Lucy Veale

‘Instead of fetching flowers, the youths brought in flakes of snow’: exploring extreme weather history through English parish registers

Abstract Parish registers provide organized, dated and located population data and as such, are routinely among the most frequently consulted documents within the holdings of county record offices and archives. Throughout history, extreme weather has had significant impacts on the church, its congregation, and local landscape. It is for these reasons that extreme weather events have been deemed worthy of official note by authors of many registers. Although isolated entries have been used as supporting evidence for the occurrence of a number of historic extreme weather events, the information that parish registers contain relating to weather history has not been studied in its own right. Parish register narratives add new events to existing chronologies of extreme weather events and contribute to our understanding of their impacts at the local level. As public and well used documents they also function to keep the memory of particular events alive. The examples in this paper cover a wide range of weather types, places, and time periods, also enabling recording practice to be explored. Finally, as the number of digitized registers increases, we highlight the risks of weather narratives being obscured, and reflect on how the weather history contained within might be systematically captured.

Imagining coastal change: reflections on making a film

Geography has a long, if episodic, relationship with film and film-making. In this essay we reflect on the process of making the short film Imagining Change: Coastal Conversations during the first three months of 2012. We discuss some issues arising from the making of the film as a medium and method for showing, and showcasing different forms of arts and humanities practice – narrating, performing, picturing – in relation to environmental change.

Revealing Repton: bringing landscape to life at Sheringham Park

Abstract The year 2012 marked 200 years since Humphry Repton (1752–1818) produced his design for Sheringham Park in north Norfolk, bound as one of his Red Books. On paper, Repton is England’s best-known and most influential landscape gardener. On the ground, his work is much harder to identify, focused as it was on light touches that equated more to landscape makeover than the landscape making of his predecessor Lancelot “Capability” Brown. This paper documents and evaluates a project that celebrated this bicentenary through a temporary exhibition within the visitor centre of Sheringham Park, whilst also making reference to the commemoration of his work in other places and on paper. In attempting to reveal Repton at Sheringham, we explore the context of the 1812 commission and the longer landscape history of the site, as well as the different methods of representing Repton on site that are open to site managers.

Book review: Weathered: Cultures of Climate:

rience freedom – Tsing’s interlocutors describe mushrooms as ‘trophies of freedom’ rather than commodities, though they do transform into capitalist assets down the line (p. 62). Even in Japan, Tsing describes the flow of matsutake through the logic of the gift. Tsing uses these ‘pericapitalist’ forms – non-capitalist, but not outside of it – to build her ideas around ‘salvage capitalism’: the process of capitalist accumulation that takes advantage of the value produced without capitalist control. Tsing argues that salvage is integral to capitalism: ‘a feature of how capitalism works’ (p. 63). Mushrooms are particularly helpful as a metaphor here: the hidden mycorrhizal acrobatics that make the commodifiable fruit possible exemplify salvage. Tsing also uses matsutake as an inroad into the politics of knowledge. She critiques the demands for scalability in science, arguing that such a strategy both banishes diversity and precludes what Tsing calls the contamination of encounter, where individuals and histories develop through interaction with others. She contrasts the matsutake forest to plantations of sugar clones, which provided the ‘landscape model of scalability . . . [the] inspiration for later industrialization and modernization’ (p. 39). Matsutake mushrooms, on the other hand, resist the conditions of the plantation; ‘they cannot live without the transformative relations with other species’ (p. 39). Tsing insists on a methodological approach that captures the messiness of the matsutake forest, arguing for a method based on the same skills required of the mushroom picker: the art of noticing. This insistence has helped to produce an unconventional book. It consists of 24 short chapters that meander through the complexities of salvage capitalism in the same way that mushroom pickers traverse the forests, using all of their senses to notice – the bump of an underground mushroom cap, the white pine, the tracks of deer, the deep aroma of the matsutake. This is the method of the mushroom hunter, and the method of The Mushroom at the End of the World, wherein the art of noticing creates a body of empirical and theory-building work that draws our attention to the mycorrhizal encounters of salvage capitalism, and the collaborations required to salvage life within ruin. The Mushroom at the End of the World is not a simple book to read, and the intertwined stories throughout make a stand-alone chapter difficult to pull out. Nonetheless, the book unfolds, circling like the mushroom picker, meandering through the commodity chain, to allow us to see both the forest and the trees – a fascinating telling of the story of contemporary capitalism. Ruination marks the history of human interaction with nature. But, as Tsing demonstrates, ‘some kinds of disturbances have been followed by regrowth of a sort that nurtures many lives’ (p. 190). Tsing tells us that matsutake are an acquired taste, but this book is a delicious foray into and underneath forests that invites us to imagine the mycorrhizal networks of collaboration that create the possibility for life within capitalist ruin. This book is, as Tsing hopes, ‘like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain: an over-the-top bounty; a temptation to explore’ (p. viii).