Finding Nature

Discussions of nature connection often begin with access: how much green space people have, how close they live to it, and whether they are urban or rural. Drawing on People and Nature Survey (PANS) data across England, this blog takes an informal look at how nature connection varies across cities, towns and counties. The patterns that emerge challenge simple urban–rural explanations and point instead to deeper social, cultural, and regional influences.

Nature Connection Across England (darker is more connected). Created with flourish.studio

The relationship between noticing and nature connection

The data looks at how strongly people feel part of nature and how often they notice and engage with everyday nature. The correlation between the two was weaker than might be expected, just 0.17 between nature connection and noticing across the local authorities with over 300 survey responses. While individual‑level studies show that actively noticing nature is an important pathway to stronger nature connection, the relatively weak correlation between noticing and nature connection at the local‑authority level suggests that place‑based differences reflect broader cultural, social, and historical factors, not just how often nature is noticed. We’ll return to that later.

Nature connection rankings

First-up, the sample sizes for each place could lead to around 8% error, so ranking differences in connection less than 5 need to be treated cautiously. Even allowing for this uncertainty, Liverpool and Leicester are likely below City of London and Tower Hamlets. And Cornwall is probably the most connected county surveyed.

City Living

At first glance, the City of London’s score looks anomalous, it has a low level of green space per person. It’s an unusual area though with around 9000 residents who are likely to be high earners and have second homes outside London. They’re nature identities likely formed elsewhere, so nature connection levels are less likely to be an effect of the urban environment itself. So, the City’s high score should not be read as evidence that dense commercial urban form promotes nature connection, but rather as an illustration that strong nature connection can persist even in highly urbanised contexts under certain social and experiential conditions

Tower Hamlets neighbours the City of London. It too has a low level of green space per person, but a lot more people at high density. So, there may be more green spaces than that suggests. It is threaded by canals, docks, and river-edges and more biodiverse green roofs than any other London borough!

Tower Hamlets is a “Tree City of the World” and promotes urban greening, estate-level and community-led planting. I’ve read that it has communities with strong traditions of allotment growing and outdoor social life. Nature could well be more embedded in living rather than framed as “recreation” or “escape”.

We know nature connection varies from nation to nation and Tower Hamlets has the largest Bangladeshi-born population in England and Wales. Perhaps, that community brings culturally embedded ways of relating to nature with them.

The interaction between cultural scripts of nature, migration history, urban form, and everyday practice will be complex. In some places (Tower Hamlets, Bradford, parts of Stockport), these align to support nature connection; in others (e.g. Leicester), they do not. Lived nature connection depends on whether the local environment affords expression of those practices. People may value nature highly but have fewer opportunities to enact that value daily. They may experience nature as distant, managed, or regulated.

Rural and Urban differences

The mean difference between urban and rural areas of 6.8% is far lower than the variation across cities (36%) or counties (20%), so the rural/urban divide is too simplistic. Especially as some city areas score so highly. Although urbanisation is a strong factor in nature connection across several studies it shows that there are other important regional factors.

High nature connection is not simply the outcome of noticing more nature in everyday life; it reflects deeper meanings, identities, and practices that are perhaps weakly tied to perceptual attention. There was a period where nature connectedness was often framed through mindfulness, but this data, plus the more structural research last year helps show how individual connection is context‑dependent, historically produced and socially transmitted within and across generations. This helps explain why dense, highly managed urban areas can score as highly as rural counties.

Which brings us to Buckinghamshire which provides a useful counter‑example to simple access‑based explanations of nature connection. Despite extensive countryside and relatively high affluence, average nature connection scores are low. This may reflect the county’s role as a commuter belt, where daily routines leave little space for everyday engagement with nature, and where landscapes are often experienced as destinations rather than lived environments. In this context, nature is nearby but not necessarily meaningful, reinforcing the idea that sustained nature connection depends less on proximity and more on how nature is woven into everyday life and identity.

Noticing Nature

For noticing nature, once again, the mean difference between urban and rural at 2.9% is far lower than the variation across cities (31%) or counties (29%). Given the weak relationship between noticing and connection at the place level there are other important factors that explain the differences. Places differ not just in how often people notice nature, but in whether those moments stick.

