David Gentleman's Britain [antikvár]

/ htf^Huotten/s^ There is no such thing as a British landscape. Though we might instinctively feel that a characteristic landscape was English, Welsh, Scottish or Irish, no British-looking scenery exists. Instead, these islands contain a remarkable concentration of distinctive local scenery, of hill and moorland, plain and valley, river and shore, all packed into a country so small that nowhere is really out of our reach. Overlaid on all this is a dense tracery of human alterations, some splendid, some ghastly, so that nowhere can one avoid the reminders of people and ideas. In town, this can get claustrophobic; in the country also, the things we see have been shaped by man's hand or, if not, have only been left as they are by positive human resolve. And even where we see least trace of humanity, in wild and romantic desolation, our own reaction to it has probably been conditioned by other people: it is impossible to see anything with an eye all one's own. Britain is warmest, lushest and most comfortable in the South, and gets barer, bonier, and wetter the farther away one goes. Southern clichés are warm, reassuring: the Weald of Kent, the Thames Valley, the dairyland of Dorset and Somerset. The Midlands are already more hard-pressed ; the North gets increasingly rockier, colder and less luxuriant; wildernesses begin north of Leeds and intensify steadily until, after a pause for Edinburgh and Glasgow, they take over. In the West, the effects of distance are reinforced by different traditions and history, so that in Ireland the coiuitryside seems to be only just emerging from a peasant economy. London, as it has become richer, has spread westward, so that if the process continues London and Bristol will gradually merge. But North and South seem to grow no closer ; rich and poor, sly and honest, cold and friendly, each resignedly accepts the other as its opposite. I grew up in a quiet country town twenty miles from London - well outside it in those days : half the train journey was through fields. The villages and farmhouses, lanes and viaducts of my childhood surroundings grew familiar to me from a passenger seat clamped to the crossbar of my father's bicycle. We had no car ; the roads were still empty. Later on, my own bicycle took me further afield : to Cambridge, to the Midlands and the Cotswolds, to the East coast and the fens and to the West of England. Some of the impressions formed then have stuck more clearly in my mind than later ones. Some of them remain accurate today ; but not all. Britain's appearance has changed more sharply over the last thirty years than ever before. New roads, new houses, new working processes and new expectations on everyone's part have transformed many things that until recently seemed permanent and unalterable.