Landscape Preservation, ‘advertising disfigurement’, and English National Identity c. 1890–1914

Abstract

In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, anxieties developed about the impact of advertisements on the English landscape. Large posters and hoardings in rural areas were increasingly seen as having a damaging effect on the scenic beauties of the country, and a campaign to have their use restricted was started up in the 1890s. This article focuses on that campaign, and on the activities and ideology of the organisation (the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising — SCAPA) which spearheaded it. In doing so, it seeks to engage with the wider historiographical debate about the nature of ‘Englishness’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an examination of the agenda of SCAPA and other preservationist bodies (such as the National Trust), it suggests that it is misleading to conclude that English culture in this period was pervaded by backward-looking ‘rural-nostalgic’ obsessions. However, it also emphasises that English national identity was nonetheless to an important extent related to ideas about land and landscape. It does not do to write off phenomena like opposition to the ‘disfigurement’ of picturesque English scenery as insignificant, the concern only of a very marginal section of elite culture.

Ways of Seeing Advertising: Law and the Making of Visual Commercial Culture

“…SCAPA was established in 1893; the architect and royal academician Alfred Waterhouse was president, the Irish barrister Richardson Evans its active secretary. SCAPA numbered over seven hundred members in 1894, an elite but politically diverse and gender-mixed group that enjoyed broad support (Readman 2001). Its aims were "checking the abuse of the practice of spectacular advertising, and : : : protecting and promoting the picturesque simplicity of rural and river scenes, and the dignity and propriety of our towns" (Beautiful World 1893, Appendix A, 26).…”

Waste and ‘Everyday Environmentalism’ in Modern Britain

“…Can these accounts be adequately attributed to the diffusion of preservationist discourses since the nineteenth century, or the survival of ideas of customary right? (Ranlett, 1983;Readman, 2001Readman, , 2008Roberts, 2010) Such accounts of environmental political mobilizations are too narrow; they fail to account for precisely what was at stake in articulating opposition to waste disposal (Welsh, 2010). Moreover, they usually fail to read with sufficient care the manner in which the arguments of proponents were constructed and construed.…”

Written in the Skies: Advertising, Technology, and Modernity in Britain since 1885

“…113 Paul Readman has argued persuasively that preservationist organizations like SCAPA, consistent enemies of sky advertising, did not oppose industrial modernity: "Wanting not to renounce modern life, they sought rather to enrich it." 114 Similarly, the London Society, though often critical of "commercial incursions into the cityscape," did not simply reject commercialism; rather they were motivated by "a vision of an ordered capitalism, channeled toward the improvement of the city." 115 This vision could accommodate advertising, provided it was ordered, dignified, and in harmony with its surroundings.…”