Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 138

For some time now, Boydell & Brewer have been encouragingly supportive of rural and agricultural history. Generously illustrated, beautifully produced and reasonably priced, the book under review here is further evidence of this. The countryside of East Anglia provides a comprehensive treatment of the social, cultural and environmental history of that region between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Laid out in nine thematic chapters, it pays particular attention to change – and continuity – over time, in doing so challenging assumptions about a period often portrayed as a time of ubiquitous rural depression, depopulation and decay. Without denying the severity of the problems faced in the region, Susanna Wade Martins and Tom Williamson make a sustained case for their being exaggerated, both by contemporaries (such as Rider Haggard) and in later commentaries. Large-scale arable farming may have fared badly, as per received wisdom, but the spread of dereliction was uneven, being concentrated on areas of poor soil, pre-eminently the Brecklands of north-west Suffolk and south-west Norfolk. Pasturage and horticulture did better than cereals, and even relatively well in some circumstances. Chapter 3, on alternative agriculture, is especially illuminating in this regard. For all the later nineteenth-century scorn poured on advocates of smallholdings like Jesse Collings (‘Jessie’ on p.55 – a rare typographical error), their proposals did not represent any triumph of ideology over practicality. Especially in Norfolk, where county council smallholdings covered nearly 27,500 acres by 1925, small-scale cultivation proved generally successful – even in economic terms (the expanding market for vegetables, fruit, poultry and eggs being the key factor here). Indeed, while smallholdings represented modernity and the future, the traditional economy of great estates and larger arable farms represented the past – a past which was fading as much in East Anglia as elsewhere, as shown in chapter 4.

Modernity, of course, had its disadvantages, especially in ecological and environmental terms, and one of the great strengths of this book is the attention it gives to the physical re-shaping of the landscape in these years. For example, pace Oliver Rackham, hedgerows did not benefit from farmers and landowners lacking the resources to effect their removal during the depression. On the contrary, impoverished squires were likely to fell hedge timber in attempting to raise capital and retain tenants anxious about the revenue-sapping potential of shade cast on crops. Moreover, if depression contributed to the process of prairification, it also contributed to the afforestation of the region, another problematic environmental side-effect of rural modernity. In a 1946 debate on government forest policy, Leah Manning told the House of Commons that ‘completely utilitarian’ conifers were quite acceptable ‘in the soft ground of East Anglia’, a point of view from which the Forestry Commission would not have dissented. Indeed, in the inter-war years, and in the face of significant criticism, the Commission planted pines with great enthusiasm, the trees taking well to relatively infertile un- and under-cultivated land (including some common lands). The consequences were significant, doing considerable damage to the wetlands, heathlands, and overall biodiversity of East Anglia. By the time of the Second World War, very little original breck remained in the Brecklands, and many species had simply disappeared, never to return.

Yet if modernity inflicted certain depredations on the landscape, it also saw a rise in appreciation of its scenery and amenity value. Tourists discovered East Anglia in the late nineteenth century, frequenting the Broads, coastal resorts and ‘Constable Country’ in ever increasing numbers as time wore on. But Wade Martins and Williamson show that the landscape of East Anglia did not fit very easily into the rural-nostalgic ‘south country’ paradigm of Englishness. This was a less cosy place, a landscape of alterity – but one nevertheless prized for its historical associations, the access it afforded to an older, quondam England. If, as the authors write, ‘[a] visit to the countryside was supposed to be a trip back in time: the importance of the rural lay largely in its direct connections with the nation’s past’ (p.194), the example of East Anglia demonstrates that the (imagined) landscape of this national past took various different forms.

In all, then, this is a handsome and useful book that does much to draw out the distinctiveness of East Anglia, while at the same time connecting the region’s experience to wider national trends. It is a book that will interest scholars working in a range of disciplines and sub-disciplines, including historical geography, local and regional history, and heritage studies, as well as – more obviously perhaps – social, agricultural and environmental historians.