Chris Baines

Chris Baines is an English naturalist, one of the UK's leading independent environmentalists. He is a horticulturalist, landscape architect, naturalist, television presenter and author.

Baines grew up in Sheffield, West Riding of Yorkshire. He worked in the local parks department when he left school, and then studied horticulture and landscape architecture at university.

Career

After an early career in landscape contracting, including several years of greening desert landscapes in the Middle East and community landscaping on UK inner-city housing estates, Baines taught landscape architecture at post-graduate level until 1986, when he was awarded an honorary personal professorship at Birmingham Polytechnic in Birmingham.

In 1980, he was one of a group of local environmentalists who co-founded the Urban Wildlife Group (now the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country), the first of a series of such urban conservation organisations to appear in the UK that year. This was the beginning of a burgeoning urban wildlife movement with which he has always had a close association, and he remains Vice-President of the Wildlife Trust for Birmingham and the Black Country.