E. M. Forster in 1964 wrote that two world wars had enveloped the wildness of Britain. “‘Two great wars demanded and bequeathed regimentation,’ wrote E. M. Forster in 1964, ‘science lent her aid, and the wildness of these islands, never extensive, was stamped upon and built over and patrolled in no time. There is no forest or fell to escape to today, no cave in which to curl up, and no deserted valley.’” (Macfarlane 2009, p.8)
Jonathan Raban claims Britain lost its wilderness much earlier in the 1860s with population and industry:
so thickly peopled, so intensively farmed, so industrialised, so citified, that there was nowhere to go to be truly alone, or to have … adventures, except to sea. (Jonathan Raban Cited in (Macfarlane 2009, p.8))
Macfarlane states population and the road network is really to blame for the lack of wilderness or remoteness:
In Britain, over sixty-one million people now live in 93,000 square miles of land. Remoteness has been almost abolished, and the main agents of that abolition have been the car and the road. Only a small and diminishing proportion of terrain is now more than five miles from a motorable surface. There are nearly thirty million cars in use in Britain, and 210,000 miles of road on the mainland alone. (Macfarlane 2009, p.9)
George Monbiot argues that there is a wildness paradox, that Britain's gardens have more wildlife in them than barren uplands:
Spend two hours sitting in a bushy suburban garden anywhere in Britain, and you are likely to see more birds, and of a wider range of species, than you would while walking five miles across almost any open landscape in the uplands. (Monbiot 2014, p.69)
Liz Wells argues Britain is a managed land and notes the paradox of the pictorial countryside as safe, clean, and undisturbed rather than managed.
...British land is managed – there is no wilderness; even the coastal littoral is overseen (by the Environment Agency). It follows that landscapes and vistas are human constructs, which means that aesthetic principles, as well as social mores, were and are in play within the actual shaping of land. Pictorial renderings of countryside as pastoral depict Britain as undisturbed and undisturbing, thus contributing to constructing a simplified and benign rural imaginary, to picturing countryside as safe. (Wells 2011, p.164)
The lack of wild animals like wolves, beaver and boar:
So few wild creatures, relatively, remain in Britain and Ireland: so few, relatively, in the world. Pursuing our project of civilisation, we have pushed thousands of species towards the brink of disappearance, and many thousands more over that edge. The loss, after it is theirs, is ours. Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. (Macfarlane 2009, p.306,307)
Macfarlane, R., 2009. The Wild Places, Granta Books.
Monbiot, G., 2014. Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life, University of Chicago Press.
Wells, L., 2011. Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity, I.B.Tauris.