Linescapes Remapping and Reconnecting Britain's Fragmented Wildlife

Selected as a Book of the Year 2017 in the Guardian

‘This is a beautifully crafted book . . . timely and essential reading’ Kathy Willis, Director of Science, Kew Gardens

It is rare to find a landscape untouched by our lines – the hedges, walls, ditches and dykes built to enclose and separate; and the green lanes, roads, canals, railways and power lines, designed to connect. This vast network of lines has transformed our landscape.

In Linescapes, Hugh Warwick unravels the far-reaching ecological consequences of the lines we have drawn: as our lives and our land were being fenced in and threaded together, so wildlife habitats have been cut into ever smaller, and increasingly unviable, fragments.

Hugh Warwick has travelled across the country to explore this linescape from the perspective of our wildlife and to understand how, with a manifesto for reconnection, we can help our flora and fauna to flourish.

Linescapes offers a fresh and bracing perspective on Britain’s countryside, one that proposes a challenge and gives ground for hope; for while nature does not tend to straight lines and discrete borders, our lines can and do contain a real potential for wildness and for wildlife.

Hugh Warwick is an ecologist and writer with a particular fondness for hedgehogs. He is the author of A Prickly Affair and The Beauty in the Beast and Hedgehog, a monograph. Hugh has studied hedgehogs, off and on, for over 30 years, spending months radio-tracking them around the West Country and Scotland. He is a spokesperson for the British Hedgehog Preservation Society and appears regularly in the media talking about wildlife and the environment. He lives in Oxford with his wife and two children.