP for Brighton Pavilion for 14 years, having been elected in four consecutive general elections.
Her 2024 book Another England offers a vision for reclaiming English identity for progressive politics. In 2022 she introduced the first ever Right to Roam Private Members’ Bill in parliament.
Soraya Abdel-Hadi
Soraya is a sustainability specialist, life coach, facilitator and the founder and driving force of nature behind All the Elements, a CIC supporting leaders working on access and representation in the UK outdoor sector. She’s an energiser, a maker of change and connection.
Jay Griffiths
Jay is the acclaimed author of six books on nature, time, activism and childhood including Wild: an elemental journey, Kith: the riddle of the childscape and Why Rebel.
She once spent a couple of years living in a shed on the outskirts of Epping Forest, and many others learning from indigenous cultures around the globe. She is now based in Wales.
Robert MacFarlane
Author of multiple groundbreaking, award-winning works of nature writing, including The Old Ways, Mountains of the Mind, Underland and the forthcoming Is A River Alive?
Robert is a passionate advocate for the natural world and the rights of nature. He became involved with the campaign following the pyrrhic attempt to ban Wild Camping on Dartmoor and has kindly agreed to join our Parliament as a Long-eared Owl.
You can find his 'broadside ballad', Riversong, on our website here.
Mary-Ann Ochota
Mary-Ann is a broadcaster and writer specialising in anthropology, archaeology, and the outdoors and countryside.
She’s President of CPRE, the Countryside Charity and a member of Natural England’s Landscape Advisory Panel (NELAP), which advises the Natural England board on landscape issues.
Mary-Ann is passionate about improving diversity and inclusion in the outdoors, and helping established organisations build positive relationships with underserved communities and grassroots movements.
Nature, represented by Paul Powlesland
Paul is a river Guardian on the Roding in East London and a barrister at Garden Court Chambers.
He’s also co-founder of Lawyers for Nature, an organisation advancing the Rights of Nature within the legal system, and providing legal support for grassroots nature defenders.
He joins our Parliament as part of an experimental pilot which aims to see nature’s interests formally represented on the boards and advisory bodies of all organisations.
What we're campaigning for
Access to nature is essential to our physical and mental health and without a connection to the natural world we’re less likely to care about it and unable to act to protect it. Yet we’re excluded from much of what surrounds us.
There’s a right to roam in only 8% of England, much of it in remote areas of mountain, moor, heath and down, rather than the places the majority of us live.
Even where we do have access, what we can do is limited; with no right to swim or cycle, camp, or canoe. Our footpath network is brilliant but unevenly distributed and insufficient, offering a right of passage with no right to be; only to pass through.
Who we are
Since 2021, Right to Roam has been organising peaceful trespasses into some of the vast areas of countryside from which the public are currently excluded. Led by botanists, ornithologists, astronomers, dancers, singers, citizen scientists, outdoors specialists and poets.
As we go, we follow the tried and tested access code which governs Scotland’s right of responsible access, respecting privacy, crops and nature – all while seeking to leave a positive trace and practising deep care for the natural world: a concept we call Wild Service.
Our vision is of a future countryside in which people not only enjoy the physical, mental and spiritual benefits of nature but serve as its guardians too.
To get in touch with the campaign, email: hello@righttoroam.org.uk
In turn, many of the access rights and freedoms we have taken for granted are under threat. Over 49,000 miles of historic paths have disappeared from the official maps. 32,000 rights of way have been blocked or obstructed. 2,500 ‘access islands’, created by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, remain unresolved.
Venerable freedoms, such as the right to wild camp on Dartmoor, have come under threat from wealthy landowners. Hundreds of years of permissive access to major green spaces, such as Cirencester Park, have suddenly been withdrawn. Even in our vaunted national landscapes, rights of access can be poor – with 22 out of 34 in England permitting less than 10% of land to be designated for public access.
All that affects how we feel and relate to the landscape around us: at best, visitors in our own country, rather than people who truly belong.
So we are campaigning for England and Wales to follow the lead of Scotland, Scandinavia and other countries around the world in establishing a ‘Right to Roam’: a default of responsible access to land and water to replace the current default of exclusion.
It will not be a free-for-all: there will still be restrictions and exclusions to protect privacy, gardens, crops and sensitive wildlife areas and for public safety. But exclusion will no longer be subject to the arbitrary whim of major landowners, 1% of whom still own 50% of England. Our belief is that access should become a democratic conversation, held by all.
We’ve drafted our own Right to Roam Act, modelled on the Scottish example, which you can find here.
Why we need access
The UK currently ranks bottom of the league for nature connectedness across Europe. Our children spend less time outdoors than prisoners, their roaming range contracting with each generation. Meanwhile, an epidemic of physical and mental health challenges is being exacerbated by the inability of people to access their nearby nature. This is despite the consistent, well-documented evidence that experiencing nature is fundamental for our health and wellbeing.
