00:00 Hello I'm Joy Blizzard, I'm the Policy and Communications Officer for the Field
00:04 Studies Council. We are an environmental education charity and we were started in
00:10 the middle of World War Two and today we're at one of our centres, one of our
00:15 twelve residential centres and this one is Preston Morgford in Shropshire. We
00:20 acquired this in 1956 for the Princely Summer, £300 a year and we welcomed a
00:26 thousand students to come and learn with us and I suppose we are probably best
00:31 known for providing residential courses for people who are doing their A-level and
00:37 GCSE Biology and Geography fieldwork but we're actually about far more than that.
00:42 We're about wanting to make sure that everyone has fantastic opportunities to
00:48 learn about the environment, to care for it, to get really excited and enthused
00:52 about it. So we do have courses available for preschoolers right the way through
00:56 to postgraduates and all stations in between and we do courses for all ages
01:02 and abilities as well so if you're just slightly interested in some creatures or
01:07 nature or wanted to learn a little bit about plants or animals we've got courses
01:10 for you but we also provide opportunities for people who want to
01:13 study to become incredible experts in their field. So my name is Aaron Holdsworth
01:18 I'm the Centre Manager here at Preston Montford. We have a very busy Outdoor
01:25 Education Centre here with schools visiting from all over the country,
01:28 taking part in fieldwork, a lot of Geography GCSE fieldwork, studying rivers
01:34 and towns and we have a lot of A-level biology groups coming here, studying in
01:38 the grounds, the biodiversity and looking in the ponds and in the woodlands. We also
01:43 have a lot of primary groups who come on site and go building shelters in the
01:48 woods and doing bushcraft, they love the pond dipping in the pond as well and
01:53 just enjoying being out in the outdoors in the open space that we have here. So
01:56 we're very busy, we have a lot of adult groups as well, studying all sorts of
02:01 natural history courses from dragonflies, bats to mammals and so on which a lot of
02:07 that can be done on site. So yeah it's a really rich sort of biodiverse
02:13 environment we have here and we're very lucky and I think everybody that comes
02:18 here really enjoys studying whatever they're studying and it's a pleasure to
02:22 have them visit us. So we started in 1943 and we acquired this centre in 1956 and
02:31 when I looked in the archives it talked about describing Preston Montford as an
02:35 ordinary, a field centre in a sort of ordinary English countryside which
02:39 sounds a little bit rude doesn't it but actually it was a genius decision
02:42 because as those of us who live in Shropshire and we know and love it,
02:45 Shropshire is the most fantastic place for all sorts of landscapes to study. So
02:50 of course we're really famous for our geology so that was very much in the
02:53 minds of the kind of the founding wardens who worked here but there's also
02:58 incredible archaeology, history, we have some fantastic landscapes that you don't
03:03 get anywhere else. Of course we've got the Long Mins, we've got the Stiper stones,
03:06 you've got the Mears and Mosses and of course the River Severn which winds its
03:09 way round the site and Charles Darwin himself as a child was pottering along
03:14 the banks studying nature so there's a nice link to a famous
03:20 scientist there. So yeah times were not particularly easy, you've got to remember
03:25 that many of our centres started off when we were still on rations and I realised we
03:31 didn't actually have our first fridge bought until about ten years into the
03:35 charity so the people were doing the most incredible things and taking on
03:39 buildings like this wasn't easy either, there was a shortage of tools and
03:43 materials particularly after the war so we had some really quite enterprising
03:46 wardens who would make their own furniture or make do and mend. We
03:52 didn't have mains electricity in some of our centres for quite a while so they were
03:56 an incredible pioneering group of people. But the warden for Preston Montfort
04:01 despite it being described as being in ordinary English countryside, he had a
04:05 really quite novel idea at the time and his idea was we could probably teach
04:10 ecology in almost any kind of setting so he was quite keen on making sure that
04:17 you could teach ecology in the grounds. Of course we've got 40 acres when we bought this
04:21 site, we have beautiful grounds and beautiful centres and that turned out to
04:26 be a really wise decision because quite soon after we opened there was a foot
04:29 and mouth epidemic in 1960 and 61 and therefore we couldn't take people out
04:34 into the countryside understandably but he'd already planned for all the
04:38 lessons that could take part in our centres. So one of the things that we do
04:42 is that all our centres do have the most incredible grounds and habitats, we're
04:47 responsible for looking after some of our nature reserves, you've got veteran
04:52 trees, you've got all sorts of interesting species and that becomes
04:55 part of what we offer visitors. You're not coming to a boring building with a
04:59 load of tarmac and a playing field with a load of plantains on it, you've got all
05:02 sorts of things to study without having to travel very far and I think sometimes
05:06 for some of our smaller younger visitors they really appreciate being able to
05:10 tumble out of a coach and you know enjoy the surroundings without having to
05:14 travel too far. So we've just completed our 80th year, our anniversary was actually
05:19 10th of December where the founders met in the middle of the war in a very
05:25 bomb-damaged Natural History Museum and decided that they would go ahead with
05:28 this plan. So quite visionary you know the the headlines of the day were no
05:32 swift end to the war so they were looking forward to a better time. So we
05:37 really wanted to celebrate that and we've done that, all our centres have done
05:42 individual events to celebrate the work that they've done. We've planted 80
05:46 trees and this year we offered 80 places to young people who have got a real
05:52 passion to study wildlife and nature and really upskill their kind of the
05:58 biodiversity and identification skills. So obviously we were oversubscribed but
06:04 we managed to fill all those 80 places, we've got some real keen young people
06:07 that want to go on and make a difference with what they've learned. So that's what
06:10 we've been celebrating. It hasn't been easy, there have been times when you can
06:16 imagine foot-in-mouth caused a problem, government funding disappeared
06:20 overnight in the 1950s, there were kind of financial crises, Covid of course had a
06:27 massive impact on us because of course we had to shut all our centres but we're
06:31 celebrating the fact that we are still here and that original vision of
06:36 offering an opportunity for everybody to engage with nature and understand the
06:41 countryside, that's as relevant today as it was then because of course now we're
06:46 facing a biodiversity crisis and a climate change crisis so the more people
06:50 that we have who are actually trained up and skilled in the kind of things that
06:55 will help solve these problems the better. So yeah we're 80 years old but
06:59 still relevant.
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