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By the time I emerged from Oxford Circus station, I was in the usual London blur: buses exhaling at the curb, office workers weaving through tourists, sirens somewhere between streets, a thin strip of sky squeezed between glass and stone.
If you’d stopped me right there and said, “You’re standing in the middle of a National Park City,” I probably would have raised an eyebrow.
But that’s exactly where I was headed: London National Park City HQ, just a short walk from the junction that appears on Monopoly boards and traffic reports. A “visitor centre” not for a distant wilderness, but for the city itself.
Inside, the energy is different. Plants on shelves. Big green maps on the walls. People wandering in for an open day, asking some version of the same question: So… what is this?
When I ask Mark Cridge, the director of National Park City Foundation and London National Park City, he laughs.
“People hear ‘National Park City’ and go, ‘Wow, I love it… what is it?’” he says. “That emotional reaction is the door we walk through.”
He tells me that in a normal National Park, your first stop is the visitor centre: you grab a map, learn the trails, find out where you can swim or hike, and what to watch for this season. They wanted a similar place for Londoners who don’t think of themselves as “nature people” at all—the ones on their lunch break, the ones who didn’t come looking for nature, but might discover it anyway.
“A National Park City is a special place where people connect with nature,” Mark explains. “And we use that connection as a starting point to reimagine what our cities could and should be like over the next couple of decades.”
Not just a few more trees on the edges. A different story about the whole city.
The map that changed the story
Every movement needs a beautiful object to make its idea hard to unsee. For London National Park City, that object was a map.
Years ago, the design studio Urban Good—founded by the wickedly talented Charlie Peel, whom I had the joy of working with on the Urban Nature Amsterdam Map—took a classic Ordnance Survey–style map of London and quietly rewired it. Streets and buildings were pushed into the background; parks, rivers, canals, front gardens, playing fields, and scraps of scrub were pulled forward. The result looks less like a street map and more like a circulatory system: green and blue veins running through the body of the city.
“For a city everyone imagines as grey and sprawling, it turns out London is over 50% green and blue space,” Mark says. “When you count all the parks, rivers, canals, gardens, and trees.”
Maps are never neutral. They tell you what matters. Most city maps say: the “real” city is buildings and roads; nature is decoration. The London National Park City map flips that logic: nature is the structure. Everything else has to negotiate around it.
Half the city already green and blue. Half still up for grabs.
In 2019, after years of work by explorer and educator Daniel Raven-Ellison and a coalition of citizens, organisations, and the Mayor, London was formally recognised as the world’s first National Park City.
It wasn’t a trophy for being done.
“It’s not an award,” Mark stresses. “We’re not saying London is perfect. We’re saying this place has recognised the problem and is willing to share responsibility for doing things differently.”
That willingness is captured in the London National Park City Charter: seven commitments that thread nature through everything from housing and transport to culture, health, and play. Clean air. Swimmable rivers and canals. More space for wildlife, more opportunities to be outside together, and new ways of making decisions that take nature seriously rather than treating it as an afterthought.
After the confetti of that first announcement came a harder, quieter question.
“Okay,” Mark says. “Now what?”
A movement that has to move without you
When he joined as director three years ago, Mark realised they weren’t just managing a project. They were trying to steward a story.
He keeps coming back to a line from the book New Power by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms: “It’s only a movement if it moves without you.”
“If everything depends on a small central team,” he says, “we’ll never move fast enough for the emergencies we’re in.”
Those emergencies stack on top of one another: climate crisis, biodiversity collapse, loneliness, kids growing up with no independent time outdoors, and no sense of belonging in green spaces.
In an emergency, you use every means at your disposal. You don’t ask, “How can our organisation do more?” You ask, “How can thousands of other people do more, together?”
The Rangers
For London National Park City, that means focusing their limited energy on two things: celebrating what’s already working, and growing a network of “Rangers.”
The celebration piece is straightforward: find the people already doing interesting work, tell their stories, and make it easier for others to copy them. That matters in an emergency: proof that something is possible is often the most powerful fuel.
