I

The material approach has its roots in the antiquarian and archaeological tradition but this mainly concerned buildings and monuments. Important steps towards a more holistic understanding of landscape were taken in the interwar period by figures such as W. G. Clarke, one of the pioneers of field walking, and O. S. Crawford, among the first to recognize the potential of aerial photography for revealing past landscape features.Footnote ⁸ It was only after the Second World War, however, that geographers and historians made attempts to achieve a synthetic understanding of landscape change over extended periods. The key figure in the development of British historical geography in this period was H. C. Darby. His article ‘The changing English landscape’ (1951) challenged the assumption then prevalent among geographers that, in practice, the pattern of the landscape could be understood through physical geography alone, attending to landforms, soil types, and the geological and climatic forces that shape them. On the contrary, Darby insisted, landscape was profoundly shaped by human relationships too.Footnote ⁹

More than any other figure, however, it was Hoskins who established landscape history as a recognized academic subdiscipline in the UK, and whose work and influence has dominated the material approach to landscape history ever since. Hoskins was the first to attempt an evidenced, analytically rigorous historical synthesis at the scale of a whole country and the book that came of this, The making of the English landscape (1954) remains in print seventy years later, one of the few works of landscape scholarship to have achieved a genuinely popular readership.Footnote ¹⁰ Hoskins may have reached a still wider audience through his TV series Landscapes of England, blazing a trail subsequently followed by other gifted communicators like the archaeologist Mick Aston, leading light of the long-running Time Team show (1994–2014).Footnote ¹¹

Even landscape historians with less flamboyant personalities working in the material tradition typically felt a responsibility to engage a wider public, often through adult education classes and publishing books and articles aimed primarily at readers outside academia. This applied, for example, to Maurice Beresford and John Hurst, pioneers of research on deserted medieval villages, the prolific Muir, author of widely read handbooks such as The Shell guide to reading the landscape (1981), and Taylor, noted for his contribution to understanding nucleated settlements and medieval gardens, and celebrated by Susan Oosthuizen, herself a prominent contributor to the material tradition, as the pre-eminent landscape historian of his generation.Footnote ¹²

Taylor spent almost his entire career working for the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments. As this suggests, the ongoing influence of the material tradition is attributable to its close engagement not only with the public but also the heritage bureaucracy. A significant step here was the ratification of the European Landscape Convention (ELC) in 2004, and in the UK, the ensuing, albeit contested, adoption of Historic Landscape Characterization (HLC) as a methodology and policy tool. The ELC brought regulatory practice into closer conformity with research by recognizing that landscape ‘evolves through time as a result of being acted upon by natural forces and human beings’, rather than being static (at least over human timescales) and entirely natural, while HLC aimed to provide a means of operationalizing this perspective in the context of planning guidelines and decision-making, although it has been criticized for its doubtful conservation efficacy and specious show of objectivity.Footnote ¹³

Two years after the ratification of the ELC, English Heritage published its ‘England’s Landscape’ book series (2006), summing up half a century of research in the material tradition since The making of the English landscape. The eight regional volumes demonstrated the diversity and complexity of the processes that have formed English regional landscapes, and in many cases the fragility of the features that give them their distinctive character. Making full use of methods such as place-name, boundary, and soil analysis, they showed that far more evidence of the prehistoric landscape survived than was once recognized, and emphasized the previously neglected contribution of the period between the end of the Roman occupation and the Norman Conquest to the shaping of the medieval and modern landscape.

As well as benefiting from its association with the ‘heritage state’, the material tradition has drawn strength from a network of academic institutions that supported its work, among them the Medieval Settlement Research Group, the Society for Medieval Archaeology, the English Place-Name Society, the Society for Landscape Studies, and the University of Leicester’s Department of English Local History. Three journals have also been particularly significant, above all Landscape History, which remains centrally concerned with classic questions in the material tradition: continuity and change in settlement patterns, place names, land use, and field systems. Although mainly non-historical in its remit, Landscape Research has provided a valuable outlet for landscape historians in the material tradition too, especially for those working on modern themes, for example contemporary urban and military landscapes. It has also featured wide-ranging conceptual pieces, and articles on landscape management, heritage, and planning. A more recent addition to the field, Landscapes covers much the same ground as the other two journals but with a distinctive interdisciplinary focus.

Among the most frequent contributors to these journals has been the author of the West Midlands volume of ‘England’s Landscape’, Della Hooke. Her studies of charter boundaries and place names were critical in establishing a post-Hoskins orthodoxy emphasizing social and cultural continuity from the fifth century CE to the late Anglo-Saxon period, although she also highlighted changes within this overall pattern of continuity, for example with respect to woodland regeneration.Footnote ¹⁴ Hooke’s findings resonated with research by, for example, Oosthuizen, who argued that the place names and field boundaries of Anglo-Saxon fenland suggested the disruptive effect of migration in the post-Roman period was limited.Footnote ¹⁵ It has become clear that the two most striking changes in the landscape of early medieval England, the emergence of nucleated settlements and collectively managed open fields in the ‘central province’ (approximately corresponding to the Midlands and North-East), occurred much later than early researchers in the material tradition had assumed, and that monocausal explanations of these changes, such as Joan Thirsk’s hypothesis that they were driven by population pressure and an ensuing shortage of pasture, are difficult to sustain. Christopher Dyer, Richard Jones, and Mark Page’s Whittlewood Project, for example, demonstrated that nucleation in this part of the central province emerged from the interaction of numerous micro-decisions rather than a few simple macro-causes.Footnote ¹⁶

