Where amenity and modernity collided: The Lake District national park and West Cumberland's atomic coast

Abstract

This article serves as a lens for understanding — in extremis — the tensions generated when state-sponsored modernity and amenity collide. In examining the origin of Britain's largest military-civil atomic complex at Sellafield alongside the delineation of the Lake District National Park's boundaries, the article demonstrates how the dual post-war reconstruction objectives of amenity and modernity were forced to reach an accommodation within the same geographical area and over an overlapping time period. Whilst the origins of national parks are well served by national park historiography, the contestation of any of their boundaries has not been explored. Furthermore, whilst the history of Britain's military-civil nuclear complex has been served by official narratives, it remains under-explored by unofficial ones. This article brings together for the first time state and civil society archive material. It exposes how emerging state military-civil strategic priorities, and state secrecy, framed the contestation over boundaries with civil society proponents of the Lake District National Park. This undermined civil society's capacity to maintain an effective opposition to these military-industrial developments, leading ultimately to the British State's war factory expansion and the immediate post-war development of its military-civil atomic capacity, overtaking and superseding the amenity organisations' boundary aspirations for the park.