University Archives
Access to the countryside and the 'freedom to roam' movement
The papers of Howard Hill, a Sheffield-born electrician and trade unionist, include material relating to his part in the ‘freedom to roam’ movement. By the mid-1930s he was an active Communist, later becoming secretary of the Sheffield branch of the Party and a town councillor. He was a keen rambler from the early 1930s, when he joined the Pack Rambling Club, and was a participant in the mass trespasses organised on Kinder Scout and elsewhere in 1932, which he later described in his book Freedom to roam: the struggle for access to Britain's moors and mountains (1980). On his retirement in 1975 he became active in the Ramblers' Association.
There are 38 files and bundles of research papers and drafts of Freedom to roam, as well as original or photocopied material from the period, including photographs of rambling groups and mass trespasses, correspondence, membership cards, newsletters and programmes of rambling clubs based in Sheffield, the Peak District and the North East, especially the Spartacus Ramblers, and articles by and about the Sheffield rambler GHB Ward, founder of the Clarion Ramblers in 1900. [DHH]