The Making of the English Landscape [antikvár]

Introduction The Making of the English Landscape is one of the greatest history books to have been written in the twentieth century. It expresses a new and distinctive way of looking at the world; and it does so in language of great charm and simplicity. When it was published in 1955, it captured the imagination of readers who would not normally have opened a work of history. In many cases, it changed their lives, by teaching them how to see and appreciate things they had never previously noticed. Now, fifty years later, it retains the freshness and fascination with which to enchant new generations of readers. W. G. Hoskins wrote at a time when the physical face of England was being dramatically reconstructed in the aftermath of the Second World War. The bombed centres of ancient cities were torn out, the slums cleared and towns rebuilt in a modernist idiom. Many of the country houses in which aristocrats had lived for centuries sank into decay or were turned into hotels and nursing homes. Hedgerows were bull-dozed to make room for the new mechanised farming; giant pylons were erected to carry electric power across the terrain; and new motorways, bearing an ever-mounting volume of traffic, were driven through the rural landscape. This relentless pressure to modernise and improve had long been vigorously opposed by those who cared about the visual beauty of the world which was being destroyed. The conservationist impulse went back to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877), the National Trust (1894) and the Council for the Preservation (later Protection) of Rural England (1926). It found its literary expression in the celebration of rural themes by Georgian poets from Edward Thomas to Edmund Blunden, and in the Shell Guides of the 1930s, edited by John Betjeman and John Piper, which depicted an England of small market-towns and village churches, rich in architectural invention and country craftsmanship. After the war of 1939-45, this interest in England's uniquely varied landscape was reflected in the work of scholars, no less than artists and poets. In 1951, Jacquetta Hawkes, archaeological adviser to the Festival of Britain, pubhshed A Land, a part-geological, part-archaeological.