Catherine Brace

Human geographies of climate change: Landscape, temporality, and lay knowledges

In this paper we bring together work on landscape, temporality and lay knowledges to propose new ways of understanding climate change. A focus on the familiar landscapes of everyday life offers an opportunity to examine how climate change could be researched as a relational phenomenon, understood on a local level, with distinctive spatialities and temporalities. Climate change can be observed in relation to landscape but also felt, sensed, apprehended emotionally as part of the fabric of everyday life in which acceptance, denial, resignation and action co-exist as personal and social responses to the local manifestations of a global problem.

Finding England everywhere: regional identity and the construction of national identity, 1890-1940:

This paper examines the relationship between regional and national identity in England in the first half of the twentieth century. It explores the ways in which England was imaginatively constructed through regional identities and their uniqueness. It further argues that this amounted to a powerful myth of regionalism in England which informed a discourse of national unity, particularly in the interwar years. Taking the example of the Cotswolds - a limestone hill region in central southern England - the paper shows how a unique regional identity was constructed through a corpus of local writing which also invoked the Cotswolds as an ideal version of England. The paper also examines more wide-ranging examples found in topographical writing from the first half of the twentieth century which reveal how England’s regions were mobilized to represent something of the nation.

Gardenesque imagery in the representation of regional and national identity: the Cotswold garden of stone

Abstract Research which has highlighted the symbolic power of rural landscapes to picture English national identity has tended to homogenise those rural landscapes, eliding the role of regions in the construction of national identity. This paper argues that the construction of a unique regional identity for the Cotswolds was informed by and itself informed the construction of English national identity in the first half of the 20th century. This paper examines one aspect of this relationship; the use of gardenesque imagery to construct both the nation and the region, focusing particularly on the ‘garden of stone’ metaphor which recurs in non-fictional rural writing, guide books and poetry about the Cotswolds from around 1900, reaching a peak in the interwar years. This paper examines the religious and secular symbolism of the two components of the metaphor; the garden and the stone. The paper is predicated on the notion that gardens are repositories and generators of meaning and value. Using the language of slow growth, seasonal cycles and continuity along with the motifs of composition and creation, the garden of stone describes an organic community in a reciprocal relationship between people, soil and stone. The idea of organic communities is shown to resonate within representations of both the Cotswolds and English national identity and is also explored in some depth.

Envisioning England: the visual in countryside writing in the 1930s and 1940s

The dust-jacket art, photographs and end-paper maps used in books published by B.T. Batsford Ltd in the 1930s and 1940s are examined. Drawing on work on landscape representation, publishing history and the history of geographic thought, the ways in which the visual arts associated with countryside writing constitute forms of popular geographic knowledge are explored. It is suggested that more attention should be paid to the ways in which some apparently non-academic, creative and imaginative processes of envisioning landscape inform, and are themselves informed by, an academic discourse—in this case geography—which continually asserts a claim to speak authoritatively of, and for, landscape.

Publishing and publishers: towards an historical geography of countryside writing, c. 1930‐1950

The role of publishers as cultural agents is under-researched by those who have made use of the extensive canon of twentieth-century countryside writing. This paper calls for an historical geography of publishing, which treats publishers as a vital element in the production and circulation of knowledge.

A Pleasure Ground for the Noisy Herds? Incompatible Encounters with the Cotswolds and England, 1900-1950

This paper draws on and forms part of the growing body of literature which examines critically the relationships between landscape and Englishness in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular this paper develops our understanding of the moral geographies of outdoor recreation and the popular discovery of rural England. It also shows how national identity itself was seen to be threatened by first, the alteration of the English landscape to accommodate new kinds of visitors, and second, by the apparent inability of those visitors to enjoy the English countryside in an appropriate way. These issues are explored through the variety of ways in which the Cotswolds were being discovered and encountered in the first half of the twentieth century. This was occurring at a time when rural England more generally was being ‘discovered’, explored, constructed and re-created both physically and in print through non fictional rural writing, guide books and topographical works. Discovering the Cotswolds and England was a deeply contested activity fraught with tensions and paradoxes which were themselves informed by ideas of class and culture.

Book Review: Landscape and Englishness:

In recent years the relationships between landscape, culture, society and national identity in England in the interwar years have been of considerable interest to geographers, historians, and literary critics, amongst others. It has quickly become apparent that these relationships are far from simple and each new piece of writing reveals new complexity, contradictions and conumdrums. This is the case with this book. The broad theme – the intertwining of landscape and senses of Englishness – is a familiar one. But the highly textured account presented in Matless’s book demonstrates in considerable detail that what we think we know about landscape and national identity in the interwar years is far from a complete story (if such a thing can ever be achieved). Matless argues that ‘the power of landscape resides in it being simultaneously a site of economic, social, political and aesthetic value, with each aspect being of equal importance’ (p. 12). Organizing and making sense of this much material amounts to a massive task for any author attempting to put together a story of landscape and Englishness, but Matless makes an excellent job of it. The book is characterized by his ability to make all kinds of connections between events, people, places and ideas, and the main work of the book is to give us a much greater understanding of the detailed context within which attitudes towards and ideas about landscape developed in the interwar years and beyond. He also makes some attempt to show the connections between past and contemporary attitudes. The book covers the period from 1918 to the 1950s in four broadly chronological parts. The first chapter in each part deals with different versions of landscape and the second discusses their connection to questions of citizenship and the body. Part I looks at the emergence in the 1920s and 1930s of a movement for the planning and preservation of landscape. This is a familiar argument from Matless but presented in much more depth here. There is a nice passage on Baldwinite Conservatism which shows how Baldwin’s often-quoted speech on England ‘accommodated a quiet, ordinary, evasive little England, not the assertive English future envisioned in the preservationist movement’ (p. 30). There is also a sustained account of the meaning of suburbia and ribbon development. The material throughout is richly contextualized, a strength of the book overall. Part II provides a contrast to Part I by examining the work of organicists in creating a counter-current of Englishness and a different kind of physical engagement with the landscape. Here Matless succeeds in demonstrating ‘the interconnectedness of issues held apart elsewhere’ (p. 30). In Part II, the chapter on ‘English ecologies’ is complemented by one on ‘The Book reviews 477

Landscape and Englishness

Landscape has been central to definitions of Englishness for centuries. David Matless argues that landscape has been the site where English visions of the past, present and future have met in debates over questions of national identity, disputes over history and modernity, and ideals of citizenship and the body. Landscape and Englishness is extensively illustrated and draws on a wide range of material - topographical guides, health manuals, paintings, poetry, architectural polemic, photography, nature guides and novels. The author first examines the inter-war period, showing how a vision of Englishness and landscape as both modern and traditional, urban and rural, progressive and preservationist, took shape around debates over building in the countryside, the replanning of cities, and the cultures of leisure and citizenship. He concludes by tracing out the story of landscape and Englishness down to the present day, showing how the familiar terms of debate regarding landscape and heritage are a product of the immediate post-war era, and asking how current arguments over care for the environment or expressions of the nation resonate with earlier histories and geographies.