Noticing nature is a psychological mechanism that can be influenced by interventions to increase nature connection, but sustained nature connection depends on deeper structures. The persistence of nature connection at the level of places reflects deeper cultural and structural conditions, a pattern that mirrors my recent agent‑based modelling work on the emergence and decay of nature connection over time.

Cultural, social, and historical factors

Nature connectedness research has had a rapid growth over the last decade. As a field, it is maturing. The more reductionist, individual‑level focus was, and still is, necessary to establish a robust evidence base. My own more recent work has moved from viewing nature connectedness as an individual trait towards understanding it as an embedded phenomenon, explored through agent‑based modelling. In many ways, this marks a return to my ergonomics and human factors roots.

Those roots have always been present. One example is the reimagined ergonomics onion developed in 2017.

A nature connectedness informed, embedded model of ergonomics. Notes: Richardson et al., (2017); Adapted from Grey, Norris and Wilson (1987); Wilson and Corlett (2005).

Ergonomics, at its core, is concerned with the relationship between people and their environment, traditionally placing the person at the centre of the ‘onion’. The concentric rings represent interacting factors across solid boundaries, with the outside world treated as something external that we encounter. The adaptation above attempts to capture embeddedness by softening these boundaries and a larger shaded human form which reflects that experiences are not mediated across layers but are shared across factors.

From a nature connection perspective, the person does not reside at the centre. Instead, the self and the external natural world are integrated. The things we do, and the wider environment in which we do them, are part of our being. Being is not separate from the world; it is constituted through interaction with it.

Yet to understand nature connection, science often seeks to control and isolate factors, effectively reducing the number of layers in the onion. This is a necessary approach for understanding individual mechanisms, but it inevitably places complex realities to the side.

My recent research therefore focuses on simulating individuals and their dispositions within families, cultures, and environments shaped by urbanisation, education, and economic priorities. As with the regional patterns discussed above, nature connectedness becomes something that is experienced individually but shaped, scaffolded, and constrained culturally.

There is cultural inheritance, where some cultures transmit more holistic ontologies, moral standing for non‑humans, and seasonal, land‑based narratives, raising the population mean of nature connection.

There is everyday practice, where nature is part of food, work, worship, or daily movement rather than a recreational “escape”. In these contexts, nature connection becomes habitual rather than episodic.

There is environmental affordance, where those cultural scripts only persist if people can enact them and nature remains encounterable rather than abstract. Constraints such as urban design can suppress culturally inherited nature connection. Lower scores therefore do not imply weaker values, but weaker opportunities for expression.

The challenge now is to model these interactions and examine the levels of nature connection that emerge, and to test whether such simulations can reproduce the differences observed between local authorities. That is a study I hope to see published in the spring.

Conclusions

The data shows that nature connection doesn’t simply scale with rurality or green space. Instead, they point towards a more relational model where culture, stewardship, life history, and everyday engagement shape how people experience their place in nature, even in the most urban parts of England. Urban nature connection is compositional, not just spatial. Higher levels reflect who lives there and how they can relate to nature as afforded by what surrounds them. Culture sets the potential; place determines whether it can be realised. Understanding and modelling that interaction may be essential if we are to move beyond simple access‑based solutions and support enduring relationships between people and nature.

Nature Connections 2026 will take place on 16^th July in Derby, bringing together researchers and practitioners interested in nature connection to share and discuss the latest research, ideas, and applications. To keep costs down we’ve returned to a single day. You can submit an abstract or book your place here.

Over a decade on from the first Nature Connections, the event has grown into something special, and for 2026 we look forward to welcoming you to a new venue, next (i’m promised) to a kingfisher highway, but still in the city and within easy reach of the railway station.

As ever, the day is made by those that attend and we invite submissions for ten-minute talks or poster presentations.  Submissions should outline a study, project or practice that focuses on nature connection – people’s sense of relationship with the more-than-human world. We welcome submissions from any sector, including academics, creatives, practitioners, and other professionals.

Deadline: 5^th March 2026

Hope to see you in July!

An alternative seasonal tale

Each winter, as the low sun casts its pale light across the sodden landscape, a remarkable phenomenon occurs on the side of our house. The gate latch and picket fencing cast a shadow that transforms into Gatezilla—an 8-bit silhouette reminiscent of the legendary Godzilla.

