Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity by Liz Wells: Chapter 4 Pastoral Heritage/ The English Jeremy Paxman

 "If I should die, think only this of me: 

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England...(Rupert Brooke)

This chapter is a midly polemical swipe at the way idyllic rural Britain is viewed. I coupled this chapter with reading some of Jeremy Paxman's The English as it covers some similar ground from an historian's perspective. At times, Wells cannot avoid the opportunity to aim a feminist left-wing shot. She starts by quoting an image by Karen Knorr of a suited man in an art gallery, 'stemmed glass in hand, contemplating a landscape scene. Wells sees this as a manifestation of the 'male territory' looking out over land which is the 'object of his gaze and thus , metaphorically, rendered subject to his ownership'. It is a stereotype of the most basic sort, with the obvious negative connotations of the man's attire and drinking predilection. But how does she know that the man might not be a connoisseur of landscape art, admiring the work? What, one may ask, would she have made of a woman staring at the picture holding a glass of water?

This is not untypical of Wells' occasional habit of going too far with her arguments, becoming assertive rather than  academic. At one place (loc 2795) she says that there is no wilderness in Britain - 'British land is managed', even the Environment Agency oversees the ' coastal littoral'. So, she concludes, 'landscapes and vistas are human constructs', conveniently ignoring 4 billion years of geology. She lives in Devon, evidently knows Dartmoor well, but one wonders whether she knows how Dartmoor is formed (it and Bodmin Moor are almost unique in the world - there are very few other large granite protrusions); if so she pays no acknowledgement as to how the imperviousness and acidity of the rock influences the landscape, or how geology affects landscape throughout the country. Britain uniquely has the complete range of geological periods represented in what is in global terms a tiny area. You do not have to know what the colours mean in the map below to appreciate the variety of rocks underpinning the British landscape:

Available from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Geology_Map_UK.svg/2000px-Geology_Map_UK.svg.png

Wells continues that 'boutique hotels, caravan parks, and even Center Parcs, testify to the continuation of the pastoral idyll. She evidently has not been to a Center Parc, as they are entirely human constructs designed mainly for activities that can only realistically be contemplated in a semi rural location. But the pool and the slides and the many restaurants could be anywhere...Caravan parks are not exactly a retreat to the idyll, more a sort of rural shrine to what Jeremy Paxman alludes to as the Englishman's need for privacy (Paxman, 1998, p 118); rows of identical 'mobile homes' (mobile in theory but the wheels are used for only a few yards at most) planted in coast or countryside where there is little prospect of alternative land use. It is a function of the extraordinarily rapid and thorough urbanization of England (to a lesser degree Wales and Scotland) in 19th century, coupled with the time and money to expend pursuing a 'second home', as much as a 'continuation of the pastoral idyll'. Paxman (ibid, p144) puts it pithily: 

'The English have become exiles from their own country. Their relationship with this arcadia is that of some emotional remittance man."

Paxman is scathing about the rural idyll. The country he argues does not work, in either sense of the word. He quotes a woman from Beaminster that 'the country is just one big suburb now'. Paxman summarises thus:

"it is the charm of small things; there is scarcely a geographical feature in the land that has any claim on world records. It is a place of tended beauties, the cottage small, the field of grain, belong to a landscape that has been shaped by generations of labour....Yet increasingly in southern England, that is all it is." (ibid, p170)

 Wells points put that the soft 'classic' landscape is typically that of the south; others such as Dvies have focussed more on the industrially  scarred landscapes of the north. Paxman makes this point too:

"For not only is this imagined England rural rather thean urban, it is southern rather than northern" (ibid, p117)

Wells returns to familiar ground when pointing out that there are relatively few women landscape photographers. Perhaps in early days it was due to the need to travel, which women would rarely do at all, and never unaccompanied. They were not 'explorers' in the sense of the US photographers in particular. Even now, Wells argues, women may be constrained by childcare responsibilities, mitigating against freedom to travel (loc 3233) and encouraging photographic pursuits closer to home. 

Reference:

Paxman, Jeremy (1998) The English: A Portrait of a People. London. Penguin