English Landscape Research Articles

Izgubljeni identitet ingrid pollard čitanje fotografija

Ingrid Pollard is a British artist whose art photographs try to emphasize the identity of the black population in an environment to which she does not belong. Through lines of identity visual art, she introduces the viewer to a story that has been evolving for years in her world. Intertwining and emphasizing Otherness through the detailing of black life confirms the question of „Who are you?“, and the meaning lies in the artist’s depictions in the vastness of British landscapes. The paper will show the disability of identity through photographs of the Pastoral Interllude collection and try to compare Bauman’s theory of non-belonging to the real environment and the constant striving for a fixed identity. As a starting point for this work, works of art created in the twentieth century depicting portraits of blacks in the everyday situations of British streets and outdoor natural spaces. The historical background of two lost identities that create their selves through life. The visual arts of the time took the space of deliberately emphasizing the original identity through depictions of artistic photography, especially portraits. The anti-essentialist direction will be proven by deliberate shots of photography in environments that are not specific to the time in which Ingrid Pollard’s identity remained trapped. National identity in the photographic world will be highlighted by Ingrid Pollard faithfully portraying the social visual cues that produce the image of a nation and fully embracing character, while reviving the idea that photography is a transmitter of identity.

Historical traditions and cultural and economic tenability of the modern landscape design of the Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans

The article is devoted to the analysis of the history of creation of the Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans in the city of Chernivtsi, where the Yurii Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University is now located. A part of this ensemble is a park, the uniqueness of which is due to the combination of three types of parks at the same time – the Italian garden, the French regular park and the English landscape park. The periods of creation of the park, participation of landscape designers and clergymen are covered in detail, landscape techniques and their correspondence to the three above-mentioned types of parks are analyzed. The range of problems of the park's existence and measures for its arrangement are described. Proposals for the creation of a unique Bible garden with the symbolic meaning of landscape sceneries are described separately. The proposed measures are substantiated in terms of creating a new tourist attraction.

Estate landscapes in the Netherlands

In the past, country house research was mainly concerned with individual houses and gardens. Yet, as early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so many country houses were being built around the major cities that they came to define the landscape. Genuine estate landscapes took shape along several rivers (Amstel, Vecht), along the inner edge of coastal dunes, and on newly reclaimed land. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the rivers were augmented with a network of barge canals and soon they too were lined by a belt of country houses. The greatest density of country houses was to be found around Amsterdam, but other big cities in the provinces of Holland and Zeeland had their fair share as well. Access was mostly by water, but in some areas, especially in Zeeland, country roads performed this role. The majority of country houses were built on or next to a farm, which generally continued to exist and, in many cases, survived the country house. In a few areas, the evolving density of country houses has been traced in a detailed chronological record. In most cases it reveals progressive growth towards a high point in the first half of the eighteenth century, after which a gradual decline sets in. However, in a number of areas growth was much more rapid, in particular along the River Vecht. Sustained growth was followed by decline. In the final decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth, large numbers of country houses were demolished and in many instances the land reverted to agriculture production. It appears that the decline set in earlier in Zeeland than in Holland, but regional differences in decline are not yet entirely clear.
 The second quarter of the nineteenth century saw the construction of a new generation of country houses, especially in the undulating sandy areas of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug and the southern part of the Veluwezoom, where railway lines provided access. The owners of this new crop of country houses laid out their gardens in the English landscape style. They also bought up vast, neighbouring heathlands from local councils or farmers and planted them with trees. As a result, these country houses are quite different in character from those of the earlier period.
 In the past the concentrations of country houses dominated the landscape and even today, wherever they have survived to a substantial degree they continue to represent an important landscape quality. As such, protection and management should not be confined to individual country houses but should extend to groups of country houses and their interrelationships (in the form of visual axes, for example). In recent years, a number of provinces have already set a good example by formulating policies for country house biotopes and linear estate landscapes.

Vandra Costello. Irish Demesne Landscapes, 1660–1740.

Vandra Costello. <i>Irish Demesne Landscapes, 1660–1740</i>.

