George Browne

George Browne is a writer, editor and podcaster with a particular interest in the people, places, arguments and stories that shape the British countryside. Despite being the grandson of two farmers, the son of a farmer, and the brother of a farmer, he somehow managed to avoid becoming one himself, though a brief stint in British Sugar’s agriculture department was a near miss. Nevertheless, farming and the countryside have proved tricky to escape; he’s found that thinking, talking and writing about rural affairs are pretty decent substitutes.

Much of George’s work examines the intersection between agriculture, wildlife conservation, culture and politics, or pokes fun at the weirdness of rural life. As Editor of Scribehound he writes and commissions work in these areas, as well as on folklore, fieldsports and rural ephemera. George also hosts the GunsOnPegs Podcast, a show dedicated to celebrating the peculiarities and peculiar people of the UK game shooting community.

His own writing tends to return to a handful of recurring themes: the danger of simple answers to complicated environmental questions; the importance of practical knowledge; the strange relationship between people and wildness; and the conviction that the countryside is most interesting when viewed not as a museum piece, but as a living, working and perpetually changing place.

George is especially interested in landscapes that bear the marks of long human occupation, and in the idea that the countryside is not something that exists independently of people, but something generations of people have helped to make. This has led to a probably unhealthy obsession with the ancient seabed beneath Hampshire: its chalk, flint, streams and downs, and the ways in which it has shaped human activity for thousands of years.

Away from his keyboard and microphone, George is happiest outside. He shoots (erratically), fishes for trout (badly), for salmon (optimistically), and cooks with smoke and flame (ambitiously). He’s a collector of half-mastered rural skills, a keeper of middle-class chickens and a budding restorer of grey partridges. A childhood spent reading The Famous Five and Swallows and Amazons, camping on the farm and exploring the west coast of Scotland gave him a taste for adventure and for wildly impractical, overly ambitious outdoor projects.

George Browne is a vehicle for improbable hats and a dubious moustache. He lives with his wife and their twins near Winchester.