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BEN BENTLEY gets the lowdown from Andy Boddington, chairman of the Campaign to Protect Rural England

"The countryside has to live as well as look beautiful, and if it lives it will look beautiful."

If you have an image in your mind of what the Shropshire boss of the Campaign to Protect Rural England is like, you might like to rip it up now.

In the best possible way, its new chairman Andy Boddington looks more like a punk rock Alan Titchmarsh than a tweedy bumpkin; a colourful, plain-speaking character who might yet make the CPRE the coolest club in the country(side).

Andy, 55, is an electronic trailblazer who uses Twitter and Facebook to share ideas about the countryside and to stir more young people into standing up and defending their bit of Shropshire’s green and pleasant land.

As a younger man he certainly had been there, done that and got the T-shirt: a born campaigner, he was at one point homeless; he has set up companies, crashed them and set them back up again.

In short, the words "Andy Boddington" and "conventional" are unlikely to be employed in the same sentence.

His first job is to change the perceived image – and Andy insists it's only a perceived image – of the CPRE as "old fashioned" and boring. But worry not - he is not about to sex up the countryside by building a ferris wheel on top of the Long Mynd; that’s precisely what he’s not trying not to do.

But he says: "We realise that we need to draw in more young people, and they are increasingly online talk­ing through social network sites and using information from the Internet.”

"We have done Twitter-based proj­ects on dark skies to reduce light pol­lution and that has been really good."

Indeed, one evening when he was tweeting about the twinkling stars he could see from his home near Felton Butler, he was bombarded with replies from city folk saying "Stars, what stars?"

As an unpublished author he mused how much light pollution was damag­ing the world's creativity. Would Shakespeare have written about star-crossed lovers had his night sky been obscured by lampposts?

As a result, an international Twitter campaign he launched called darkskies2010 now has almost 2,000 followers.

Returning to the subject of making the CPRE more inclusive he says: "I'm open to ideas. I want to do a review on how we work in Shropshire to see how we are perceived and how we are not perceived – I’m very much in listening mode.

"I want to do a video competition to get young people to produce videos and multi-media projects about how we see the countryside."

He's also in the process of setting up an internet-based poll to find Shropshire's ugliest building, although he remains tight-lipped about the structure most likely to win a pug pageant.

"It would be online and interactive." he says enthusiastically.

"When we did it in Oxford it was very successful. It will get people to vent their feelings about buildings, to say what they think about them."

Current county membership in of the CPRE, which has been protecting the countryside in Shropshire for 60 years, stands at around 400 - a number that progressively is in slight decline.

"I would like to double that membership," he says. "It's very hard, but we take on hard campaigns and a membership campaign is as hard as preserving something in the countryside."

Originally from Northamptonshire, Andy began campaigning on countryside matters when he was 17, fighting everything from the demolition of a Victorian arcade to wining a campaign against urban expressway.

He was an archaeologist for 12 years, a computing adviser at the Open University, and director of evaluation at the Economic and Social Research Council.

In more recent time he worked full time for the CPRE in Oxfordshire, spearheading a successful bid to prevent Didcot power station using lakes as a dump site for waste ash.

The CPRE is, of course, primarily a campaign group. As Andy says, it does what it says on the tin.

So there are a myriad of ongoing campaigns in Shropshire: to prevent the construction North West Relief Road in Shrewsbury, the retail plan in Oswestry, to keep the night sky starry, and to get more affordable rural homes built.

The good thing about Andy is that speaks from personal experience. The need for affordable homes in the countryside, he says, is paramount if we are to sustain rural areas as places where local people can live and work.

“Having been left homeless at one point (as a result of an episode of depression) I can understand people's needs for decent housing," he says.

"We can build houses that we need without wrecking the countryside.

"The countryside has to live as well as look beautiful, and if it lives it will look beautiful."

"We are famous for saying no - no to the North west Relief Road, no to new supermarkets.

"But we also do positive things like affordable houses in villages and the local food projects, to preserve markets and work with farmers.

Personally speaking, Andy admits that he often has too many ideas on the go. During our conversation his mobile rings incessantly and in the end he elects to switch it off.

"I live my life in the most chaotic fashion, I'm always juggling too many balls at one time, and there's my new business," he says referring to his internet start-up work for small companies.

Published in the Shropshire Star 19 June 2010.

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