Despite the impressive body of scholarship the material tradition has generated, it has not been without its critics. Questions have been raised, for example, about its central metaphor of landscape as a ‘palimpsest’.Footnote ¹⁷ It perhaps implies a present-centric view of landscape, concerned only with what remains visible, or can be made visible, to contemporary observers, arguably reifying these material traces as significant in themselves, rather than recognizing them as carriers of symbolic meaning or as echoes of the lives of previous inhabitants. Some have pointed out that palimpsests consist of distinct layers, one on top of the other, and that this denies landscape’s continuity, and the way elements of past landscapes remain active in the present. That may be more questionable – few writers have evoked the ongoing presence of the past in contemporary landscapes more powerfully than Hoskins. Given the focus of the material tradition on fields, settlements, and vernacular architecture, landscape elements shaped by and reflecting the lives of peasants and the ‘middling sort’, criticisms of it for prioritizing the activities and perceptions of elite landowners also seem a little unfair. More pertinent is the observation that the material tradition, at least until recently, has had little to say about the ‘quotidian, everyday, cyclical and contingent’, especially the lives of the most economically and socially marginalized, who left few material traces behind them.Footnote ¹⁸

As the most prominent standard-bearer of the material tradition, Hoskins has unsurprisingly been subject to close scrutiny. The most compelling critique has come from David Matless, who argues that Hoskins presented a ‘melancholy’ backwards-looking view of English history, in which everything ‘done’ to the landscape in the twentieth century damaged it, and the only hope was to seek refuge from modernity in rural backwaters such as Rutland which might still be saved from the inflictions of big business and authoritarian bureaucracy. Matless argued that this anti-modernism was not the only way English landscape history could have been written. Planner-preservationists like Dudley Stamp, Patrick Abercrombie, and Thomas Sharp, for example, believed that a landscape aesthetics of order, tidiness, and appropriate design could harmonize new construction with the best elements inherited from the past. Had landscape historians in the post-war years responded more sympathetically to this perspective, Matless implied, a more open, optimistic, and forwards-looking understanding of the relationship between landscape and national identity might have developed.Footnote ¹⁹

Critiques such as this put some on the defensive. In 1998, Muir penned a philippic against the post-modernist and cultural turn influences he believed had come to dominate human geography. One-sided though this was, it gave expression to wider fears that the material tradition was in danger of becoming marginalized within the academy. Had the hostile tone of Muir’s response prevailed, there might have been some danger of this, but fortunately most landscape historians preferred to take their cue from his more constructive observation that the ‘two approaches [i.e. the material and cultural traditions] would benefit from greater cross-fertilization’.Footnote ²⁰ Over the intervening quarter of a century, the cross-fertilization Muir called for has become much more apparent, notably, for example, in Tom Williamson’s extraordinarily wide-ranging, often iconoclastic and always stimulating studies of regional landscape change, the origins of fields and field boundaries, ‘ancient’ woodland, parks and gardens, orchards, water meadows, rabbit warrens, and much besides.Footnote ²¹ As this indicates, despite persistent questions about the adequacy of its theoretical foundations the material approach remains vibrant and is no longer, if indeed it ever was, in any sense in crisis.Footnote ²² It continues to draw on a wide range of rigorous and well-established methodologies, among them excavation, field walking, aerial photography (and recently LiDAR), use of GIS, settlement plan analysis, toponymy, dendrochronology, and pollen analysis.Footnote ²³

Recent work in the material tradition has been characterized by the diverse range of sources it utilizes. Nigel Everett’s The woods of Ireland (2014) is a good example, assembling as it does material from political tracts, literary works, estate papers, topographical drawings and paintings, letters and correspondence, legislation, and military memoirs.Footnote ²⁴ This is particularly apparent in the University of Hertfordshire Press’s admirable ‘Exploring Local and Regional Landscapes’ series, which also underlines the extent to which the material approach is becoming more open to influences from other intellectual traditions within the humanities and social sciences, evident in the use studies such as Ronan O’Donnell’s Assembling enclosure and Sarah Holland’s Communities in contrast make of Actor Network Theory.Footnote ²⁵ While much research in the material tradition continues to focus on well-established themes, ongoing research and new methodologies and approaches have clarified many long-standing questions, resulting in a shift in emphasis from the origins of nucleated villages to a wider range of settlement types and regions, from deserted villages to settlement evolution, and towards a larger scale of analysis often encompassing multiple parishes.Footnote ²⁶

Space permits only a brief summary of the extensive overlap between landscape and environmental history. In origin, environmental history was strongly materialist, construing nature as separate from, albeit liable to damage by, human interference. This ‘realist’ historical ecology has been particularly pronounced in the UK. Oliver Rackham’s study of Cambridgeshire coppices (1967), the formation of the Historical Ecology Discussion Group in 1969, Max Hooper’s hedgerow dating methodology (1976), and Rackham’s magnum opus, The history of the countryside (1986) were among the early landmarks.Footnote ²⁷ Rackham was wary of ‘grand theories’ and as late as 2000 was prepared to assert that ‘[L]andscape is an objective reality that can be studied scientifically.’Footnote ²⁸

But this notion of ‘nature’ as existing unproblematically in its own right was challenged by a generation of environmental historians influenced by the cultural turn from the 1990s onwards, notably Donald Worster, whose Nature’s economy demonstrated that however neutral and objective they purported to be, ecological ideas were always deeply imbued with moral values.Footnote ²⁹ William Cronon brought a more socially contextualized approach to environmental history, emphasizing the crucial role that class, race, gender, and religion had played in mediating the relationship between people and environment, while Richard White foregrounded ideological influences.Footnote ³⁰ These perspectives remain influential, often now seen through a postcolonial prism, for example in the work of Richard Grove, John MacKenzie, and more recently Dale Tomich, underscoring how ecological transformation and transfers were integrated into global trade and empire, with an awareness of the way colonial and settler landscapes were shaped by highly asymmetrical, but never completely unilateral, power relations between indigenous communities, settlers, and the environment itself.Footnote ³¹