The second piece is more unusual. Rangers are not uniformed park staff patrolling big landscapes. They are people already doing things in the city’s overlooked corners: the ones running the community garden, organising the children’s nature club, restoring a local pond, planting street trees.
Many of them felt isolated, like their project was a one-off. The Ranger programme gives them a shared identity, a peer community, and practical support.
“We want the Ranger community to be as diverse as London,” Mark says. “Because London is one of the most diverse cities in the world.”
He tells me about Divya. She works a standard nine-to-five, but her passion is fruit trees—especially the unexpected, exotic ones tucked into backyards and side streets. She runs Fruity Walks, an Instagram account and walking series that charts these trees across the city.
She’ll spot a fig or guava leaning over a fence, knock on the door, and ask: how did this tree get here? Often, the answer is a story of migration—a parent or grandparent bringing seeds from another country, planting them as an anchor in a new place. Divya collects those stories and turns them into walks: people literally tasting the city’s cultural history as they go.
Then there’s Katie, a Ranger involved with an allotment site in Newham. She is, by Mark’s account, a powerhouse of community energy, but becoming a Ranger gave her something else: confidence and a sense of being part of something bigger.
She created a literal green sofa at the allotment—a place where anyone can sit and talk about how they’re really doing. Mental health. Money worries. Loneliness. From that starting point, people drift into gardening, into community, into having somewhere to show up each week where they’re expected and welcomed.
These are small scenes. A fruit tree in a back garden. A sofa in a plot in East London. But they’re exactly the kind of scenes that add up when you see a city as a whole landscape rather than a collection of separate projects. London National Park City’s role is to be the mycelium under the surface: connecting, feeding, and amplifying (this makes me so happy).
The National Park Cities around the world
The idea has already jumped continents. Today, there are four recognised National Park Cities: London; Adelaide in Australia; Chattanooga in Tennessee, the first in North America; and Breda in the Netherlands.
I like that the movement’s next adopters weren’t the usual superstar cities. Instead of New York or Paris, we get Adelaide, Chattanooga, and Breda. That makes the idea feel more universal, less like a branding exercise and more like a toolkit.
To help other places get started, the team created a “Journey Book”: ten broad steps any city can take to become a National Park City, from building a loose coalition to assembling a portfolio of evidence. When a city feels ready, its case is reviewed not by a distant expert body, but by a peer group: people from existing National Park Cities, campaigners from other places, and advisors who visit in person, ask questions, and check that the coalition is real and broad—grassroots groups, city officials, businesses, cultural institutions.
“It only works if it all works,” Mark says. “You can’t just have volunteers without government, or government without community. You need a shared ambition.”
Right now, most of that interest is in the Global North: the UK, Europe, North America, and Australia. Mark is clear that this has to change.
“The idea of a ‘National Park City’ is, in many ways, a very Western concept,” he acknowledges. “If this is going to be a truly global movement, cities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific have to lead their own versions of the story.”
The colours shift with the climate: greener, healthier and wilder in London; greener, healthier and cooler in Adelaide; greener, healthier and browner in a desert city where success might mean shade and soil moisture rather than lush lawns. Indigenous knowledge and local cosmologies have to shape that work, rather than squeezing every place into a London-shaped mould.
The core remains the same: people and nature belong together in cities, not in opposition.
The movements in the movement
Lately, Mark and his colleagues have been asking a question that sounds simple but carries sharp edges: if your city is a National Park City, what new rights should people and nature have there?
One example is the right to grow. On public land that’s suitable for it, the default should be yes to growing food and plants, not no-unless-you-convince-us. Cities like Hull and some London boroughs are experimenting with this. It’s not about turning every street into a farm; it’s about permitting people to reconnect with soil, seasons, and where their food comes from.
Another is the right to access: a genuine right to move through and enjoy paths, riverbanks, and green spaces that, on paper, may already be public but in practice are fenced off, unwelcoming, or unsafe.
There’s a right to decide: building citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, and “legislative theatre” into how decisions about land, water, and climate are made. Because if the decision-making system doesn’t change, the outcomes won’t either.
