Alongside the National Health Service and National Coal Board, the Labour government of 1945-1951 created National Parks and a National Theatre. An Arts Council of Great Britain was founded, to subsidise the visual and performing arts and make them accessible to all (in 1994 separated into distinct bodies for England, Scotland, and Wales).In 1946 the BBC launched its "Third Programme" - now Radio 3 - to present classical music and cultural programming (alongside the talk-based and informative Home Service - now Radio 4 - and the Light Programme - now Radio 2 - that provided light music). Through the Third Programme the BBC commissioned new musical compositions, plays, poems and documentaries. Dylan Thomas, for instance, originally wrote Under Milk Wood for performance on the Third Programme. It was taken for granted by the government, the Arts Council and the BBC that wide access to "high culture" was desirable and desired, even though conservatives in the 1940s and radicals in the 1960s insisted that only a narrow elite could derive benefit from it.
New Towns were built with recreational zones of parkland (that pictured here the Fairlands Valley Park in Stevenage), new schools were expected to have not just a yard to play in but some sort of sports field, and council estates had playgrounds for children.
Lewis Silkin, Minister for Town and Country Planning in Attlee's government, went so far as to refer to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 (which created the National Parks and guaranteed recreational access to the countryside) as "the most exciting Act of the post-war Parliament."
The National Trust was a non-governmental organisation founded in 1895 to preserve vanishing aspects of British rural life (countryside, coastline, old buildings). From 1935 it ran a programme of "Country House Rescue", the country house (and the country house garden) being typically British cultural achievements, many no longer economically viable. In 1946 the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, set up the National Land Fund: as a memorial to the war dead, country estates would be bought up with funds from the sale of surplus military stores, and turned over to the National Trust (still an independent charity) to maintain public access. Unique ensembles of architecture, furniture and landscape that would otherwise have been broken up and sold piecemeal were kept whole and opened to the general public. This was sometimes described as "a form of land nationalisation acceptable to the owners".
Since 1908 local authorities have been obliged to set some land aside to be made available as "allotments" to people who wanted to grow their own fruit and vegetables. This obligation was reinforced and clarified by the Allotments Act 1950, passed at a time when rationing was winding down and building land was at a premium, making it harder for local councils to take back allotments and use the land for building.
Throughout the United Kingdom, an infrastructure was created, partly by central government and partly by local authorities, that was intended to make healthy and stimulating recreation available to all.