The greatest physical and mental health resource yet created is everywhere about us: nature. Yet England’s still feudal structures of land ownership and access mean that little of it is available to the public to enjoy. We are living with the impacts of a pre-democratic system of exclusion; a legacy of centuries of game laws, enclosure acts, stoppage notices and the hostile architecture it left behind. Spiked fences, barbed wire, angry signs, cameras, walls, gamekeepers and gates: all mar our experience of the countryside and the more positive, inclusive culture it could yet create.
But it’s not just about what we get from nature, it’s about what we can do for nature too. Across Britain, networks of grassroots nature defenders are emerging in exactly those places where access rights are most enduring. It is no coincidence that the River Wye, one of the 3% of rivers with longstanding rights of access, is at the heart of our fight to arrest the declining health of our rivers. Access reform can unlock that potential across the country, making the ability to know and care for nature immanent to every community. Connection is the precondition of protection – we cannot redress our ecological crisis without it.
We call this concept Wild Service: a culture of connection and care which takes us beyond recreation and towards recreation, an ancient bond with nature we must reform, and reaffirm.
FAQ's
Don’t we have enough access already?
The 8% of England’s countryside where we currently have a right to roam is mostly in remote upland areas, far from where most people actually live. It is also unevenly distributed. Coverage is pretty good in Cumbria but really bad if you live in Cambridgeshire. It’s a similar story with our network of public footpaths and bridleways (Public Rights of Way, PRoW). This network covers 0.2% of land on which access rights are limited to making your way along a prescribed narrow line.
In some areas the network caters to the needs of walkers, off road cyclists and horseriders reasonably well, in others it does so poorly. Around 49,000 miles of PRoW have already been lost through missconduct, neglect or error, or are (unlawfully) obstructed by fences, wires and locked gates. Others cannot be accessed safely (e.g. they link to dangerous roads or cross fields of overly frisky cattle), and more still are so blighted by hostile architecture (walls, fences, barbed wire, razor wire, anti-climb paint, threatening signage and CCTV) that using them is the opposite of quality time in nature.
A Right to Roam is not just about where we can go, but what we can do. The vast majority of existing access rights cater to walkers. By contrast, other ways of connecting to nature are poorly served or offer few guarantees of a peaceful day out. For instance, while swimmers, canoeists and paddle boarders maintain a right to enjoy many rivers, the law is sufficiently hazy enough that landowners with river frontage can feel entitled to shout at them for doing so. We need a Right to Roam Act which defends and extends such simple, long-standing freedoms.
Won’t people damage the countryside?
The impact of the public is low down on the list of the current harms to nature. Issues like habitat loss and pollution with nutrients and pesticides from industrial agriculture causes more damage in a day than most walkers combined could in a decade. Sewage dumping by water companies, dredging, transport infrastructure, poorly considered development, the detritus from commercial fishing, and “management” for shooting all add massively to nature’s burdens. We can do so much better as a society, but blaming regular people for environmental decline is a deflection from the real causes of damage.
We’re not naive. People aren’t perfect. Our culture has been in a state of nature-disconnection for so long that our sense of belonging to the land and our ability to act in harmony and reciprocity with the land has been diminished. The solution to this disconnect is not exclusion: it is education, it is experience, it is cultural transformation. Countries with a long established right to roam have cultures which are markedly more knowledgeable and respectful of nature.
The irresponsible access practices often cited in arguments against access reform are already unlawful. Thus it is the responsible majority who are most affected by exclusion: prohibitive laws penalise those who already care. We believe we’ve got the messaging on the countryside wrong. It should not be ‘leave no trace’, as though you’re a visitor with no stake in the land, but ‘leave a positive trace’, with responsibility for what takes place there. Follow our Principles (see Take Action/Principles of Trespass) and you can’t go far wrong.
A new access culture is already emerging, as many recreational organisations, such as our partners at organisations like Trash Free Trails, Surfers Against Sewage, Conham Bathing, Save The Wye, the River Roding Trust, and the BMC, all show what is possible when people are allowed to care.
Nature needs us. In an environment so heavily influenced by humans, we need humans who will act on nature’s behalf. Connection is the first step to that protection. We cannot save what we do not know. We need proper rights of access to take this culture of deep responsibility to the next stage.
Isn’t England too crowded for a Right to Roam?
We are sometimes told that Scottish style right of responsible access will not work here because there are too many people. While Scotland does have a lower population density than England, it is the distribution, not density that matters. 70% of the Scottish population live in the Central Belt, with much of the remainder occupying the rest of the Lowlands to the south of Edinburgh and Glasgow and along the east coast.
In upland areas, access was already enjoyed on the basis of custom and tradition before the Land Reform Act of 2003 enshrined it as a legal right. What really changed was people’s right to access exactly those areas most similar to large swathes of England. In the case of ‘honeypot sites’ - popular places that often attract a very large number of people, a Right to Roam Act would make provision for location-specific measures to manage pressure, including bye-laws if required. But of course, if we had more places to go, then pressure on honeypots may also be diluted.
Ultimately, If the English countryside feels crowded, it’s only because we’re all crammed into the same 8% of it. A Right to Roam Act makes access to nature more local, more practical, and more affordable. It will help us make nature part of our everyday lives.