Like its namesake, Gatezilla is a creature of nature’s rhythms. Its appearance is dictated by the Earth’s tilt, the orbit around the Sun, and the geometry of my garden gate. It is a fleeting spectacle, just a few minutes long—an alignment so special I liken it to an eclipse.

The wonder of this annual event inspired me to attempt to predict the exact times when Gatezilla will stride across the wall each winter’s day. I measured the exact orientation of the fence (216° from North) and the latch geometry: 1 meter high and 1.35 meters from the wall. Combining these figures with the latitude and longitude I was tempted to use the 8-bit technology of my 1984 Oric Atmos—still desperate for a purpose—to calculate Gatezilla’s full seasonal window from just a single day’s observations. But I just asked Grok.

It turns out that the shadowy creature first stirs for All Hallows’ Eve in late October (13:26–13:41 GMT), peaks through November (between 13:15–13:30), shifts earlier in December (early: 13:10–13:25), and finally succumbs to the inexorable march of the season around the Winter solstice. A secret in the sunlight decoded.

Opportunities to capture a photo of Gatezilla were running out. As the sun reaches its solstice low, the defining rays are scattered and obscured by twigs and holly leaves of taller trees. A situation that reminded me of James Reason’s Swiss Cheese Model of systems failure as I crouched camera ready in hand. The clouds on the breeze and ever-shifting holes between the twigs illustrated how momentary alignments create pathways to failure, or in my case success.

Now that the solstice has ended the spectacle I can spend the Winter thinking of next steps for 2026. A makeshift henge, perhaps? Constructed from an old garden trampoline frame to celebrate Gatezilla’s arrival next October by carefully aligning its uprights with the sun’s paths. Or an app, a local alert system, #GatezillaRises, notifying enthusiasts when conditions are optimal: low winter sun, clear skies, and the right hour of the day. Much like chasing the Northern Lights, I feel sure that witnessing Gatezilla will become a seasonal ritual, a celebration of geometry, astronomy, and the magic of nature.

Above all, Gatezilla reminds us to seek magic in the mundane, proof that even in the quiet geometry of winter shadows, nature finds ways to surprise.

Postscript

A tradition of the Dull Men’s Club Facebook group is for the photograph to include a banana for scale. So, there was another race against time. After many gloomy days, the sun appeared, but clouds hurried across the sky. Gatezilla’s fleeting glory versus my blunt scissors and a roll of gaffa tape. I hacked at the tape but had been woefully ill-prepared. The banana was placed in position alongside a watery shadow of Gatezilla which soon dissolved. The picture did not do Gatezilla justice.

The Swiss Cheese theory came to life the next day when I was sat at my desk and glimpsed the discarded banana climbing my leg. It had somehow become gaffa-taped to my calf while I was rummaging in the office. It gave me a real fright—and then a bout of laughter at the absurdity of the situation. A textbook example circumstances aligning to create unexpected events.

Dr Carly Butler & Professor Miles Richardson  

Earlier this year, we introduced the idea of ‘heritage connection’ – an individual’s subjective sense of relationship with people, nature and place over time. With the support of University of Derby’s Vice-Chancellor’s Partnership Award, we’ve teamed up with the National Trust to dig deeper, asking: what is heritage connection is, why does it matter, and how can we help more people experience it?

Over the past year, we have been scoping the literature, listening to heritage professionals, and pilot-testing the first heritage connection intervention. We’re now excited to share a summary of this work in our latest report, Heritage Connection: Scoping and Sounding the Field. The report brings together key insights from published research, discussions with heritage professionals, and the results of our first heritage connection intervention. It also sets out an ambitious research agenda for advancing knowledge and supporting practice and policy.

Previous research has identified a link between heritage and wellbeing – living near or visiting heritage sites or taking part in heritage activities have been found to boost mood and bring meaning and purpose to people’s lives. As well as supporting individual wellbeing, heritage can bring people together, offering community cohesion and a sense of place.

But the power of heritage to make us feel good doesn’t come from historic buildings or ancient artefacts or landscapes themselves. Simply being in or near something historic isn’t what boosts our sense of wellbeing. Much like nature connection, it’s people’s psychological experience of a place that matters – how we think and feel about heritage is more important than physical contact with it. This is where heritage connection comes in. It’s a way to understand and measure our subjective relationship with the places, people, and things of the past.

