Automobile Association

• Transcending both nature writing and environmentalism, his novel continues to inspire and speak to new generations.
• It showcases Baker’s life, highlights how The Peregrine still resonates today, and considers how his nature writing influenced the Essex landscape.
• To hold them and look up at the sky – Baker’s Essex sky.

• Born in Chelmsford, Essex in 1926, Baker dreamed of being a writer, but his father deeply disapproved of the idea.
• He found love, got married, and worked in various jobs he disliked, eventually settling at the Automobile Association.
• The Peregrine recounts the story of a bird over ten winters, but Baker’s archive is the story of a very private man.

• Baker’s landmark book, The Peregrine, is part-love letter and part-eulogy to a bird of prey under threat from human actions.
• Between 1940-1946, the government’s Destruction of Peregrine Falcons Order resulted in a cull of hundreds of peregrines to protect carrier pigeons that they prey on.

Leaving a legacy

• The Peregrine has influenced other high-profile naturalists and conservationists including Sir David Attenborough, who narrated the audiobook, and author Robert Macfarlane.
• Baker’s legacy resonates deeply with inspiring filmmakers such as Shaunak Sen and Werner Herzog who said of The Peregrine: “It’s a most incredible book.

• Today, peregrines are once again back in Baker’s Essex sky.
• Alongside Hetty Saunder’s brilliant biography of Baker, My House of Sky (2017), the exhibition draws upon his archive and some little-known letters of his from the Richard Burton Archives at Swansea University that give an extraordinary glimpse into his life.

Sarah Demelo does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.