Issues facing Lewes n the new South Downs National Park

Lewes is the largest town in any national park.

By Chris Bennett
BBC Sussex

Farming makes the Downs different.

Within a few hundred feet there is physical evidence of over one thousand years of English history in the High Street of Lewes.

Take a walk along it and you will pass a castle built just after the Normans crushed Harold in 1066.

Thomas Paine debated politics in the White Hart. The Crown Court tried Haigh and John Bodkin Adams.

A local photographer's studio boasts Buffalo Bill among its former clients.

Now, in one particular way, Lewes is making history again. It is the largest town to be part of a national park.

The courts in Lewes have staged famous trials for many years.

With a population of over 16,000, it dwarfs towns like Keswick, Brecon and Lyndhurst.

The new Park is seen by many in Lewes as a welcome arrival. But they have concerns, too.

Move along the High Street, down which Lewes' famous bonfire boys march each November and you can see a memorial to the seventeen Protestant martyrs who were burned at the stake.

Population South Downs - 120,000 Lake District - 42,200 Peak District - 38,000

David Quinn, president of the Chamber of Commerce, has run a carpet business from his shop opposite the memorial for almost twenty nine years.

"The positive side is that it will attract a lot more people to the town." he said.

He hopes that the new authority will find a solution to the town's parking issues.

"Firstly we'd like to see a multi-storey car park for a start - that would benefit the town immensely because we are very short on parking spaces."

The new South Downs National Park is significantly different to those in the Lakes, the Peak District and elsewhere in the UK.

A view over Firle from Mount Caburn

I met Richard James, a senior countryside officer who watches over the Downs in East Sussex. To him, Kipling's 'whale-backed hills' are "an amazing landscape".

"East Sussex, you've got the open landscape, the open fields . As you go into West Sussex and Hampshire you've got the wooden landscape."

"It is a unique landscape because it is farmed, because we have some very large settlements within that such as Lewes and Midhurst, a lot of people living with that and a lot of people living just outside the national park such as in London and Brighton. So it is a different landscape completely. " he said.

It may not look that way, but over 107,000 people live in the new National Park.

The high population - around 107,000 - means that planners across the South Downs area receive around 4000 planning applications every year.

One of the first tasks of the new park authority will be to decide whether it makes those decisions in future or if it asks local councils to decide on its behalf.

In Lewes, the town's civic society is hoping that the Park will mean "better design, better conservation" and more money to repair buildings in need of improvement.

Robert Cheesman, chairman of the Friends of Lewes, said the park "is not going to preserve everything in aspic". There was, he said, a balance to be struck.

"We have to recognise that the whole of the national park and in particular the market towns need to be economically vibrant paces and that means there must be progress in development,"

"But that development needs to be properly designed and in the right places, we don't want inappropriate development," said Mr Cheesman.