Agricultural History Review, Volume 63 Part 2 (2015), p. 328

In Wilkie Collins’s 1866 sensationalist novel, Armadale, the Norfolk Broads are a curiosity, the ‘hidden labyrinth’ of waters suggestive of the unexpected – mysterious, fluid-margined and hard to know. It is a region where anything could happen. For David Matless, growing up in Norwich, Broadland held no such intrigue but was merely a ‘remote zone near home’, barely experienced – exploration only beginning after he moved away and saw it as a site with academic promise. In this book, he journeys through these slippery wetlands and, whilst doing so, takes a new direction in cultural geography by rigorously revisiting and rethinking the notion of regional cultural landscape; the recombination of the constituent terms ‘region’, ‘culture’ and ‘landscape’ suggested as productive not in spite of, but because of, its inherent complexities and instabilities.

It is an entertaining and illuminating excursion, worth taking not least because it brings a fresh approach to the region, presenting landscape as colloquial, with voices and accents – from the scientific and the institutional to the comic and the vernacular – competing for attention and authority. Sounds, too, emerge from this ‘colloquium of voices’, the boom of the bittern recorded as well as the blast of the motor cruiser. The book has an unusual structure, its chapters interspersed with two rather grainy photo montages, ‘Broadland Scene’ and ‘Broadland Signs’, and two ‘interlude’ studies of Broads icons, the wherry and the windmill.

The first chapter, which suggests that regional cultural landscape might achieve a new political resonance in England were Scotland to become independent, discusses academic engagements with Broadland, its institutions and scholarship. This introduction to the region includes a too brief commentary on the Cantley sugar beet processing factory, the first in England, then offers six quirkily descriptive passages – snapshots, as it were, of sites where tensions of landscape are condensed. There is also a helpful outline of the study area and its nomenclature. Six rivers, all flowing into the North Sea, are collected under the name the ‘Norfolk Broads’ while the broads (lower case) are shallow lakes made from flooded medieval peat diggings, sometimes linked to these rivers by dug channels.

Formation of the broads was long disputed and their artificial origin only discovered in 1952 by the late Joyce Lambert, a key informant whom Matless interviewed several times. These contested narratives, and Lambert’s work of scholarly detection, are discussed in the second chapter, ‘Origins’, which details the ways in which scientific argument was shaped by claims to regional authority. If the suggestion that the broads were man-made initially appeared to diminish their appeal, it later facilitated proposals for their dredging and restoration.

Chapter three, ‘Conduct’, takes an expansive look at moral geographies of leisure conduct on the Norfolk Broads, a region described by Nature in 1887 as the most ‘beguided’ in the British Isles and variously imagined over the years as a site of authentic folk culture, a locus for adventure and a holiday pleasure ground. Geographer Vaughan Cornish’s 1930 proposal for a Broadland national park sparked debates over regionally appropriate modes of conduct (quiet sailing preferred to raucous cruising, for instance) which continued to shape policy even after 1989, when the Broads Authority assumed the statutory powers of a national park.

There follows a brief study of the wherry, a regional craft latterly resurrected for pleasure cruises but once a working vessel, portrayed in nineteenth-century paintings of the Norwich School. Wherries transported goods such as grain, coal, timber, manure, ice and sugar beet, suggesting an attendant clutch of cultural landscapes that, rather disappointingly, are not unravelled here.

The remaining chapters are likely to be of most interest to agricultural historians. Animal landscapes and plant landscapes are considered in chapters four and five respectively. Here the voices of a vivid, and sometimes eccentric, cast of characters enter the colloquium – from the fervently masculine J. Wentworth Day, who adored shooting and advocated stuffed birds as a way of keeping the ‘domestic female’ at bay, to broadcaster E. A. Ellis, who created an experimental nature reserve at Wheatfen – and served coypu (a now extinguished invader) to a visiting party from the British Association for the Advancement of Science. These sections, which present complex narratives, discuss matters such as the emergence of Broadland as a region for scientific study; how disputes over shooting rights – and wrongs – shaped the Broads as public and private space; and the potent cultural harvest of the reed industry.

After another interlude, this time drawing on work by Tom Williamson to focus on the windmill – technology once widely employed in the region to pump water for drainage – Matless moves on to chapter six. Entitled ‘The Ends of Landscape’, this covers narratives of impending environmental disaster and addresses the region’s vulnerabilities to silting, pollution, drainage, drought and flood. An account is included of the political battles over the Halvergate Marshes in the 1980s, in which notions of ‘landscape character’ were successfully deployed to prevent characteristic grazing marsh being drained for conversion to arable.

This is, in essence, a lively and original book, scholarly and rigorous, but also entertaining. More than that, it is thought-provoking: worth reading even for the armchair excursionist to the Norfolk Broads.