The idea of a South Downs National Park goes back to the 1920s, when public concern was mounting about increasing threats to the beautiful downland environment, particularly the impact of indiscriminate speculative housing development on the eastern Sussex Downs (Peacehaven was a notorious example of this). In 1929, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, led by campaigners including the geographer Vaughan Cornish, submitted a memorandum to the Prime Minister urging the case for national parks, including a national park on part of the South Downs. When however, towards the end of World War II, John Dower was asked to report on how a system of national parks in England and Wales might be established, his 1945 report, National Parks in England and Wales, did not identify the South Downs for national park status, but rather included it in a list of other amenity areas. Sir Arthur Hobhouse's 1947 Report of the National Parks Committee took a different view, and he included the South Downs in his list of twelve areas recommended for designation as a national park, defined by John Dower as an extensive area of beautiful and relatively wild country in which, for the nation's benefit...the characteristic landscape beauty is strictly preserved.