Brits want kids to experience nature. It’s an old story.

Are the young people you know more likely to identify a Dalek or a magpie? The National Trust asserts that Daleks come up trumps, complaining that “nature is being exterminated from children’s lives”.

Concerns about young people’s increasingly sedentary lifestyles and lack of exposure to nature have led to a number of popular outdoor endeavours including schemes to “rewild the child”. This may seem to be a particularly 21st-century issue, but the urge to counteract the influence of the city on the lives of young people has a long history.

Precisely 100 years ago, in the midst of World War I, a family of Quakers in Cambridge set up a youth organisation designed to offer outdoor coeducational experiences without the militarism and imperialism that they perceived in the Boy Scouts. They called the group the Order of Woodcraft Chivalry. This marked the start of a larger movement, spread across a range of organisations emerging during and after the war years.