This is Our National Park. What’s Yours?

Coming this month to Latest TV: a new series of short films that explore our relationship with the South Downs.

The South Downs National Park is so much more than rolling English countryside.

It’s our oxygen, our inspiration, our happy place. It feeds us, waters us and brings us together. And it teaches us about our past, present and future.

If we take care of it, it’ll take care of us.

This is the message of Your National Park: a collection of 10 short films about our natural and cultural connections with the South Downs. Designated a national park in 2010, the Downs have been a uniquely living landscape, with people living and working in it, for thousands of years.

Commissioned by the South Downs National Park Authority, the collection is a celebration of what’s special about the South Downs, giving viewers a privileged window into the diverse life, habitats, human history and the many secrets embedded in its revered ecosystem. But it’s also a pertinent reminder of the role we can all play in conserving our national park.

Each film invites the viewer to experience the South Downs from the eyes of someone with a special calling to the countryside, and follow their journey of inspiration, discovery or even transformation through the landscape.

For ranger Paul Gorringe, the Eastern Downs above Brighton are more than countryside; they’re part of his community. He feels passionately about the Downs being accessible to everyone, and works hard to change its image as a playground for the more privileged among Sussex residents.

“Whitehawk Hill and Sheepcote Valley are where I cut my teeth as a ranger and naturalist. It’s here I learned how to get people volunteering and feeling a sense of ownership.”

“In summer, the valley blooms with wildflowers and rare butterflies — like a rainforest in miniature. When people come up here for the first time, they can’t believe the beauty on their doorstep. How can you not love a place like the South Downs, especially one so connected to the city and the sea?”

The Your National Park project is four years in the making, having survived the threat of cancellation during the COVID pandemic. On the project’s completion earlier this year, an interactive trail featuring the films was installed along the breadth of the South Downs Way, from Holden Farm in Hampshire to Beachy Head in Eastbourne. And there are plans to take the films out to communities in Sussex and Hampshire.

The films’ producers Neo and Angie Thomas Studios worked with a diverse group of local people and their communities to collect and craft the stories – rangers, conservationists, walk leaders, business owners, artists, campaigners, teachers and schoolchildren among them.

Kelly Smith, writer and co-director, reflects on the potential of the films to inspire a new way of interacting with our local countryside:

“The process of making these films has shown me there are so many ways we can live in balance by rethinking our relationship with the landscape around us. Most of all, it has taught me that our sense of belonging to nature can bring us together, whatever our differences, to solve some of our most urgent social and environmental problems. Just as nature opens us up to one another, so too — we hope — will this collection of stories.”

Latest TV will broadcast one episode every evening at 7pm from Monday 18th to Friday 22nd November, and Monday 25th to Friday 29th November.

Latest TV is on Freeview 7 and Virgin 159 in Brighton and surrounding areas, and available to livestream anywhere from our website.

Follow the film trail on the South Downs Way! Find out more at southdowns.gov.uk/yournationalpark