Nature, the past and the English town: a counter-cultural history

Abstract

In investigating urban culture, historians have understandably tended to focus on the man-made and the modern, and have paid less attention to the role of nature and the past, which seem the opposite of what the town stands for. This survey, which takes as its case-study England, argues that nature and the past have always been part of urban life, but as urbanization gathered pace, particularly from the eighteenth century, they became if anything an even more important element in city and town culture.

Is it the cow that sells the steak, or the sizzle? Using animal images to sell meat in mid-nineteenth-century Belgium

“…The advertisements of meat retailers in the trade cards followed a wider current of nineteenth-century romanticism that embraced a representation of nature. Borsay (2017) (Borsay 2017) has argued how deeply intertwined the process of urbanization was with a renewed interest in (and desire for) nature. As rapid urbanization fully took off, an opposite response led to the growth of what Borsay dubbed 'a thirst for the natural': as city dwellers were ever further removed from, and lost contact with, nature, it became more interesting and attractive.…”