Looking at the Rother Valley in West Sussex, the authors give a short history of a lowland English river catchment and prospects for its future management.

John Boardman is a geomorphologist educated at the Universities of Keele (BA and DSc) and London (BSc, PhD, PGCE). John retired from the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at the University of Oxford, in September 2008. He is now an Emeritus Professor at the ECI, and at the University of the Free State, South Africa. He has published over 190 papers mainly on land degradation and has edited several books including Soil Erosion in Europe (2006) and Southern African Landscapes and Environmental Change (2018). John continues to work on soil erosion in southern England and on land degradation in South Africa.