In-between Landscapes

Abstract

Abstract Since Pahl’s celebrated 1966 article ‘The rural-urban continuum’, scholars have persistently sought to question and complicate antithetical constructions of town and country. Yet such binary formulations remain stubbornly embedded at the level of public discourse. This chapter explores a type of landscape that, it is argued, became increasingly significant in the twentieth century, referred to here as ‘in-between landscapes’. In-between landscapes could take a wide variety of forms: gardens and parks, views out to distant countryside, ‘ruralized’ roads planted with trees, wooded slopes and ravines too steep for building, water meadows and flood plains, urban commons, and what were perceived to be ‘rural’ enclaves, typified by groups of buildings visibly much older than those encompassing them. These landscapes were at once highly modern, in that they were characteristic, indeed well-nigh universal, elements in twentieth-century urban and peri-urban landscapes, and also resistant to modernity in their marginality and, often, ‘left-behindness’. In exploring how and why in-between landscapes mattered so much to many urban people, this chapter demonstrates that ‘the rural’, both as discursive construct and as spatial practice, continued to play a vital role in structuring lived experience in twentieth-century Britain.