PRESS RELEASE
Issued by: Bearley Wilmcote Action Group (BWAG) Contact: Janine Lee – | 07816 105204 Date: 23rd February 2026
International Shakespeare Scholar Warns of Irreversible Damage to the Countryside that Inspired the World’s Greatest Writer
An eminent American academic has added her voice to the growing opposition against plans to build up to 10,000 houses and associated industrial infrastructure between Stratford-upon-Avon and Wilmcote/Bearley.
Professor Katherine Scheil - author of Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway and Associate Dean at the University of Minnesota - has issued a powerful statement condemning the proposed BW development as a threat, not merely to local green fields, but to a landscape of global cultural significance.
After learning of the proposals from Wilmcote resident, Professor Ewan Fernie of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford upon Avon, Professor Scheil wrote a deeply moving letter in support of the Bearley Wilmcote Action Group (BWAG).
Her words are a sobering reminder that what is at stake is not just housing numbers - but the preservation of a landscape that continues to inspire people from around the world.
Professor Scheil leads annual study tours bringing American students to Stratford- upon-Avon. While they visit iconic landmarks in London, she explains that the most transformative experience for her students is not found in a city museum or theatre. It is found in the quiet walk from Stratford through Shottery and into the countryside around Wilmcote - countryside that remains largely unchanged from the world Shakespeare himself knew. There, she says, her students do not simply learn about Shakespeare - they find him.
They discover the rural landscape that shaped his imagination, the fields that surrounded his mother’s family home at Mary Arden’s Farm, and the environment that nurtured the poetry and plays that have influenced centuries of global culture. Her students return to America with a profound appreciation of what she describes as the ‘soul of England’ - a character rooted in the very countryside now threatened by large-scale development.
Professor Scheil reminds us that this landscape has long stirred visitors from across the world. As early as 1918, an American educator wrote that she came to Stratford ‘to find Shakespeare,’ but instead found ‘the soul of England.’ In the nineteenth century, visitors such as William Howitt and Harriet Beecher Stowe feared that modern progress might one day destroy this fragile inheritance. Thankfully, their fears did not materialise.
Today, however, that danger feels real.
Professor Scheil warns that constructing a modern settlement of this scale would permanently sever the living connection between landscape and literature. She likens the proposal to P.T. Barnum’s 1847 attempt to dismantle Shakespeare’s Birthplace and transport it to America as a commercial attraction - a scheme rejected at the time as cultural vandalism. She argues that today we face a similarly short-sighted threat, albeit in a different form.
Particularly concerning, she notes, is the potential impact on the rural setting of Mary Arden’s Farm in Wilmcote - a site of immense historical and symbolic importance. Increased traffic, urban sprawl, flood risk, paved pathways and industrial infrastructure would erode the integrity of the landscape that allows visitors to imagine the lives of the women who shaped Shakespeare’s early world.
Once lost, that authenticity cannot be recreated. Professor Scheil concludes with a stark truth: once this rural character is sacrificed, it is gone forever. Bearley Wilmcote Action Group believes this international intervention should give decision- makers time to reflect. When scholars from across the Atlantic recognise the global importance of this countryside, it raises a fundamental question: if the world understands its value, why are we prepared to erase it?
This is not opposition to housing in principle. It is opposition to an ill-conceived development of unprecedented scale in a location of extraordinary heritage sensitivity. There are alternatives. What there is not, however, is a second Shakespearean landscape waiting to replace the one we would lose.
BWAG urges local councillors and planning authorities to reflect carefully before endorsing proposals that would irreversibly damage the countryside that inspired the world’s greatest playwright.
The world is watching.
And future generations will judge the choices we make today.
You can read the full text of Professor Schiel's letter here:
