Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 2 (2018), p. 293

Paul Readman’s Storied Ground examines the place of landscape in narratives of English identity between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Readman provides a much-needed bridge between those works which have focused on landscape in the Georgian period, and those concerned with the late Victorian and Edwardian periods and beyond. Storied Ground will become the standard reference point for those concerned with English landscape and national identity in the long nineteenth century.

Readman argues that stories of landscape and national identity were as much urban as rural, and challenges assumptions of nostalgia and anti-modernity. National identity is shown to be interwoven with other scales, notably the local and regional, with these geographic scales mutually supportive rather antagonistic. Readman emphasizes the role of historical associations in shaping landscape narratives, and the ways in which landscape became the site for demotic rather than aristocratic narrative. After an introduction covering historiographic and theoretical debate, with works in cultural and historical geography given notable prominence, Storied Ground is structured by places of significance, with six chapters focusing on specific landscapes: Dover, Northumberland, the Lake District, the New Forest, Manchester and the Thames. Maps would have helped readers unfamiliar with these regions to navigate the narrative, but each chapter provides rich, original and nuanced analysis.

In each chapter, physical landscape and historical association interweave. The cliffs of Dover present spectacular chalk and signs of island defence, while Northumberland as a border region with historical associations of conflict is presented in the nineteenth century as a region progressing to a unionist order. Dover and Northumberland in this period become border regions which cement rather than fragment Englishness and Britishness. The Lake District and the New Forest become, through the nineteenth century, landscapes which in tourist practice and patterns of landholding shape senses of popular national landscape, the National Trust’s foundation in 1895 owing much to Lakes campaigns evincing a patriotism Liberal or Socialist rather than Conservative. Attention to Manchester allows Readman to argue that national landscape narratives could be as much urban as rural: ‘The patriotic landscape imaginary of the long nineteenth century was a capacious one, encompassing both rural shires and city streets’ (p. 249). Just as rich or poor residents of the industrial north west visited the Lakes as a national landscape warranting preservation, so Manchester could itself be appreciated for its modernity and history, guidebooks praising its civic and commercial architecture. The Thames Valley, with its combination of riverine and maritime wealth creation, and campaigns for landscape preservation producing the 1885 Thames Preservation Act, shows too for Readman that ‘Englishness, as figured by the Thames, was in step with modernity’ (p. 299). There may be some overstatement here though; even if a painter such as Helen Allingham, depicting the vernacular dwellings of the Thames Valley as the personification of a happy England, was undertaking work for a modern commercial art market, the images produced conveyed a sensibility at the very least in tension with the modern world. Modern things – cheap prints of cottage paintings, bicycles ridden to get out of town – are not always in step with modernity.

Readman’s earlier, fine book, Land and nation in England: Patriotism, national identity and the politics of land, 1880–1914 (2008), gave extensive coverage of agricultural debate in the decades before the First World War, and agriculture perhaps in consequence receives less detailed discussion here. Agricultural questions do, however, shape the regional narratives in Storied Ground; the role of agricultural improvement in progressive stories of Northumbrian identity, and the agrarian economy of common land in the New Forest, where ideas of landscape preservation, public amenity, common rights and popular liberty came together in campaigns against state timber plantation, culminating in the 1877 New Forest Act: ‘This was the New Forest as a national landscape, as the people’s property, and its cultural valence owed much to the associations attaching to common land’ (p. 191). Readman here traces the complexities of political and cultural debate, with resultant freedoms of common grazing criticized as denudation by those concerned with the management of timber resources.

For Readman the material covered in Storied Ground denotes a complex ‘English cultural nationalism’ (p. 309), often popular and demotic. In a hundred years someone might write a similar text on today, with some of the sites featured in Storied Ground still forming places of significance. Anxieties surrounding trade, migration and island identity gather over Dover, just as concerns for climate change spark renewed interest in just what formed the Dover Strait in the first place. Northumberland borders a possibly re-emergent political frontier. The Lake District is granted World Heritage Status for its cultural historical value, for being the region where landscape appreciation and preservation took shape. Manchester stands for common diversity in the face of terror. The plotlines continue. England remains storied ground.