Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 2 (2012), p. 316

The historical community is better served with studies of the North and northern identities than it was a couple of decades ago, and this recent historiographical trend informs much of the content of this useful book. Despite the work of a number of scholars, there remains much to be said about the interplay of urban and rural landscapes, economies and population. This wide-ranging book makes a valuable contribution to this literature and, through the discussion of landscapes and the processes by which they were shaped, aspects of a distinctive region emerge.

The book’s eighteen chapters are grouped into five parts: ‘the lie of the land’, ‘parks and gardens’, ‘living in the landscape’, ‘urban landscapes’ and ‘perceptions and representations’. The lengthy, though skilful, introduction valiantly attempts to bring coherence to the book by exploring broader themes, but the editors cannot compensate for the gaps and omissions left by the patchy coverage of the northern landscape in the remaining chapters. That this is a region of contrasts almost need not be said: here the picturesque, romantic, rural North is starkly contrasted with the mining and industrial landscapes of County Durham, Newcastle and the south-east of Northumberland.

However, for a region dominated by economic activities whose impact on the landscape is dramatic and large-scale (coal mining, heavy engineering and agriculture), it might surprise some readers to discover that none is given particularly full treatment in this book. Those who know the landscape of the region might be surprised to see large swathes of it completely absent from this book. The Cheviots and Kielder, representing sizeable areas on the margins of the region, are largely ignored, with the bleak uplands that characterize much of inland Northumberland not being fully explored. Urban landscapes too are skewed to the larger urban settlements exemplified here by studies of Darlington, Durham, Middlesborough, and Newcastle, which are treated as separate entities rather than as part of a wider regional urban structure. Settlement patterns more generally are not dealt with. Village layout and vernacular domestic architecture, both prominent features of the north-eastern landscape could have been more fully explored, as could the network of smaller urban centres including Alnwick, Berwick, Hexham, Morpeth and Rothbury. The editors were only able to work with the papers presented at a conference a decade ago, and the addition of a few chapters has not given the book the clarity, comprehensiveness and coherence it needs to really succeed. One cannot help but suggest that this book would have worked better as a monograph, where much more control could have been exerted over the content.

Nevertheless, the book does have insightful contributions, and the general lack of coherence does allow the reader to read chapters in isolation. Readers of this journal are particularly likely to benefit from the first two parts of this book. Cousins’ discussion of the retrogressive study of Prudhoe is an extremely useful introduction to this analytical method, although larger maps and further discussion would have strengthened this chapter still further. Purdue’s brief account of the impact of the landed estate on the landscape during a period of economic expansion and relative political stability in the two centuries following Anglo-Scottish union is genuinely regional in scope. The impact of the gentry and aristocracy provides a useful backdrop to Caunce’s study of agriculture in the region. Few authors understand with such clarity the nature and distinctiveness of northern agriculture, and Caunce’s holistic survey of the role of agriculture in the development of the region is a genuine highlight of the book. Not content to focus on the minutiae, Caunce attempts to analyse landscape and the agricultural systems it supported within the wider contexts of mechanization, industrialization and urbanization. His survey is necessarily brief, and direct and more complete comparisons with the agricultural systems of other northern counties might have benefited this chapter. This book, and Caunce’s chapter in particular, make it clear that a longer survey of northern agriculture in the three centuries after 1700 is long overdue.

The section on parks and gardens places the emphasis firmly on the landed elite and the polite landscapes they created, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This section explores a narrow, though important, social group and their impact on the landscape with focused studies of individual properties (Desmond on Hardwick gardens and Betney on Gibside) and broader thematic surveys (Goulty on walled gardens and Green on the creation of public parks).

Overall this is a valuable book. It is extremely well produced, eminently readable, and the editors have done an exceptional job in bringing it together. The introduction itself is an extremely useful discussion in its own right, not only of the content of the book, but of its intellectual origins and deeper purpose. The research base, wide-ranging methodologies and diverse themes make this a rich and valuable book which readers of this journal will find instructive; indeed, individually each chapter has considerable merit. Ultimately, however, this book offers a rather fragmentary account of the wider region and largely fails to convey a sense of a regional landscape that is the product of long-term processes, economic systems, underlying geology, transport infrastructure, population movement, cultural trends, and technological innovation. For a region that is widely held to have a robust regional identity, this has not been reflected in the intellectual framework within which this book has been written.