Scholars who continue to work in the historical ecology tradition have increasingly absorbed culturalist perspectives of this kind. A good example is Ian Rotherham’s Eco-history (2014) which drew attention to the ‘cultural severance’ that has grown up between ecosystems and the local land management systems that created and had once sustained them. This, Rotherham argues, left ecosystems such as woods, moors, marshes, and commons dependent on ‘outside’ management by conservation organizations and government subsidy and regulation.Footnote ³²

Rotherham’s interest in the tension between officially sanctioned, top-down conservation and customary traditions and practices was taken further in an illuminating paper by Carl Griffin and Iain Robertson. Drawing on Karl Jacoby’s concept of ‘moral ecology’, Griffin and Robertson examined how state-imposed conservation schemes in the Forest of Dean and Cotswolds delegitimized and ultimately crushed local environmental practices underpinned by customary ecological values. In the Dean, a discourse of resource depletion undergirded the state’s imposition of silviculture from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, enabling the forest to be reimagined as an ‘unpeopled space’. Decades of resistance followed.Footnote ³³ Similarly, on the limestone commons of Cranham and Sheepscombe, the customary practice of grass burning, abandoned in the mid-twentieth century due to the disapprobation of official conservationism, had in fact been informed by ‘deep engagement with, sensitivity towards and, indeed, affection for life on and with the common’. Echoing W. J. T. Mitchell’s insistence on the impossibility of separating nature and culture, Griffin and Robertson argue that through the discourses and regulatory practices of modernizing science-legitimated conservation, ‘nature was enrolled to perform acts of exclusion by class’.Footnote ³⁴

It was in the light of studies like these that Esa Ruuskanen and Kari Väyrynen concluded in 2017 that neither ‘simple environmental determinism’ nor ‘the absolute autonomy of social and cultural aspects’ any longer provided a viable intellectual grounding for environmental history. Instead, historians should recognize ‘a logic of parallel opportunities in the co-evolution of culture and nature’.Footnote ³⁵ Hence, whatever distinctions may once have existed between landscape and environmental history would appear to be rapidly eroding.

II

For materialists and historical ecologists, landscape exists ‘out there’, as a physical reality, even though it may be profoundly shaped by human action. While landscape historians working in the cultural tradition do not necessarily deny the objective existence of landscape, their work is marked by a decisive shift in attention from the description of landscape’s external features to elucidating the social meanings and significance with which it was freighted. Hence, the cultural approach has been centrally concerned with the representation of landscape, and it was no accident that art historians and critics played a key role in its emergence in the 1970s. Although he himself wrote scarcely any formal landscape history, the libertarian Marxist art critic John Berger’s insistence that landscape does not just exist but was a ‘way of seeing’, one that came into being through specific historical processes and that could not be divorced from the political and social assumptions implicit in it, was the starting point for much of what followed.Footnote ³⁶ As Malcolm Andrews later put it:

The central task for cultural historians and geographers of landscape was to trace the historical processes that made this possible and hence lay bare the ideological work done by the landscape way of seeing – what Daniels later termed the ‘duplicity’ of landscape.Footnote ³⁸

One of the first in-depth studies to adopt this approach was John Barrell’s The idea of landscape and the sense of place. Barrell traced the influence of the early modern ‘Roman’ landscape painters Nicholas Poussin, Gaspard Dughet, Salvator Rosa, and above all Claude Lorrain in forming the ‘idea of landscape’ amongst the eighteenth-century English rural elite. Barrell saw an analogy between the ‘commanding’ vantage point from which these Roman landscapes were typically painted and the determination of elite English landowners to subordinate land to their aesthetic, intellectual, and ideological control. The practical counterpart, in Barrell’s eyes, was the way in which the same landowners transformed the landscape physically through enclosing and fencing commons and open fields, constructing new roads, and straightening watercourses. Like the Claudian landscape, the material post-enclosure landscape was ordered relationally and hierarchically. Barrell contrasts this outsider’s way of seeing with the labouring poet John Clare’s experience of the landscape, which he argues was affective and participatory rather than cognitive and appraising (Clare had ‘a sense of place’; Claude an ‘idea of landscape’). But according to Barrell, Clare’s insider awareness is no longer available, because the locally bounded worlds that gave rise to it have been comprehensively interpenetrated by accelerating flows of global capital.Footnote ³⁹

In the early 1980s, Denis Cosgrove picked up on Barrell’s concept of landscape as an idea, Berger’s emphasis on the dominant traditions within Western art as a ‘way of seeing’, and the distinction between insider and outsider experiences of place to which both they and the US geographer Edward Relph had drawn attention. In an ambitious and influential synthesis, he correlated the emergence of the ‘landscape idea’ (the isolation from its other attributes of land’s aesthetic qualities, and the reification and celebration of these) with the development of early capitalist social relations in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century northern Italy. The crucial innovation, he argued, was the invention of linear perspective. This enabled a range of representational techniques that were fundamental to early capitalist appropriation, control, and management of land. The distanced, overwhelmingly visual way of seeing that Cosgrove took to be inherent in the ‘landscape idea’ established a distinction between subject and object that paralleled the relationship between Renaissance science and a nascent bourgeois social order. This way of seeing was then adopted by English landowners, who replicated it in their landscape gardens, and by artists such as Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt the other side of the Atlantic. Thus, in Cosgrove’s view, was ‘land’ converted into ‘landscape’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Barrell’s and Cosgrove’s analyses of the way the ‘landscape idea’ served English agrarian capitalism was developed further by Ann Bermingham, who perceived an inverse relationship between the tamed, orderly landscapes of enclosure and agricultural improvement and the purportedly wild, ‘natural’ landscapes the eighteenth-century English aristocracy increasingly adopted for their parks and gardens.Footnote ⁴¹

