Blending original social history, stunning nature writing and poignant family memoir, Outskirts is the first book to tell the story of Britain's green belts. It charts their genesis, which grew from romantic Victorian notions of the countryside and our past, but evolved into something more complex and divisive, and would become a key part of the landscape and psyche of post-war Britain. Outskirts is at once a witty and deeply affecting memoir and a fascinating exploration of a defining, but poorly understood, facet of our national story.