28 research outputs found
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Ladybird landscape; or, what to look for in the 'What to Look For' books
The interlocking relationships between agriculture, nature, science and modernity underwent fundamental, far-reaching change in mid-twentieth century Britain. This article examines Ladybird's iconic, best-selling but under-researched ‘What to Look For’ seasonal natural history series, focusing particularly on the illustrations by the distinguished wildlife artist Charles Tunnicliffe and their relationship to the text by the biologist L. Grant Watson. Beneath their apparent simplicity, the ‘What to Look For’ books attempt an ambitious, forwards-looking synthesis between mechanisation and tradition, nature and livelihood that calls into question historiographical critiques (by Newby, Miller and Bunce, for example) of contemporary representations of the rural as nostalgic and evasive. The ‘What to Look For’ books quietly subvert some of the more distorting tropes of English landscape representation. People are shown going about their everyday work (in contrast to the ‘landscape without figures’ tradition) and modern farm machinery such as tractors and seed drills are also acknowledged and even celebrated. Tunnicliffe and Grant Watson sought to harmonize these potentially discordant elements; their vision of the rural was an inclusive one that accommodated working women, children and even to some extent ethnic diversity. Yet in the second half of the twentieth century attempts to imagine a positive relationship between rurality and modernity such as Ladybird’s were increasingly undermined by escalating ecological crisis
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From field walking to phenomenology: a review of recent British landscape historiography
This review identifies three major traditions in British landscape historiography: material/environmental, cultural, and phenomenological. The continuing vitality, methodological rigour, and popular reach of the material tradition is emphasized, notwithstanding persistent questions about the adequacy of its theoretical foundations. Its close cousin historical ecology has meanwhile developed into a broader environmental history, increasingly sensitive to ideological and institutional influences. The development of the cultural tradition, originating in art historical analysis of the ‘landscape idea’ as a culturally specific ‘way of seeing’, is traced through a rich proliferation of studies connecting landscape with memory, national identity, and governance, and through feminist, postcolonial, and history-from-below perspectives. The pervasive influence of the spatial, mobilities, and material turns is highlighted but phenomenology’s focus on experience perhaps challenges the cultural tradition’s premises more fundamentally. Although historians were slower than anthropologists and archaeologists to adopt phenomenology, medievalists and early modernists have applied it rewardingly to topics such as the settings of elite buildings, peasant landscape perceptions, and collective landscape memories. Few modernists have yet embraced phenomenology but it has great potential here given the abundant life-writing sources available. While scope remains for further convergence between research traditions, British landscape history is therefore in an exciting phase of methodological renewal
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The survival of three large agricultural estates on the north Hampshire-south Berkshire border during the interwar period
Historians credit the interwar period with the demise of the great agricultural estates but many survived, reduced in area and refocussed on new priorities. Three estates lying in close proximity in north Hampshire and south Berkshire had very divergent interests, but there were similarities, and significant differences, in the manner in which they survived the interwar period. One invested in a programme of renewal of houses and farm buildings, and another adopted a more commercial approach to managing its diverse interests and the third retrenched, cutting investment but maintaining the status quo as an agricultural and shooting estate. All three survived, relatively intact and financially stable, and remain in operation today. An examination of estate financial performance before and after the Great War provides the context to the strategies pursued by the owners and their Land Agents, and their place in the broader rural landscape of the 1920s and 1930s
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The rural idyll: a critique
This book chapter argues that the concept of the 'rural idyll', although widespread in scholarly and popular discourse, obscures more than it reveals. Representations of the rural have, in virtually all times and places, been a complex mix of positive and negative elements. Furthermore, the way the rural has been represented, and what has been celebrated about it, has varied enormously across time and space. The 'rural idyll' concept obscures these distinctions, implying quite falsely that a particular positive conception of the countryside persisted over centuries, detached from and effectively independent of underlying changes in the economic, social, political and cultural context
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Far away and close to home: Children’s toponyms and imagined geographies, c. 1870 – c. 1950
This article draws attention to a neglected topic in historical geography: the names children give to places that matter to them. In doing so, it seeks to make a contribution to the rapidly developing field of children’s geography and to bring together two rarely connected research areas: geographical and psychological research into children’s play and literary research on cartography in children’s fiction. Although early studies of the spatiality of children’s play emphasized the need for research into children’s toponymy, there has as yet been little scholarly response. The present study focuses on a specific form of children’s toponymy current in early and mid twentieth-century England: transfigurative naming. This is where familiar places in the child’s home neighbourhood are given exotic names, sometimes in an ongoing, processual dialogue with fictional cartography (as in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series). Investigation of four life-writing case studies suggests that transfigurative naming drew on discursive sources that were contingent on time, space and class, but that there were nevertheless important commonalities in the circumstances in which it arose and the purposes it served. The most striking of these was that transfigurative naming was deployed by children and youths in stable affective and residential contexts seeking to explore and extend their ‘home range’. It is argued that this may reflect a developmental dialectic between security and growth. The article concludes by considering some of the methodological and conceptual challenges scholars will need to address to achieve a more comprehensive knowledge and understanding of children’s toponymns
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Static countryside, dynamic agriculture: the contradictions of modernity in rural England, 1950-2000
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