Others explored alternative ways of attempting to ‘read’ landscape, drawing on literary rather than art historical analytical techniques. James Duncan and Nancy Duncan construed landscape as a text, inscribed with meanings which it was the critic’s responsibility to interpret and deconstruct.Footnote ⁴² Robert Mayhew took this discursive approach further, chiding historians from a stringent Skinnerian position for imposing anachronistic interpretations on historical landscape representations rather than attending to the range of meanings available to contemporaries.Footnote ⁴³ More recently, the ‘landscape as text’ metaphor has been critiqued for focusing attention on the meanings attributed to landscapes by its ‘authors’, while underestimating the potentially much more complex and multifaceted responses of its ‘readers’, although recent work in this and the related semiotic tradition has sought to develop more open and flexible interpretations of landscape-as-text.Footnote ⁴⁴

Since its origins in the 1970s and 1980s, the cultural approach to landscape history has developed and ramified richly. One prominent theme has been landscape’s power as a carrier of social memory. Pierre Nora’s vast project Les Lieux de mémoire (1984–92) and Simon Schama’s Landscape and memory (1995) were especially important here. Nora was concerned that a professionalized, analytical, institutional ‘History’ was driving out a social, collective, unselfconscious ‘Memory’. By recording ‘sites of memory’, places imbued with still-surviving, and often intense, local historical associations, Nora hoped to preserve, even perhaps regenerate, something of this vanishing shared sense of the past.Footnote ⁴⁵ Schama’s aim was also in part restorative. Through a vast and varied exploration of European and North American landscape myths, he sought to rebut claims that Western civilization was foundationally hostile to nature, emphasizing, in accordance with the cultural turn’s social constructionism, that ‘[b]efore it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Another major line of development has been the articulation of a distinctively feminist landscape history. In the 1990s, feminist geographers such as Gillian Rose argued that landscape in the Western tradition was constructed by and for a ‘masculine gaze’. Rose construed this gaze in psychoanalytical terms as both distancing and desiring. Landscape and nature, she claimed, were coded female, and the masculine gaze sought to achieve a separate, objectifying control over this feminized landscape, while paradoxically also being drawn towards it. The only positions available to women (or non-heterosexual men) within these terms were to identify either sadistically with the active, dominating male gaze or masochistically with its passive object. Hence, the crucial move for feminist geographers was to disrupt the normativity of this gaze.Footnote ⁴⁷

One attempt to do so was Catherine Nash’s study of two feminist representations (or reclamations) of landscape, ‘Abroad’ and ‘Inis t’Oirr/Aran Dance’. Nash argued that they challenged patriarchal power relations through destabilizing the representational traditions in which they were rooted.Footnote ⁴⁸ More recently, feminist landscape studies have begun to look not only at the gendering of landscape representation but also at how women themselves have shaped landscape. Briony McDonagh’s Joan Thirsk Memorial Prize winning study of elite women landowners, for example, bridged the gap between the material and cultural approaches by demonstrating how these women, sometimes constrained by but often challenging gender expectations, played an active role in managing and transforming the commons, woods, fields, and villages on and around their estates, through promoting enclosure and other ‘improvements’.Footnote ⁴⁹

A further emphasis within the cultural approach since the 1980s has been a Foucauldian interest in the discursive regulation and governance of landscapes. The pre-eminent work in this tradition has been David Matless’s Landscape and Englishness (1998). This deployed the concept of ‘moral geographies’ in relation to citizenship, conduct, and bodily dispositions (defined by contrast with ‘othered’ anti-citizens). Matless focused on two competing mid-twentieth-century discourses of Englishness, which he designated ‘planner-preservationist’ and ‘organicist’. Planner-preservationists embraced aspects of modernity enthusiastically. Their antipathy was reserved for messy unregulated development, epitomized by the title of one of their key publications, England and the octopus (the octopus being ‘urban sprawl’). Their openness to orderly, appropriately sited, fit-for-purpose modern design enabled them ‘to achieve a position of cultural and political power during and after the Second World War’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Organicists, by contrast, looked to landowners and the soil rather than ‘experts’ and government to regenerate rural England. Initially, their association with fascism and hostility to the social democratic state limited their influence, but Matless argues that planner-preservationism’s top-down modus operandi fostered an anti-modern populist reaction from the 1950s, exemplified by the rise of ‘heritage’. This corroded planner-preservationism’s ascendancy, and by the 1990s the organicist vision had greater popular and political purchase.

