Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
What have been the most important changes to the English countryside in the last 100 years?
One of the main changes is the impact of the motor car. A hundred years ago if you lived in the middle of a city and you wanted to get out to the countryside, then you had to take a train, or cycle, or walk. The range of countryside you could look at was limited by cost or time. Now you can drive halfway across England, have a picnic, and drive back again all in a day. It also means that people can now commute to work. The countryside has become not only a place which produces food, but also a place where we go to live and enjoy ourselves. This is no bad thing: a lot of people say it’s terrible that there are all these newcomers, most of who commute out on a daily basis. But they may also have a positive impact on village society by bringing to it a wider range of concerns, interests and abilities.
Your first book describes the way these changes have physically affected the countryside. Tell me about your first book, The Making of the English Landscape.
The interesting thing about the book is that in effect it created an entirely new subject of landscape history. Hoskins and his colleague Maurice Beresford, as a result of walking in the English Midlands during the Second World War, realised that there was a whole story about the landscape that hadn’t really been told. He published the book in 1955. It examined the way in which the countryside had come to look as it does, starting from pre-historic times and going right up to the time of writing.
So the book has had a big impact on the way we think about the countryside?
Yes. Although subsequent scholars have disagreed with many of his arguments, his great contribution was to ask the original questions. The third edition is particularly interesting because it has an introduction and commentary by Christopher Taylor, who has been one of the leading later landscape historians. Taylor has inserted comments and criticisms at the points in the text where modern research differs from what Hoskins says, which means in effect you are getting two books for one.
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Paul Brassley is a Research Fellow at Exeter University and a former chair of the British Agricultural History Society. His academic interests are in rural history and economics, with current research projects involving the history of technical change in 20th-century agriculture and the history of rural Europe in the Second World War.