The Political Ecology of Hedgerows and Their Relationship to Agroecology and Food Sovereignty in the UK

Hedgerows can make an important contribution to agroecological transitions and to an overall contribution to multifunctional agro-ecosystems with multiple benefits for biodiversity, climate change mitigation, soil health, human health, well-being, and livelihoods. Where such agroecological transition assumes the form of political agroecology, this can underpin transformation of the farming system towards food sovereignty. Current mismanagement of hedgerows is constraining the optimum delivery of ecosystem services by these important features of the British landscape. This mismanagement is, moreover, an integral part of a (capitalist) productivist degradation of the countryside that is contributing to the delivery of ecosystem disservices and is, therefore, antithetical to the adoption of agroecological production practises. Being contrary to the requirements of political agroecology, it is similarly antithetical to the requirements of food sovereignty. In response, this paper outlines what appears to be required, in policy and political terms, for the adoption of an agroecological and food sovereignty framework enabling the sustainable management of hedgerows and maximising their potential for ecosystem services delivery.

Exploring Linear Earthworks across Time and Space – Introducing the ‘Monumentality and Landscape: Linear Earthworks in Britain’ Project

Linear earthworks of a monumental character are an enigmatic part of the British landscape. Research in Britain suggests that such features range in date from the early 1st millennium BC to the Early Middle Ages. While the roles of these monuments in past societies cannot be understated, they remain a relatively under-researched phenomenon. This article introduces the Leverhulme Trust-funded ‘Monumentality and Landscape: Linear Earthworks in Britain’ project, which aims to provide a comparative study of linear earthworks focusing on those dating to the Iron Age and early medieval period. This contribution reviews our approach and shares preliminary results from the project’s first year, identifying wider implications for the study of linear earthworks.

Kerbing Relations through Time: Reuse, Connectivity and Folded Time in the Viking Age

The paper explores a group of graves in which the past was used actively in Viking Age eastern Norway. Studying the use of the past in the past was introduced in British landscape archaeology of the 1990s, but a reassessment and a renewed relevance of the theme may now be observed due to the rise of materiality studies and the affective turn within archaeology. Through an investigation of the apparently insignificant kerbstones on a number of Viking Age burial mounds in Eastern Norway, and their links to specific Roman period mounds and graves, the paper explores how time and the past were perceived in the Viking Age. This further opens potential for examining connections between the use of the past and identities and self-perceptions in a Viking Age society. The analysis also includes a movement away from understanding reuse merely as a means of power. The overall ambition is to demonstrate the relevance of studies of the past in the past in archaeology today.

Thomas Cole’s Double View of Mount Holyoke

When Thomas Cole first unpacked his easel in the Catskill Mountains, and began to paint the scenes that would make him America’s most influential landscape artist, there was still a close relationship between the United States and Britain. Though the War of 1812 was a bitter conflict regarding all remaining British claims to North America, it had ended in stalemate a decade earlier and neither side was in the mood for another war. Instead, the two countries had agreed to an ongoing series of negotiations to settle their differences. Comity and compromise were the order of the day. Coincidentally, so was landscape painting. Artists such as John Constable and J.M.W. Turner were just the latest lights in what was already, in Ann Bermingham’s words, a ‘golden age of English landscape painting’ that began with Thomas Gainsborough.1 Could anything be more inspiring to a painter like Cole...

Framing the Non-human: American Honey as Eco-Road Movie

This article approaches Andrea Arnold's American Honey (2016) as a contemporary manifestation of an eco-road movie. Although the film's expansive interest in the ‘natural’ environment and its non-human inhabitants aligns it with Arnold's earlier work, American Honey is unique for its complex engagement with the cinematic traditions of Hollywood genre films. I argue that Arnold's eco-aesthetics work to conflate the distinctions between human and non-human worlds, offering a de-romanticisation of the American picturesque vistas and exploring the intersections of human speciesism, masculinity and whiteness, as well as narratives of conquest and ownership. I focus on the ways in which the film both participates in and exceeds Arnold's previous ecocinematic approach in filming British landscape, while at the same time highlighting her distinctive contribution to the tradition of the road movie. If the conventional road movie tends to offer a sense of escape from the capitalist dystopia, American Honey displaces such a promise. In its complex treatment of the supposedly distinct realms of nature and culture, the film does not endorse a return to the mythical wild but, rather, draws attention to the messiness of ecological, social and economic entanglements, exposing both neoliberal and anthropocentric power structures. Ultimately, it is through the intertwining of the film's ecological orientation and its engagement with the conventions of the road movie and its antecedent, the Western, that such a critique is possible.

