Governing the Unfettered Coast: Landscape Protection, Planning Reform, and the Making of Cornwall's "Mosaic" AONB

Protected landscapes in England did not emerge simply as acts of environmental preservation, but as governance responses to specific historical failures of land-use control. Nowhere is this clearer than in Cornwall, where dramatic coastal scenery, dispersed settlement, and a tourism-dependent political economy combined to expose the limits of early planning while simultaneously intensifying pressure for protection. This paper examines how Cornwall came to be designated not as a National Park, but as a fragmented Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB), arguing that this outcome represents a pragmatic governance compromise shaped by post-1918 planning reform, interwar development pressures, wartime reconstruction politics, and local resistance to centralised control. An exploration of archival material, parliamentary debate, planning history, and landscape policy literature, traces the national origins of landscape protection, the emergence of differentiated designations after 1945, and Cornwall's distinctive trajectory from proposed National Park to "mosaic" AONB. It shows that Cornwall's protected-landscape status was designed to preserve wilderness but on a more political note, to correct the cumulative effects of unfettered coastal development, while remaining administratively and politically workable within a lived-in, economically active landscape.