This paper uses narrative accounts of private gardens in Britain from the MassObservation Archive (MO) to explore ideas of landscape, privacy and attachment that emerge from daily practices and routines in these ordinary domestic spaces. We argue for the domestic garden as a vernacular or ordinary landscape that displays tensions between the private and the public nature of home within ambivalent emotional responses. Extended personal narratives offer privileged access to a site of intense engagement and carefully guarded privacy, yet with varying levels of attachment. The garden is a space well described in Britain in its public form but less well known as a private, everyday landscape. In this way a cultural landscape study becomes a contemporary critical geography of an ordinary space.
Gardens are not unusual sites to practise cultural geographies. In an earlier ‘cultural geographies in practice’ Steve Daniels reflected on his work on Art of the Garden, an exhibition at Tate Britain in 2004, which toured to other galleries,1 and a more recent contribution from Laura Lawson recounted public engagement with a community garden site in Chicago.2 This latest account documents a different, practice-based approach to the British garden, one that involved wide public engagement through a public seminar, a writing workshop and an exhibition of ‘lay’, i.e. amateur material, principally photographs. Both in its making and for its duration the exhibition caused us to explore the production and limits of lay and expert knowledge, not least because in many cases the photos on display did not conform in any way to the standards of composition and editing associated with public exhibition. Here we outline some further challenges we encountered when running the exhibition, highlighting the value of engaging with the public to deepen understanding of both everyday spaces and everyday academic practice
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