The South Downs National Park was designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty by Natural England. At the South Down Project, we’d like to keep it that way.

The landscape of The South Downs is quite simply, beautiful. Its smooth, sculpted chalk hills give way to rolling vistas with distant horizons, nestling its villages and copses in the undulating greenery.

And it’s our responsibility to maintain and nurture this extraordinary treasure for posterity. This is why the South Downs National Park quite rightly puts the preservation of this landscape at the very top of their list of purposes.

Can we preserve it, and let it meet our needs too?

The landscape of the South Downs constantly evolves. If you’d been here 5,000 years ago, you’d have seen rolling hills of forests, sprinkled with small clearings, and the smoke of hundreds of fires snaking up from Iron Age Forts like Cissbury Ring.

Then those forests were largely cleared to allow the new farmers to graze their cattle. Then new industries came in, and now the struggle is to keep the South Downs beautiful, whilst giving people the chance to have new homes to live in, and new jobs to help our mixed economy.

Is there a place that can, discreetly, give us these homes and jobs?

Nobody wants to see anything change for the worse, and some people don’t even like change that might appear to others to be for the good. But we all agree that change is happening all the time. Whether we like it or not.

So if we could make a significant change for the better, and provide new homes, new jobs, a huge boost to our local economy, and give us better transport, more ameneities, and generally a better quality of life, with the smallest possible impact on the landscape we love, that could well be a change worth considering.

Could the South Down Project be the best way to deliver a very big difference, in a relatively small space?