The Making of the English Landscape

Hoskins, W. G., The Making of the English Landscape, (London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1955:  new edition, Penguin Books, 1985)

Occasionally the fruits of great scholarship escape academia to influence more generally how we see ourselves and the world around us. Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy (1957), or Schumacher's Small is Beautiful (1973) spring to mind as examples of such books. Undoubtedly, The Making of the English Landscape is another. It comes as little surprise that W. H. Auden included it as a favourite book. The poet, who. In Praise of Limestone (1948) wrote:

"...examine this region 
Of short distances and definite places:
[...] Adjusted to the local needs of valleys 
Where everything can be touched or reached by walking..."

The genius of Hoskins' book is, that as a pioneer of local studies his knowledge does indeed emanate from 'definite places'; however, he manages to tell the story of the settlement of the English landscape - the waves of invaders, each transforming the natural landscape through differing agricultural practices, patterns of settlement and land-ownership - in a way that it becomes a grand narrative, both exciting and absorbing. The sweep of Hoskin's vision may be grand, but his style is modest, tempting the reader to feel that they too could pull-on a pair of hiking boots and discover the story of the landscape for themselves, armed with little more than a copy of his book and a local ordinance survey map.

If Hoskins the scholar was admired by Auden the poet, then it should be no surprise that Hoskin opens the book by acknowledging his indebtedness to Wordsworth, commenting, 'poets make the best topographers'.
The converse, as Hoskins demonstrates, is also true, for he combines the rigour of the scholar with an artists sense of form, movement and development. He concludes the introduction with the following observation:

This book is, then, an attempt to study the English landscape much as though it were a peice of music, or a series of compositions of varying magnitude, in order that we may understand the logic that lies between the beautiful whole. (p20).

Hoskins presents the development of the English landscape as an organic, vibrant process based on what, Ingold, a more recent cultural geographer, termed 'a product of dynamic dwelling', coining the term 'taskscape' to describe the process. The first half The Making of the English Landscape, in five packed, but highly readable chapters narrates unfolding 'taskscapes' from The landscape before the English settlement,  to Developments in Tudor to Georgian England. The result of these phases of dynamic dwelling resulted in the underlying field, road and street patterns that are recognisably English. The fact that this account remains by and large unchallenged, almost sixty years after the book's first publication is testament to Hoskin's scholarship and clarity of thought.

The second part of the book necessarily is less hegemonic. The processes that  shaped the English landscape since the industrial revolution have, through mechanisation, transformed parts of the landscape to an extent and with a speed beyond the reach of our more distant forbears. Consequently within one generation a place such as Middlesborough changd from a single farmstead by the Tees to an industrial town of over 50,000 inhabitants.  Even here, however, Hoskins seeks to present a balanced  picture.  For example, in chapter 6,  Parliamentary Enclusure and the Landscape, Hoskins challenges the then received wisdom - derived partly one suspects from uncritical readings of Cobbett - that the English Landscape was changed suddenly and irrevocably around the turn of the nineteenth century by the enclosure of common land and strip farmed fields. The picture painted by Hoskins is more nuanced; he makes the point that in in 1700 approximately half the arable land in England had assumed the 'open field' appearence so familiar today. Hoskins makes clear that in northern counties particularly, enclosed field system farming had been commonplace since medieval times, and small scale enclosure and the reclamation of heathland and other wild land had featured throughout English history since Anglo Saxon times in all counties. One of the most charming sections of the book concerns the latter stages of wilderness clearence, where in the early Nineteenth Century the last vestiges of the forest, fenland and heath were brought into pasture and cultivation. The process is illustrated through the eyes of the poet John Clare, a rare example of an 'articulate peasant, who was able to present the impact of enclosure, not from the standpont of the economist or political commentator, but from the point of view of the common man. 

The final chapters concern the changes to the landscape which resulted from the industrial revolution. The fact that this complicated story is narrated succinctly in less than 90 pages is not only an impressive exercise in precision and precis, but contain touches of ingenuity. For example, to account for the development of the  road network in England,  Hoskins illustrates this by concentrating on a single ordinance survey sheet - no. 147, covering the area of Oxfordshire and Northhamptonshire near Banbury. Close analysis of this reveals everything from Saxon routeways, Roman roads, green lanes, drovers roads and modern bypasses. In a local area the writer discovers the patterns and histories repeated on the national level.

The penultimate chapter - the landscape of towns - is case-study in the relationship between politics, land-ownership and urban development. The story of the slums of Nottingham is revealled to be one of how ancient grazing rights coralled the development of the city and led to disastrous overcrowding, What is interesting is the closer Hoskins comes to commentating on his contemporary landscape the less able he seems to maintain an objective stance. His approach as detatched observer of the changing landscape is abandoned for a much more personal viewpoint in the final chapter. The Landscape Today.

Indeed it is in the latter part of the book that ome becomes aware of just how much the landscape has undergone significant further change since 1955. Occasionally this is brought home in small details. Hoskins comments, for example. on a particularly interesting Tudor field pattern notable near the small Essex village of Harlow. Undoubtedly this must now lie under the concrete of Harlow New Town.  Hoskins writes the final chapter from the viewpoint of his house in North Oxfordshire, and from it he can observe over a thousand years of landscape development. Given Hoskins' acute awareness of the richness of England's landscape history, then we must expect and forgive his occassional lapses into golden ageism which occur towards the end of the book. Objects of his ire include: airfields, Ministry of Defence take-over of ancient landscapes and large old houses, arterial roads and 'overspill developments'. He shares Larkin's fear:

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Going, going.. (1973)

Yet neither men's fears were fully realised. Sixty years on, then, apart from the addition of the M40, you could still trace two millenia of landscape history just from studying the Ordinance Survey map for North Oxfordshire, though it has been re-numbered as sheet 206, and no longer is 'one inch to the mile'. Indeed, the work of organisations such as Natural England, English Heritage and The Landscape Institute have succeeded in promoting amongst people at large a sense that the uniqueness of the English language is something worth preserving. In many respects rural England proved resistant to modernism, in domstic house design in particular modern versions of a re-imagined vernacular has prevailed. One senses Hoskins' viewpoint inhabits the national psyche, a rare achievement for a modest pioneer of local history.