Planning and the Myth of the English Countryside, in the Interwar Period

Abstract

A landscape is never so valuable as when it is under threat, and the English rural countryside has been the subject of alarm for centuries. Raymond Williams identified an ‘escalator’ on which literary representation continually looked back upon a past golden age of rural virtue, ensuring that the idea of a ‘true’ rural England has persisted into the twentieth century with extraordinary power Thus Howard Newby can write of the ‘stereotypes and myths which surround the popular image of the rural world’, while, at the same time, he claims this fallacious perception is ‘one of the major protecting illusions of our time’. This illusion has been reinforced by the nature of English society. Sir Lewis Narnier believed English society to be ‘amphibious’ in the eighteenth century, with no sharp divide between town and country among the interests of the ruling classes. By the end of the nineteenth century the countryside, under the influence of Romanticism and a changing class structure, had become the preserve of an upper-class society increasingly separated from industrialism and the great towns. Yet this upper class was cemented by the public schools and the universities to include not only landowners, but an array of occupations, including many intellectuals. Until the First World War, despite increasing mechanisation and specialisation in the countryside, the land presented a rural face largely unspoiled by the intrusion of industrial and urban uses. Land was held in large estates, farmed by tenants in a world of mostly irregular fields, lanes and hedgerows, with buildings that preserved vernacular styles.

The role of (de-)essentialisation within siting conflicts: An interdisciplinary approach

“…In the UK, for instance, since the 1920's planning in the countryside has been restrictive, reflected in efforts towards countryside conservation put forward, for instance, by the Town and Country Planning Acts (Cowell, 2010; see also Jeans, 1990, for an historical account). As Murdoch and Lowe (2003), citing Cherry and Rogers (1996, p.62), put it, "the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 might just as well been called the Town versus Country Planning Act: towns and cities were separate from the countryside and good planning would keep them so", which made rural areas even more appealing to people living in cities, and urban migrants the fiercest supporters of maintaining that rural-urban divide (Murdoch & Lowe, 2003;Macnaghten & Urry, 1998;also Daugstad, 2008).…”

‘The field of grain is gone; It's now a Tesco Superstore’: representations of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ within historical and contemporary discourses opposing urban expansion in England

“…34 Whilst there is some argument over the actual vintage of rural nostalgia in England, 35 Jeans argues that 'it is possible to see the period following the First World War as a time of perceived crisis for the rural landscape'. 36 As Tewdwr-Jones notes, the reaction of the British literati to this urban encroachment during the 1920s and 1930s was to call for new, more protectionist town and country planning 37 ; it was during this period that dreams of Garden Cities, green belts, and 'model villages' like Portmeirion were born and given reality. 38 Such attitudes clearly helped shape the statutory comprehensive town and country planning system enacted in the UK from 1947, yet scholars have not yet conducted much systematic analysis into the texts to come from this period.…”

Dennis Norman Jeans: Historical Geographer and Landscape Interpreter Extraordinaire

“…I found this extraordinarily exciting stuff to teach and was particularly gratified by the numbers of honours students who chose to write theses in humanist and cultural geography.' While certain papers could be said to explore these ideas (Jeans, 1981b;1983b;1984a;1988d;1990b;1990c), it does seem something of a tragedy that the wealth of imaginative and innovative ideas from the third year course was not reworked by Jeans and published.…”

“…'From regional landscapes, the course in Australian historical geography moved towards the shaping of Australia by its absorption into the world capitalist system' (Wallerstein, 1979;Jeans, 1987b;1988b;1989) and the subsequent form of Australian society (Jeans, 1988f). In the thirdyear course the relation of landscape to the broader cultural movements in Western society was explored (Jeans, 1981c;1983b;1984b;1990c). 'I tried to write on all of those things.…”