'It's about changing attitudes': could the West Midlands become a national park?

"When I show people this, they think it's Mordor," says the landscape architecture professor Kathryn Moore with a smile.

- Jessica Murray

She is pointing at a map of the West Midlands. But instead of buildings, roads and a sprawling canal network, this map shows the natural hills and undulations that lie below the human-made architecture.

"The whole region is like a basin, and it's actually at the junction of two of the biggest river systems of the UK, but nobody ever thinks of it in that way," Moore says. "The way we conceive of the region is the way the maps present it and they only concentrate on the roads, the railways, the buildings."

Moore is the director of the West Midlands National Park Lab at Birmingham City University, a pioneering project that imagines a future in which the whole region, including Birmingham, Coventry and the Black Country, is a type of national park.