Tracing developments in British town and country planning during the 1960s and 1970s, this article describes the sudden upsurge of landscape evaluation method-development among landscape architects and planners, and the disputes that made such efforts come to an end in the late 1970s. In this burst of activity, here referred to as the UK landscape evaluation movement, we can observe competing definitions of visual amenity and landscape quality take form. It is described how practitioners invented or adopted numerical measurement and preference methods as means to gain a supposedly unbiased understanding of how different landscape areas are valued by communities. Struggling to make themselves heard in a planning sector that was dominated by more powerful stakeholders and quantitative approaches (for example, cost-benefit analysis), in the landscape evaluation movement we can also witness how pioneering practitioners adopt advanced statistical techniques and computer mapping to communicate qualitative values of landscape more effectively to each other, communities and decision-makers. These were deliberate attempts by the practitioners to occupy a more active and influential role in landscape and country planning during the period. As this article shows, their success in this regard was limited due to the lack of general agreement with respect to the reliability, validity and generalisability of both assessment methods and produced findings.

Loudon’s 1825 Encyclopedia of Agriculture set out why and how ‘comfortable’ family cottages should be built for the farm labouring workforce. Over the next quarter-century, published ‘prize essays’ on cottage-design appeared alongside articles advocating ‘high farming’. Low labourer wages and insecure farm tenancies handicapped investment in both, though a parliamentary inquiry showed improvement projects could enhance labourer employment. The 1834 ‘new’ Poor Law – an ‘administrative’ law – restricted ‘poor relief’, but left many ‘settlement’ issues to continue as perceived obstacles to building cottages (the occupants might become a burden on the poor rates). This paper illustrates ideal contemporary cottage designs – relative to contrasting exposures of poor people’s home lives. Landowners, patchily, promoted some cottage-building, but labouring families mostly remained poorly housed. Along with recent scholarship on families’ work, income, possessions (often very few) and survival strategies, this work augments ideas of real housing conditions in rural areas.

In the 1850s goldrush, new communities emerged in Victoria with members from diverse origins of place, faith and ethnicity. Settlers usually migrated to pursue wealth; however, the social cohesion these young towns required often came from beyond logics of economy. As the goldrush waned from the 1860s, communal searches for children lost in the bush became a secular ‘rite’ that helped produce ‘moral communities’, which articulated shared values through common beliefs and social practices associated with lost children. Entire segments of communities would gather, suspend economic pursuits and search for lost children, often for days or weeks at a time. The euphoria of finding the child alive, or the solemn reverie when the child perished, forged communal goodwill through shared sentiment. The rite of the search became disseminated through newspapers, literature and word-of-mouth, while the ‘bush’ – a construction referring to various landscapes in Australia – enabled readers to participate in the searches remotely, as part of an imagining and feeling community in the colonies’ various climates. In the gradually secularising settler colonies of Australia in the late nineteenth century, lost children functioned as a fulcrum on which communities could pivot, while establishing social cohesion and communal belonging.

Horse trading was an important aspect of the Igbo economy and horse-related title taking was a unique feature among various Nigerian groups, especially in eastern Nigeria. The demand for the introduction of humane horse killers in eastern Nigeria was heightened by the economic drive of the colonial political economy, and was not necessarily a consideration for the harmful treatment of animals. Horse-related title taking was accompanied by the increasing rate of intergroup relations between northern Nigeria and various Nigerian groups such as Igala and the Igbo. Ordinarily, men and women sought horse-related titles as signs of prestige and honour. The culture and traditional humane living of the people saw Ogbuinya horse-related title taking as a way of achieving certain degree of social status, but it also regrettably promoted animal cruelty. Sources for writing this article were derived from archival documents, books, journals, and other written materials. A descriptive method of analysis has been adopted in writing this article.

Influenced by proposals (spanning back to the Kaiser Reich) to hinder the urban-rural divide, Hessian Social Democrats introduced the Hessenplan in 1951 to rebuild the war-torn cities, reconstruct state infrastructure, and integrate displaced persons. A key component of this plan was the establishment of rural community centres, which provided modern amenities and leisure activities, attempted to reduce the hardship of the rural lifestyle through the mechanisation of labour, as well as reinforced democratic principles – all in an attempt to hinder the rural exodus. Branded ‘Castles of Peace’, the rural community centres also represented an environment and a tool for political transformation through democratic re-education. They provided an opportunity to help balance the social, cultural, and economic inequalities between urban and rural communities, were used to prevent further individual anomie, and to instill within the rural populace the importance of becoming responsible citizens in the new democratic age.

As the Battle of the Atlantic threatened Britain’s importation of food and forestry supplies, authorities intensified plans to rapidly increase domestic production. In Scotland, this was a herculean task in rural communities decimated by land clearances, economic depression, and population decline. Against the odds, the mobilisation of a range of workers enabled Scottish agriculture and forestry to make impressive gains in production, and significantly impacted Scotland’s ability to meet wartime production targets. This article examines the contributions of four diverse groups of labourers that toiled in Scottish fields and forests: compelled labourers, including conscientious objectors and prisoners of war; adult and child volunteers; women; and foreign lumberjacks from Canada, Newfoundland, and British Honduras. This original research supplements our knowledge of the British rural workforce during the Second World War, and raises the issue of wartime migration and its effects on rural communities.

The inherent complexity of early medieval rural society is now widely recognised by scholars; this is in no small part thanks to the transformative effect that archaeology has had on our understanding of many aspects of peasant life. Yet it is only in the last twenty years that an archaeology of peasant society of early medieval Christian Iberia has emerged to challenge the supremacy of deeply entrenched historiographical motifs, explored in detail herein, which underplay peasant agency, confine peasants to familiar contextual paradigms (poverty, risk-aversion, resistance), and treat the peasantry as an undifferentiated mass of largely passive ‘recipients’ of History. This article focuses upon a case study – early medieval northern Iberia – to show that, far from an auxiliary discipline used to bolster or reject interpretations founded upon documentary analysis, archaeology now underpins our efforts to understand complex aspects of the society and economy of the early medieval countryside.