Matless’s attention to moral geographies and discursive regulation inspired other scholars to explore related territory, notably Catherine Brace’s work on class and contested constructions of twentieth-century English regional identities.Footnote ⁵¹ More recently, K. M. Brown considered traces left in the Cairngorms National Park by walkers and mountain bikers, arguing that bike tyre tracks, unlike walkers’ footprints, are discursively constituted as ‘damage’. In this way, ‘a process of informal zoning is identified whereby walkers belong in mountains but mountain bikers do not’.Footnote ⁵² Similarly, Oliver Dunnett’s study of the moral geographies of light pollution identified a discourse opposing the ‘astronomical sublime’ to the ‘problem’ of urbanization, and connected this to previous protests against urban sprawl, while Kirsten Tatum, Nicole Porter, and Jonathan Hale examined competing discourses of aesthetic landscapes and the rural in relation to housing development in Dartmoor National Park.Footnote ⁵³

Prompted by postcolonial critiques, notably Edward Said’s essay ‘Jane Austen and empire’ (1993), cultural historians, like historical ecologists, have also become more aware of the intimate connection between British landscapes and exploited (paradigmatically colonial) landscapes elsewhere.Footnote ⁵⁴ As Ludger Gailing and Markus Leibenath pertinently observe, ‘the seemingly beautiful, more or less bucolic, and “unspoiled” landscapes in the global north often have their dark sides in other parts of the world in landscapes of resource extraction…and intensive agrarian production’.Footnote ⁵⁵ Among the most significant interventions here have been a suite of studies seeking to expose, interrogate, and publicize the imbrication of British country houses in histories of colonialism and slavery: English Heritage’s 2007 (Kaufmann) report on slavery connections to its historic sites, Madge Dresser and Andrew Hann’s ensuing collection Slavery and the British country house, Jonathan Finch’s research on estate landscapes, the National Trust’s report on the connections between its properties and colonialism and slavery, and Corinne Fowler’s associated study Green unpleasant land.Footnote ⁵⁶ Some of the most innovative work in this tradition has explored diaspora and migration landscapes, for example Divya Tolia-Kelly’s research on British South Asians, many of whom came to Britain as refugees from East Africa. Tolia-Kelly considers the role of the East African curios many keep in their homes, arguing that they provide a way of retaining access to landscape heritage.Footnote ⁵⁷ In subsequent work, she uses Avtar Brah’s concept of ‘re-memories’ (indirect memories derived from parents or friends that become incorporated into identity and selfhood) to explore the way material objects can mediate the landscape identities of postcolonial migration.Footnote ⁵⁸

Although the cultural approach has always attended closely to processes of ideological displacement and domination, it is only more recently that what could be described as a ‘landscape from below’ perspective has emerged. A pioneering study here was Harvey Taylor’s A claim on the countryside. Taylor showed that working- and lower-middle-class ramblers and cyclists had played a pivotal role in the campaign for access rights to the English countryside. They worked together with sympathetic politicians such as James Bryce, but their ruralism was generated from within their own ranks.Footnote ⁵⁹ As John Walton put it in a subsequent study, arguing that the origins of rural leisure walking lay in early industrial northern England, ‘we can identify a deeply rooted popular attachment to landscape and countryside…[which] might connect with…“high culture”…[but] had a prior and an independent existence’.Footnote ⁶⁰

One of the key influences on the ‘landscape from below’ approach was the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities, especially the work of Doreen Massey on the geographical unevenness of power relations (‘power geometry’). Massey argued that the uniqueness of any place was at least partly constituted by a specific mix of social relations always extending beyond the place itself, and in constant flux. Hence, the identities of place were ‘always unfixed, contested and multiple’.Footnote ⁶¹ Attempts to stabilize place meanings, for example by the imposition of boundaries, necessarily involved an ideological denial of socio-economic realities.Footnote ⁶²

Massey’s work posed a sharp challenge to the distinction between ‘insider’ experiences and ‘outsider’ constructions of landscape animating the work of Berger, Barrell, Relph, Cosgrove, and other landscape theorists of the 1970s and 1980s. It was also an important source of the ‘mobilities turn’ from the late 1990s – the increased awareness across a range of disciplines, including landscape history, of the significance of movement in forming, reforming, and dissolving social relations and identities. Jan Birksted’s attempt to construct a coherent disciplinary foundation, in his view previously lacking, for (designed) landscape and garden history based on movement through an environment as a distinctive aesthetic experience is an interesting example.Footnote ⁶³ Taking the mobilities turn in a quite different direction, Veronica della Dora looked at how landscape representations (which she terms ‘landscape-objects’) can themselves circulate. Whether as paintings, photographs, postcards, souvenir images, printed T-shirts, or any of the myriad other forms of landscape reproduction, they travel from place to place, carrying meanings that affect and are themselves affected by their shifting contexts.Footnote ⁶⁴ There are parallels here with the Dutch concept of landscape biographies, whereby landscape is understood as an object handed over repeatedly from one generation of users to the next, undergoing not only physical changes, but also changes in value and meaning.Footnote ⁶⁵

While the mobilities turn suggests that attempts to fix durable and hegemonic landscape meanings may be less viable than Barrell and Cosgrove, for example, believed, landscape historians continue to be interested in historical conceptualizations of landscape. Perhaps the most significant contribution in this area since Cosgrove’s Social formation has been Kenneth Olwig’s Landscape, nature, and the body politic (2002), which demonstrated that the word ‘landscape’ had deeper etymological roots than Cosgrove had recognized. In north-west Europe, cognate terms such as ‘landskab’ and ‘landschaft’ referred, in the middle ages, to local polities defined by shared laws, customs, and practices. ‘Landscape’ was therefore a social and political term before it became an aesthetic one. Cosgrove’s ‘landscape idea’ was an elite appropriation and narrowing of pre-existing usages. Yet, the older understanding of landscape as local practice was never completely vanquished, and Olwig argued that it remained available as a tradition through which a more just, inclusive, and grounded relationship between people and their environment could be reconstituted.Footnote ⁶⁶ Other scholars, most prominently John Stilgoe, have since extended Olwig’s approach, emphasizing the material foundations of early conceptions of landscape, although the geographer David Crouch has criticized ‘historicist claims to fix or narrow definitions of landscape’ of this kind, seeing them as a denial of the ‘radically contingent openness’ of landscape as a continual process of remaking.Footnote ⁶⁷

