Since the 1930s, Sir John Betjeman’s Shell Guides have mixed praise with plain speaking. The new Heritage volume, by former judge William Glossop, crowns Derbyshire the jewel of Britain’s countryside but delivers a damning verdict: quarrying stands guilty of scarring its historic landscape.
One of Britain’s oldest and most prestigious guidebooks has issued an unprecedented warning about the state of Derbyshire’s landscape.
The new Heritage Shell Guide to Derbyshire, part of the series founded by poet Sir John Betjeman in the 1930s and long considered the gold standard of English topographical writing, celebrates the county’s landmarks from Chatsworth, Hardwick and Haddon to Creswell Crags’ Ice Age art and Chesterfield’s famous crooked spire.
But it also issues an unusually stark warning about the scale of quarrying, which it condemns as a blight on its historic landscape.
It says vast areas of the county bear the scars of industrial extraction, with hills hollowed out, valleys flooded by abandoned pits, and vistas left irreparably altered.
The guide, out today, warns that quarrying has left “a scene of wholesale devastation”, and “an unremarked disgrace about which environmental campaigners have strangely been silent.”
Great Rocks Dale near Buxton, meanwhile, has been blasted into what it calls “an Armageddon”.
Glossop is a former barrister who spent more than forty years prosecuting and defending major cases at the Old Bailey before later serving as an immigration judge.
Beyond the courtroom he has pursued a lifelong fascination with the English landscape, walking and camping across Derbyshire and writing on its houses, churches and industrial heritage — a combination of forensic training and personal passion that underpins the authority of his new Guide.
Speaking yesterday, he told The London Economic: “Derbyshire remains one of the jewels of England, but it is a jewel that has been chipped and scratched, almost beyond repair.
“The inheritance we have been given is fragile and once it is lost, it is gone forever. No amount of rhetoric about economic necessity can disguise the reality that this county’s beauty has been eroded by decades of short-sighted decisions.
“If there is no change of course, we will pass on to our children a diminished county, one remembered as much for what was squandered as for what was preserved.
“Derbyshire deserves better, and its people deserve better.”
The Shell Guides have long combined celebration with frank opinion. First launched in 1934 with John Betjeman’s Cornwall, the series was sponsored by Shell and aimed at the new generation of motorists exploring Britain’s countryside.
Over the following decades, artists and writers including John Piper, Stephen Bone and Henry Thorold contributed volumes, each blending local history, architecture and anecdote with strong personal judgement. The series expanded after the Second World War to cover much of England and Wales, and by the 1960s had even spawned a mass-market run of “Shilling Guides” that introduced millions to the landscapes of Britain.
Today the Heritage Shell Guide Trust continues that tradition with new county volumes for England and Wales, keeping the blend of scholarship, artistry and strong individual voice that defined the originals.
The latest, Derbyshire offers a panoramic account of the county’s landscapes and architecture. In true Shell Guide tradition, it moves from gritstone tors and limestone dales to parish churches, stately homes, market towns and industrial heritage, distilling the character of the county into 380 illustrated pages.
Glossop builds his narrative chronologically, beginning with Mesolithic hunter-gatherers, Roman lead miners and Saxon builders, before turning to the medieval houses of Haddon and Wingfield. He then follows Derbyshire into its Elizabethan and Jacobean prime at Hardwick and Sudbury, through the Georgian and Regency achievements at Buxton, Kedleston and Calke Abbey, and on to its defining role in the Industrial Revolution, with the Derwent Valley mills now recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
“So, set out to enjoy a county with the finest selection of Elizabethan and Jacobean buildings in England,” it concludes, “a county with so much to offer, from big houses to small, from the moors to the mills, where glories endure but vigilance is always required.”
But it is also more uncompromising than its predecessors, taking a harder line on how commercial pressures and quarrying continue to shape and scar the county’s landscape.
It describes Derbyshire’s long history of limestone extraction as “harvesting stone”, but notes that unlike coal, its effects have “not been much repaired by land restoration.”
And it condemns Great Rocks Dale as “a scene of wholesale devastation”, with stone “carried off in huge quantities by rail,” and a three-mile trench leaving only a ragged skyline.
The guide also says Peak Dale and Great Rocks Dale, where ministers forced through a 167-acre quarry extension inside the National Park, bear “scarring from abandoned workings” and are left with “deep pits with threatening still, green ponds destined for ever to foul the land.”
While the Peak Park Authority has tried to restrict further limestone removal, much of Derbyshire lies outside its jurisdiction — enabling large companies to continue extraction with little oversight, Glossop said.
Elsewhere, the guide highlights the edge of Wirksworth at Middleton Road, where “a vast slice of the hill has been removed, leaving a memorial and a huge gap in the earth.”
Glossop said: “Derbyshire’s landscape is not an expendable resource but a trust. Once it is torn apart, it cannot be rebuilt.
“For too long, the county has been asked to carry the cost of decisions made in distant boardrooms and Whitehall offices, yet it is here that the scars remain. They will outlast us all unless there is the courage to change course. This book is a celebration, but it is also a warning: if we continue on the present path, Derbyshire will be remembered less for its beauty than for what was sacrificed in its name.”
The Heritage Shell Guide to Derbyshire by William Glossop will be published in paperback on 1 November 2025. The richly illustrated volume features more than 500 photographs and artworks — an unusually comprehensive visual record for a county guide — and is available from Waterstones priced at £25.