Abstract
It is pleasant and probably necessary, in our current state of landscape enlightenment, to reflect upon the courage and prescience of our forebears, those brave late Victorians-the Octavia Hills, the Robert Hunters, the footpath-preservers and open-space creators-without whose pioneering efforts so much of England's beauty would today have been lost. We see them as, at first, a lonely band, dedicated to the preservation of the most spectacular beauty spots-the Lake and Peak districts, Snowdonia, the dales and moors of North Yorkshire-but gradually expanding their numbers and with them the ambit of their labors to less spectacular but so characteristically English landscape-the Surrey hills, the Sussex downs, the Cotswolds, Dartmoor. Closer to our own time, the constructed landscape is taken on board: the country house and its park, the country garden, even choice samples of townscape like Bath's terraces. The pool of enlightenment widens; the range of objects within its purview extends; we reach the point where, today, the farmer's hedgerow itself is an object of preservation, the thirties cinema, even (to cite a recent National Trust acquisition) a well-preserved late-Victorian semidetached house in Worksop. Thus the forces of light, steady and unchanging in purpose, only constrained by ignorance and a poverty of resources, gradually beat back the forces of darkness: this popular, whiggish vision of the progress of landscape enlightenment is, naturally, the one vigorously propagated by the projectors of the heritage industry. More surprising is the way in which historians have left this field open to the heritage partisans. An impressionistic survey of the most recent political history texts suggests
Published Version
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