Rewarding research also continues at the interface between landscape and national identity, following the tradition established by the cultural historians Martin Wiener, Alun Howkins, and Patrick Wright and extended in a different direction by Matless.Footnote ⁶⁸ Paul Readman’s Storied ground stands out here. Readman convincingly challenges several long-established historiographical orthodoxies, such as the assumption that modern English national identity is fundamentally rural, that lush, conflict-free representations of ‘South Country’ landscapes became hegemonic in the late nineteenth century, and that such representations exerted a conservative cultural and political influence. His central contention is that through linking past and present, landscape became a key vector of continuity during the industrial revolution, even perhaps an enabling condition for sustainable modernization.Footnote ⁶⁹ This echoes recent work on preservationism that critiques earlier studies construing it as an obstacle to modernization.Footnote ⁷⁰

Studies such as Readman’s demonstrate that cultural histories of landscape can still make a compelling contribution to overarching historical questions such as the relationship between landscape, heritage, and modernity. However, even in carefully considered work like this, the cultural approach’s focus on the way landscape meaning is constructed and represented tends to direct attention to the agency of the powerful: as Tadhg O’Keeffe pointed out, readings such as Cosgrove’s effectively ‘reduced non-elites’ engagement with landscape to acts of compliance…or resistance’.Footnote ⁷¹ As Don Mitchell observed, this leaves a significant gap: ‘Much less well studied – perhaps because methodologically so much more difficult – is the way landscapes are received, understood and used by ordinary people.’Footnote ⁷² Filling this gap is among the prime aims of the third major tradition in landscape history research, the phenomenological approach.

III

The origins of phenomenology lie in Heidegger’s rejection of Descartes’ mind–body dualism. Heidegger argued that existence precedes essence: we are in the world before we can seek to understand it. Maurice Merleau-Ponty added to this an emphasis on embodiment, insisting that all perception and awareness arises from our bodily immersion in and movement through a world of which we are already part.Footnote ⁷³ These ideas had a profound influence on twentieth-century continental philosophy but it was not until the 1990s that they were applied systematically to landscape studies. The key figure here was the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who argued that phenomenology offered an escape route from the ‘sterile opposition’ between the ‘naturalistic view of the landscape as a neutral, external backdrop to human activities’ and the ‘culturalistic view that every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space’.Footnote ⁷⁴ He recommended that we adopt a Heideggerian ‘dwelling perspective’ to achieve this, understanding landscape as ‘the familiar domain of our dwelling’, a part of us just as we are part of it.Footnote ⁷⁵

Ingold has a vivid, even mystical, sense of the ongoing flow of life, with everything continually influencing everything else, and nothing set apart:

In another essay, Ingold contrasts this profoundly monist sense of the unity-within-diversity of life with the culturalist stance paradigmatically exemplified, in his view, by Schama. Where Schama maintains that it is ‘culture, convention and cognition’ that allow us to find beauty in what would otherwise be formless and meaningless sense impressions, Ingold, drawing on Merleau-Ponty and the environmental psychologist James Gibson, argues that we perceive the world with our whole bodies, as we move through it, rather than just with our minds. No prior cultural or conceptual frame is required: on the contrary, each organism, human or animal, perceives a real world through its perceptual apparatus and situated materiality.Footnote ⁷⁷

Ingold’s advocacy of a phenomenologically inspired dwelling perspective has been highly influential among geographers, anthropologists, and rural sociologists. Initially, however, it was prehistoric archaeologists who embraced it most eagerly, most productively perhaps Christopher Tilley, who sought to recreate, or even relive, the experiences of the builders and users of the great neolithic monuments of southern England by moving along the same paths they would have done.Footnote ⁷⁸ For Tilley, a landscape was ‘a set of relational places linked by paths, movements and narratives’; a phenomenological retracing of these paths and movements could disclose the narratives and meanings they inscribed.Footnote ⁷⁹

Another prehistoric archaeologist (and anthropologist) who played a key role in applying phenomenological perspectives to landscape was Barbara Bender. Building on Ingold and Tilley, she maintained that the paths and routes people follow as they go about their everyday lives differ according to finely graded distinctions of class and gender.Footnote ⁸⁰ Furthermore, as people move, they affect the landscapes of those being moved through, and of those left behind.Footnote ⁸¹ Even people who live in the same place for generations are constantly aware of other places, whether real or encountered through stories and imagination. Hence, as Massey had argued, people’s sense of place is always ‘contingent upon a larger temporal and spatial field of relationships’.Footnote ⁸² In this way, Bender added a political perspective to landscape phenomenology, one that it has sometimes been criticized for eschewing.Footnote ⁸³

The imprint of Bender’s determination to mobilize and politicize phenomenology is apparent in much subsequent work. A special issue of Landscape Research edited by Jo Vergunst and Arnar Árnason in 2012, for example, aimed to ‘address political aspects of landscape, such as access, administrative designations and land use conflict, in terms of the experiential landscape, such as perception of time, wayfinding and identity’, while the following year Wylie argued that phenomenological attention to individual lives could bring questions about the cultural, historical, and political significance of landscapes into sharper focus.Footnote ⁸⁴ In other work, Wylie extended phenomenology in the opposite direction, through close analyses of the fleeting experiences of being in and passing through landscapes.Footnote ⁸⁵

