[3] She was educated at Clarendon House Grammar School in Ramsgate, Kent and St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she read zoology, before studying town and country planning at Kingston-upon-Thames Polytechnic (now Kingston University).

[5] After Shoard's mother fell ill in the 1990s, she wrote a guidebook, A Survival Guide to Later Life, offering advice to older people and their carers.

Shoard's first book was an attempt to explain how farming was transforming the countryside by chronicling the loss of landscape features and wildlife diversity.

Shoard proposes a variety of planning control extensions, the designation of new national parks and measures to repair damaged landscapes.

A review in the Evening Standard described it as "unique, essential and considerate", while another in the Psychology of Older People called it "the best collection of sound advice that I have come across".

[12] In The Theft of the Countryside and articles in The Times,[13][14][15][16][17] Shoard argued lowland landscape required greater protection, in part through national parks.

[18][19] Shoard has also argued landscapes are harder to protect than buildings,[20] discussed the way in which children use the countryside,[21] and the impact of place on the work of poets such as Robert Frost[22] and Dylan Thomas.

Shoard puts forward proposals for a new land tax modelled on that advocated by the American radical Henry George, as well as a general right of access to the countryside which would overturn the present law of trespass.

In 2005, Shoard claimed, "Government at both national and local levels is one of the worst perpetrators of age discrimination", with particular reference to the reduction by two-thirds in the number of NHS beds for elderly people with long-term disabling conditions over the last quarter of the 20th century.

Shoard has argued against a change in legislation which would sanction assisted suicide, writing that: Institutionalising the killing of elderly people would diminish the sanctity of life in our society as a whole.

[35]Shoard’s mother spent short periods in three care homes in the late 1990s and the treatment of older and disabled people in these establishments has been an enduring interest of hers ever since.

[37][38] Shoard served for several years as a trustee of the voluntary group the Relatives and Residents Association, which seeks to help older and disabled people living in care homes and their families.

Shoard fought to prevent building on May Hill in Gloucestershire and the erection of a grid of polytunnels over an area of countryside frequented by the Dymock poets.