Podtours recommends - a green and pleasant land
Books on the English landscape and townscape
There are numerous tour guides to England, of course, and nice picture books. But my own personal library wouldn't be complete without these books, which explain how the country came to be the way it is.
Alec Clifton-Taylor - Six English Towns, Six more English towns, Another six English towns
Alec Clifton-Taylor knew a thing or two about architecture. He also knew what he liked. Infuriatingly opinionated at times, his enthusiasm for the subject of his work always comes through - as does a love for historic buildings of all types.
These are not just books about
buildings though. They're about how the urban landscape developed through
time. Some of the towns he features grew up around a castle, a cathedral,
or a monastery - others were mercantile in origin, based on a strategic
road or river link. That difference in origin is often responsible for the
town's character - though other factors also come into play. Equally, local
materials -whether brick or timber, or local stone, or thatch - determined
the way houses were built, at least until recently.
All the towns Clifton-Taylor selects are places of real character, well worth visiting. Stamford, a limestone town with fine coaching inns on the Great North Road and a set of magnificent Early English churches, is one of my favourites; Ludlow, with fine half-timbered houses snug beneath the castle, another.
How on earth could the BBC let these excellent books go out of print? You're going to have to look around for a second hand copy.
Alec Clifton-Taylor's other works are also heartily recommended. And some of them you can order new. The cathedrals of England is a guide to the vast wealth of architecture from the Saxon period all the way to modern concrete and steel construction that is contained in English cathedrals - and if you're interested in just how things got built, and when, rather than in visiting any single cathedral, this is thet book for you. And 'Buildings of Delight' is quite simply his 'hundred best' - including dovecotes and windmills alongside more conventional, and perhaps less useful, buidlings.
WG Hoskins - The making of the English landscape
We tend to assume that the landscape is 'natural' while the town has been made by man. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Hoskins shows, the landscape has been created over the millennia - you can still see Celtic field strips in many places - and the whole of England has been worked over - there is really no 'wilderness' left.
This book is on the reading lists for most courses in English history, and for a good reason. It's not the latest research - but it is the book that created the whole discipline of landscape history.
What's particularly interesting in England is the smallness of the landscape. It seems to change every twenty miles or so - and few landscapes are monolithic. Most encapsulate history over the ages, with perhaps an iron age fort or Roman camp associated with medieval and post-Enclosure field patterns, or even a planned 18th-century park. Even the buildings relate to the landscape in both form and function - perhaps using materials from a quarry a mile down the road, or thatch from a reedbed nearby, and made for local uses - grain storage, animal husbandry, irrigation.
Read Hoskins, and you will find yourself no longer looking at the landscape and saying 'That's nice', but instead, 'That's interesting'.
Oliver Rackham - The history of the countryside
Hoskins is a short and definitive work. Rackham is more exhaustive and gives more local detail, and whereas Hoskins is a geographer and historian, Rackham started off as a botanist and is concerned with the ecology of landscape. He has a particular feeling for trees, woodlands, heaths and hedges, and his extensive field work shows through just as much as his use of historical sources.
He's also intolerant of folk myths and what he calls 'pseudo-history' and 'factoids'. For instance, he decries as wrong any idea that that forests necessarily had to do with trees - the medieval forest was created for hunting, and consisted of open countryside as well as trees.
What for me is the most interesting
aspect of Rackham is his understanding of the countryside as an ecological
system. While Hoskins sees landscape as 'made' by man, Rackham understands
the natural processes at work and the way they interrelate with human intervention.
For instance, the Norfolk Broads, now no longer regularly dredged, are shrinking
as aquatic plants, then trees, gradually reclaim the areas at the water's
edge. Some of our landscapes, then, are not 'wild', but they are not quite
'made' either - they are what happens when regular maintenance stops.