Although phenomenology has transformed landscape studies, its influence on historians has hitherto largely been restricted to the pioneering work of a few early modernists and medievalists.Footnote ⁸⁶ This is regrettable since, as Finch observed in 2018, phenomenology ‘appears to offer enormous potential for historic landscape studies’. In his view, the material, documentary, and oral sources available to landscape historians lent themselves particularly well to answering phenomenological questions, which could lead to a better understanding of the role of landscape in everyday lives.Footnote ⁸⁷ Here, he was echoing comments made by Whyte in 2007 about the failure of scholars outside archaeology and anthropology to take on board a phenomenological awareness of landscape as ‘an essential component in the everyday structures of local life’. Conversely, in her view, in most writing on rural social history landscape featured only as a backdrop to social interactions and the construction of identities.Footnote ⁸⁸ She returned to the fray in a 2015 review article, arguing that ‘phenomenological scholarship…has immense potential for opening up current research and debate’ in landscape history.Footnote ⁸⁹

Whyte’s own work, while rooted in the historiography of early modern rural England, has become increasingly imbued with phenomenological perspectives. Her studies of oral witness testimonies, for example, highlight the role of everyday knowledge of the landscape as a vector of social relationships and identities.Footnote ⁹⁰ Ingold’s sensitivity to the temporality of landscape is apparent in much of her research over the last decade, looking at the enduring but continuously reworked significance of trees, springs, wells, wayside crosses, barrows, and gallows in social memory.Footnote ⁹¹ Inherited features such as these, she maintains, had an active social function in the present, rather than, as might be the case today, being segregated off as ‘heritage’.Footnote ⁹² In her most recent work, Whyte brings together a phenomenological awareness that landscape is apprehended temporally and through movement with a close biographical reading of the travel journals of Celia Fiennes.Footnote ⁹³

Bender and Whyte both argue that phenomenology can challenge elitist landscape narratives. For Bender, phenomenology democratizes landscape experience by prompting us to recognize that we all necessarily perceive the environment around us the whole time: Cosgrove’s ‘landscape idea’ was just one among a plethora of ways of perceiving landscape, available to a narrow elite over a particular temporal and spatial range. Whyte suggests that recognizing the significance of apparently quotidian landscape elements in everyday life allows us to ‘reclaim common landscapes as heritage’ and ‘remember the agency of people in marking, claiming and making landscapes’.Footnote ⁹⁴

This was a view echoed by Stephen Mileson, who argued that rather than by studying ‘particular features’ – an implicit acknowledgement of the imaginative use historians such as Oliver Creighton have made of phenomenology in reconstructing the environs of medieval castles – ‘the greatest advances (in understanding how past inhabitants perceived their environment) will…be made by studying the landscape as a whole’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Mileson and his co-author Stuart Brookes duly delivered on this in their remarkably ambitious Peasant perceptions of landscape, a study of Ewelme hundred in Oxfordshire over more than a millennium. Through careful consideration of personal and place names, settlement morphology, terrain, vegetation, agricultural practice, and patterns of social and spatial interaction, the authors demonstrate it is possible to recover far more about even ‘ordinary’ inhabitants’ perceptions of landscape from this early period than we might suppose. Group and individual rights to particular parcels of land seem to have been most important, expressed in relation to often long-lasting social features in the landscape such as churches, springs, wells, and roads. A key change during the study period was the emergence of the village and the parish as units of belonging, in addition to the household. But there were also more regionally distinctive contrasts, notably between the more abundant collective resources in the vale villages, which the authors argue promoted a stronger sense of shared belonging, and the lack of such resources (and hence perhaps reduced identification with the landscape) on the Chiltern Hills above.Footnote ⁹⁶

Some of these themes are echoed in Susan Kilby’s research on peasant perceptions of landscape and environment in eastern England between 1066 and 1348. Kilby’s concerns are with how peasants viewed, moved through, trespassed over, and contested land and landscapes. She uses minor place names (of fields, for example) and topographical family names to good effect, arguing that unfree tenants were more likely to carry the latter, although it is difficult to be sure how this affected their sense of place. By linking architectural, archaeological, documentary, and minor place name evidence, she is also able to gain some purchase on peasant perceptions of wildlife and nature in and around medieval villages such as Castor in Northamptonshire.Footnote ⁹⁷

In contrast to the rich use that medievalists and early modernists have begun to make of it, modernists have until recently almost entirely ignored phenomenology.Footnote ⁹⁸ This is ironic and perplexing, since medievalists and early modernists face much greater challenges in applying phenomenological perspectives due to the scant survival of pre-modern personal records, leading them into creative reconstructions that ‘go beyond the evidence’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Conversely, as Finch notes, the rich data available to modernists should allow them to avoid these pitfalls.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Part of the explanation is undoubtedly the closer ties medievalists and early modernists have with archaeology where, as we have seen, phenomenology has been a powerful influence. The evidential challenges confronting medievalists and early modernists may also have forced them to be more innovative methodologically, while modernists continue to revere the documentary footnote as the warrant of their professional authority.Footnote ¹⁰¹ But possibly the greatest barrier has been the enduring hegemony of social constructionism among modernists. Phenomenology can work alongside moderate social constructionism, where, for example, representations are recognized as intertwined with the ongoing flow of lived experience, but is difficult to reconcile with a ‘hard’ social constructionism for which experience is wholly produced by discourse.Footnote ¹⁰²

Although few modernists have yet explicitly embraced phenomenology, there are encouraging signs of increasing interest in landscape experience. This may in part reflect what has been heralded as a ‘biographical turn’ in History, Historical Geography, and allied studies, driven by a greater awareness of the complexity of individual motivation, a concern to avoid imposing preconceived ‘grand narratives’ on this and a recognition that life trajectories can only be traced through longitudinal study.Footnote ¹⁰³ Landscape historians have drawn on biographical evidence in a variety of ways, perhaps most effectively, where sources permit, using life histories methodologies, an approach advocated by researchers from across the spectrum of landscape studies.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The rewards it can offer historians are apparent in three very different recent monographs.