And there’s the right to swim: a movement called Swimmable Cities argues that rivers, canals, and lakes should be clean enough to swim in. When you take that as a starting point, the next questions become practical: what needs to change in infrastructure, law, and behaviour to make that true?
Declaring these rights is not a magic trick. But it does reframe everything. Instead of asking, “Is this realistic?” you start asking, “If we believe this should be normal in a National Park City, what needs to shift to get us there?”
Underneath all of this sits a more intimate issue: our own fraying relationship with nature.
Raising wild kids in the middle of the city
We talk about recent research by Professor Miles Richardson, showing that human connection to nature has dropped sharply over the past two centuries. Not the amount of time we spend outside, but the depth of connection. Our sense of noticing, caring, and feeling part of nature rather than seeing it as a neutral backdrop.
Richardson points out that a baby born in 1800 and a baby born in 2025 are the same baby: same eyes, same brain, same innate wonder at ants and leaves and puddles. What’s changed is what we wrap that baby in.
“We see kids lose that connection in their early teens,” Mark says. “And a lot never really get it back, especially in cities.”
So what does active engagement look like in practice? It doesn’t have to mean hiking for hours. It might mean learning the names of the trees on your street. Noticing when the swifts arrive each spring. Joining a local group that’s planting bulbs on a scrappy verge. Asking why the butterflies you remember aren’t around anymore. Writing to your councillor about glyphosate on pavements. Letting your kids jump in puddles instead of dragging them around.
“It’s about creating the conditions for nature to thrive,” Mark says. “And recognising you have a meaningful role in that, right where you live.”
He came to this work without a formal background in ecology. He grew up on a housing estate in Scotland, where you didn’t have to go far to find fields and hills. As a child, he’d leave the house in the morning and come back by dinner, feral and happy. It’s a kind of roaming freedom that feels almost unimaginable for many children today.
Now he lives in central London, spends more time than he’d like in front of a laptop, and doesn’t have an allotment or garden of his own. What he does have is a daughter, recently dropped off at university, who grew up “on a Monopoly board” and still craves camping trips and long walks.
“We never really made a big thing of it,” he says. “We just spent time outside when we could. Slowing down, noticing. She gets a lot of joy from that. That gives me hope.”
As a mother raising a young child in a dense city, I ask him the question I know many listeners hold in their bodies: Is it actually possible to raise a deeply nature-connected child without a backyard, in an apartment, in a place like central London?
“It has to be,” he says simply. “That’s where most people live. It’s not about perfection. It’s about keeping that thread of connection from snapping, through what you do together and how you talk about the world.”
Looking ahead five to ten years, there’s an old internal goal that makes both of us smile: 25 National Park Cities by 2025.
“Dan (Raven-Ellison) will hate me saying this,” Mark jokes, “but I always thought, if we don’t make it, we’ll just change it to 30 by 2030.”
Right now, there are four recognised cities and a pipeline of others: Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast, Southampton, Rotterdam, and more. There’s growing interest in North America off the back of Chattanooga. Early conversations are starting in Asia, Africa, and South America.
The most interesting question isn’t how many cities get the badge. It’s what happens as more places start thinking this way. What happens when enough mayors, teachers, developers, parents, and kids begin asking, “If our city were a National Park City, what would be normal here?”
What does the Internet of Nature mean to you?
Near the end of our recording, I ask Mark the same closing question I ask every guest:
What does the Internet of Nature mean to you?
He pauses, then talks about network effects. The way one reconnection can lead to another. How a movement grows not in straight lines, but in branching, rhizome-like patterns: one Ranger inspiring another; one city making it easier for another to follow; one child’s joy in a local park nudging a parent to get involved; one map changing how thousands of people see the place they call home.
“The more we connect with nature, the more we bring others into that story,” he says. “That’s the network effect I’m interested in.”
Maybe that’s the quiet power of a National Park City: not a single grand project, but a million small rewrites of what a city is for.
A visitor centre tucked off a busy street. A green sofa on an allotment. A kid in a tower block who grows up knowing the fig tree outside their window has a story. A parent who realises they don’t have to move to the countryside to give their child a wild heart.
A city that stops treating nature as scenery and starts treating it as the main character.
Happy trails,
Nadina
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