Keynote Address by Nick Crane at the Cross-Channel Geopark Festival 2025

Dover Castle, 7th November 2025

UNESCO Global Geoparks allow us to look at the world with fresh eyes. With
wonder.

Each global geopark is a site, or landscape, of international geological signifcance, managed for protection, education and sustainable development.

You would think that these principals – protection, education, sustainable development – should be guidelines for every square kilometre of the entire world. Planet Earth, after all, is entirely geological.

As things stand, there are only 229 global Geoparks. Each one is a jewel, a glittering rock crystal of wonder, a beacon of hope and ambition. They are spread across 50 or so countries.

Not one of them spans two countries linked by sea.

The UNESCO Cross-Channel Global Geopark will be a world first.

Underpinning this geopark is a beautiful gelogical logic: The radiant chalk that binds Kent Downs National Landscape with the Parc Natural des Caps et Marias d’Opale.

The Cross-Channel Geopark has immense value for education, for nature, for tourism, for business. For international understanding. And for recasting the English Channel, La Manche, as being central to a shared future.

Speaking as a geographer, a broadcaster and author of books about landscapes, I am incredibly excited by the vision and practical benefits that this aspiring geopark will bring to communities on both sides of the Channel.

UK National Landsscapes and French PNRs have so much in common. Both designations concentrate on countryside, on the conservation and protection of natural beauty, on heritage and on sustainable development.

Linking the two is one of busiest waterways in the world for marine traffic. But it’s far more than a stretch of salt water. This deep-water shipping lane is also an ancient fishing ground and a critical marine ecosystem. To cap it all, the facing shores of this Channel are a virtuoso display of coastal topography, from cute bays and smiling beaches to dazzling cliffs and tidal rivers.

This 34 km wide passage of water has always been a lens focussed on the future. Across these straits sailed the first farmers to bring agriculture mto Britain, the first horses, and wheels, the Roman legions who built roads and towns, the first Christians, the Anglo Saxons who helped define British culture, the first cars and first croissants.

Whenever I stand on the White Cliffs of Dover, looking across at the white cliffs of Cap Blanc Nez, I feel as if I’m astride the geological equivalent of a gigantic bunch of fibre optic cables, buzzing with ideas and information.