Kerri Andrews’s Wanderers explores the walking lives of ten women writers with sensitive care, concluding that they found walking essential to their creative processes and their sense of self. Walking for them was, variously, a means of communing with the dead, of defying convention, of self-discovery, of relief from pain and connecting with a larger world. Although they experienced restrictions on their ability to walk, this did not stop women from walking. But, Andrews maintains, women move differently, see differently, and write differently about their experiences than men. Their omission from the literature on walking denies us part of our history.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Matthew Kelly’s The women who saved the English countryside is also a collective biography, in this case of four female preservationists (Octavia Hill, Beatrix Potter, Pauline Dower, and Sylvia Sayer). Kelly argues that their often behind-the-scenes role in ‘saving the countryside’ has been insufficiently appreciated. Perhaps the most innovative section of the book is a virtual walk along the Greensand Way in Kent, reprising a real walk the author took linking properties associated with Octavia Hill. Kelly succeeds in rendering the experience of his walk vividly, in a manner reminiscent of Wylie’s walk along the South West Coast Path. He describes his emotional responses and the extent to which his walking experiences corresponded to the pro-access and open-air goals that inspired Hill. At times, for example, he felt squeezed between high hedges screening wealthy private property on one side and a fence on the other. In the way Kelly intertwines biographical information with accounts of landscape preservation, legislation, management, and change, and uses his own personal landscape encounters as source material, The women who saved the English countryside exemplifies the methodological innovation and creativity characteristic of biographical and phenomenological landscape scholarship.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The third book, my own Lifescapes, seeks to achieve an in-depth understanding of landscape experience in modern Britain through close study of eight middle- and working-class diaries. It questions the assumption that private experiences of landscape marched hand in hand with its public representation, suggesting that character structures formed in childhood and youth were usually more decisive than discursive influences. Four major patterns of engagement are identified: ‘Adherers’ valued landscape for its continuity; ‘Withdrawers’ as a refuge from perceived threats; ‘Restorers’ as a means of sustaining core value systems; and ‘Explorers’ for self-discovery and development. In each case, family structures and relationships and the psychological dynamics they generated were crucial, although over a shorter timescale a wide range of socio-economic circumstances played a part too. Seen in this holistic, lifetime perspective, landscape can be understood as a mirror reflecting the psychological, situational, and cultural influences pervading our lives, as we variously absorb, resist, and accommodate ourselves to them.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

IV

Landscape history in Britain is in a flourishing condition, with a wider range of approaches than ever in evidence and new methodologies currently emerging. The material tradition continues to yield rigorous, technically proficient studies, typically based on a site or group of sites, while retaining its capacity to appeal to a non-specialist readership. There have also been impressive studies in recent years of core themes in the cultural history of landscape such as its discursive regulation, its multifaceted relationship to national identity and its gendering, both in relation to the ‘male gaze’ and women as agents of landscape change themselves. A mutually enriching convergence between landscape and ecological history is taking place, fostering rewarding new perspectives like the ‘moral ecology’ paradigm, and a recognition that ‘conservation’ is itself a contested and historically contingent category. There is a growing awareness of how inextricably entangled British landscapes are with histories of colonialism and imperialism, reflecting a wider realization, partly inspired by Doreen Massey’s work, that landscapes are, to a much greater extent than was once recognized, constituted by intersecting global flows, with differential effects on class, gender, and ethnicity.

Landscape studies over the last thirty years have also been profoundly shaped by phenomenological perspectives. Ingold’s emphasis on the temporality of landscape has been absorbed by historians like Whyte and Readman, both of whom foreground the prominent role the past plays in how landscape is experienced in the present. Phenomenology has also transformed castle studies and, with the publication of Mileson and Brookes’s remarkable study, peasant perceptions of landscape. There are encouraging signs that modernists are now beginning to dip their toes in phenomenological waters too, in the context of a developing interest in landscape experience, typically using a biographical and sometimes life histories approach. What has been published in this area so far, however, is just the tip of an iceberg: in comparison to our extensive knowledge of landscape representations, informed by half a century of research, we know next to nothing about how landscape was experienced by individuals and groups historically, or about how this varied spatially, temporally, or across other domains. In-depth biographical research on landscape experience is time-consuming and can be difficult to generalize but should be a high priority because it holds the key to understanding how landscape affected people in the past and why it did so in such different ways.

The three major traditions of landscape history research have influenced each other substantially over the last half-century and are now much less distinct than they were. However, there is still scope for further convergence, especially between the cultural and phenomenological traditions. Most representational studies are implicitly predicated on the assumption that the symbolic meanings encoded in designed landscapes and landscape representations successfully projected hegemonic ideologies. But such studies are almost invariably silent about how these landscapes and landscape representations were actually received. Hence, we have little idea how effective they were. To Cosgrove, for example, the great lawn at Rousham, sweeping down to the River Cherwell, served to naturalize aristocratic authority and property ownership. But to generations of children it is more likely to have signified an irresistible opportunity to play roly-poly. Unless we know how much was lost, and what was added, in translation between designer and visitor (or viewer), it is impossible to gauge the cultural ‘throw’ of designed and represented landscapes. Studies of visitor responses to designed landscapes, and viewer responses to landscape representations, would therefore be of great value. There are many other opportunities for convergence between, and ongoing development within, the historiographical traditions surveyed in this review: at the time of writing, British landscape history appears to have a bright future.