Through roundtables and workshops with heritage professionals, we explored what heritage connection looks and feels like. It’s about personal, meaningful and emotional engagement with heritage that helps people situate themselves in relation to time, place and other people. It offers a deep sense of belonging and a feeling of being a part of something bigger.

While work in this area is just beginning, we already know that heritage connectedness (as measured by a simple scale) can predict wellbeing and is associated with a sense of pride in place. Heritage connection offers exciting possibilities for understanding why heritage matters and how it can benefit both people and places.

We wanted to find out if some simple activities could help people feel more connected to heritage. So, we designed a heritage connection trail in the grounds and walled gardens of the National Trust’s Calke Abbey. Visitors were given an illustrated booklet with map and prompts at 15 ‘pause points’. Each prompt invited them to notice, imagine and reflect on the heritage around them, and encouraged sensory, emotional, imaginary, and personally meaningful engagement. Participants completed a survey before and after the trail. We found a significant boost to heritage connectedness, as well as enhanced nature connectedness and happiness.

A heritage connection trail

In a focus group discussion, participants shared how personal and cultural backgrounds, like ancestry, class, ethnicity, nationality, and individual interests shaped opportunities to find connection with the heritage on the site. Important points were made about the hidden or unacknowledged heritage in many historic sites – which stories get told, and which ones don’t?

We are excited for the possibilities of this work. Our research agenda sets out ambitious next steps, developing understanding, frameworks and tools to strengthen heritage connection, embed it in policy and practice, and tackle barriers to inclusive engagement.

Relational approaches are essential for wellbeing and sustainability. We know about the importance of relationships with nature and other people – this work highlights the temporal dimension of connectedness. Heritage connection helps us see ourselves in relation to past people, places and events, creating a sense of continuity between past, present and future. That sense of connectedness offers meaning and purpose – linking us to bigger stories that shape who we are today and who we might become.

If you want to dive deeper, check out the report and share your reflections by commenting on this blog. We’d love to hear from you. What places or stories make you feel part of a bigger story?

Nature connectedness is increasingly recognised globally as a strategy for transformative change. At the University of Derby’s Nature Connectedness Research Group, we’re exploring how professionals across sectors—from health and education to urban design and the arts—are helping people build deeper relationships with nature. Your insights can help shape policy and practice aligned with these global priorities.

Whether you’re designing green cities, creating nature-inspired art, improving wellbeing through outdoor experiences, or shaping policy for sustainable farming—your work is part of a growing ecosystem of change.

To take part click here by 30^th January 2026 – full details below.

Our research aims to understand and highlight work that connects people with the rest of nature: current practices, barriers and opportunities, collaborations, and visions for a more deeply nature-connected society. We want to learn what’s already happening—and what’s possible—when we reconnect with the rest of nature.

Help us map the nature connection ecosystem. Share this invitation with colleagues and networks—the more voices we hear, the stronger the movement for transformative change.

Who can take part?
If you’re working on initiatives that help people build a closer relationship with the natural world, we’d love to hear from you. Whether you’re in policy, practice, research, or community action – your insights matter.

We would like to hear from anybody whose professional work involves connecting people with the rest of Nature, particularly where the emphasis is on enhancing people’s relationship with nature (i.e. more than just spending more time in Nature). You may work in policy, professional practice, or in applied research and impact. We are interested in hearing from those working in any sector (education, health, policy, conservation, urban design, farming, the arts, academia, community support and more), and at any scale, from individual to international.

What will participation involve?
If you choose to take part, you will be asked to complete an online survey. The survey includes a mix of ‘tick box’ and open-ended questions and should take approximately 15–20 minutes to complete. If you choose to write a lot in the open-ended questions, it may take longer but we do not expect it would take longer than 30 minutes. You will be asked about your organisation’s purpose and scale, current activities and impact, barriers and opportunities, sectoral collaboration, personal and cultural Nature connection, vision and inspiration

To take part click here by 30^th January 2026.

We’d like as many responses as possible from far and wide, so please share this invitation widely with colleagues, networks, and partners. The more perspectives we gather, the better we can understand the full nature connection ecosystem and the amazing work happening across sectors.

Nature connectedness is not just a local challenge—it’s a global priority. By contributing your insights, you’ll help build a clearer picture of how we can reconnect people and nature for a healthier, fairer, and more sustainable world. Together, we can turn transformative change from a report into reality.