Raman spectroscopic study of the pigments in a putative John Constable oil sketch

AbstractRaman has long been established as a nondestructive and noninvasive technique that has found increasing application in the area of cultural heritage and the study of works of art. Here, we present a further application of Raman spectroscopy in the study of an oil painting belonging to the de Brécy Trust. In the work presented, Raman microscopy has been employed to spectroscopically study minute fragments of excised pigments from a small oil painting bearing the hallmarks of a study sketch by the famous English landscape artist John Constable. Raman spectra were collected from 18 discrete areas of the work, chosen due to their colour in order to potentially cover all of the pigments used in this work. Of the 18, six positive identifications were made, confirming that the painting contained pigments and minerals known to be favoured by the artist. Whilst the remaining 12 sample sites were complicated by the fluorescence effects observed from the applied varnish, this can be useful in providing evidence to support the application of the ‘scumbling’ technique known to be favoured by Constable. We have positively identified the pigments: ultramarine/lapis lazuli, lead white, red lead, Prussian blue, chrome yellow and ivory black. We have also identified amorphous carbon and gypsum. These positively identified pigments link into Constable's existing colour box and four palettes, providing evidence that could lead to the painting being attributed to Constable.

The double return of Friedrich Engels: Towards a dialectics of the trace

Two sculptures of Friedrich Engels have recently been installed in Greater Manchester, the city where the social philosopher spent most of his working life and was the focus of his proto-ethnographic account of the early industrial city. The first sculpture is a fibreglass ‘fabricated ruin’ set within a newly rebuilt section of the University of Salford campus. The second is a former Soviet monument that was transported from eastern Ukraine to Tony Wilson Place, a new arts, business and entertainment space in central Manchester. While the appropriation of the city’s radical figures and movements is very much part of Manchester’s narrative of post-industrial regeneration, the ‘homecoming’ of Engels in the decade following the 2008 financial crash and amid the unfolding Brexit crisis raises certain methodological concerns for us. Engels is a figure who has returned and can be returned to. Here, his ‘double return’ can be read in very particular ways. In this paper, we bring Engels back to Manchester as a figure who will immediately re-signify against the contemporary political, economic and cultural landscape. In doing so, we advocate a dialectics of geographical traces that can grasp the social contradictions and fractures of the present in a way that works both within and beyond the writing and practice of Engels. As we move on from the 2019 UK General Election in which the Conservative party formed a substantial majority government into the fractured British landscapes of 2021 and beyond, this practice becomes increasingly necessary.

Eurasian beaver (Castor fiber) health surveillance in Britain: Assessing a disjunctive reintroduced population.

Numerous translocations of Eurasian beavers have occurred with little implementation of standardised health screening. Pre-release health screening enables the selection of individuals with the best survival prospects and reduces potential health risks, but this is by-passed during unofficial releases. Beaver reintroduction to Britain has been haphazard and currently disjunctive populations of varying status exist. This observational cross section study investigated the health status of three beaver populations, with 90 live beavers tested for a range of pathogens comprising 56 from Tayside (unofficially released Scotland), nine from Knapdale (officially released Scotland) and 25 from Devon (unofficially released England). In addition, a further 32 cadavers were screened (25 from Tayside and seven from Knapdale). All beavers were in good physical condition, did not harbour any non-native disease or parasites of concern and demonstrated remarkably low levels of any disease or parasite exposure. Beavers are establishing and adapting well to British landscapes and are not acting as reservoirs of significant zoonotic diseases. Official, licensed reintroduction programmes may appear overly convoluted; however, reputational damage of unofficial releases should be considered, along with the health and welfare of the animals involved and collateral damage to other wildlife, domestic animals and humans.

English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086 by Chris Gosden, Chris Green, and the EngLaId Team

Reviewed by: English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086by Chris Gosden, Chris Green, and the EngLaId Team Hans Renes English Landscapes and Identities: Investigating Landscape Change from 1500 BC to AD 1086. Chris Gosden, Chris Green, and the EngLaId Team. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 496, maps, tables, charts, appendices, bibliography, index. $115.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-0-1988-7062-0. The study of the histories of English man-made landscapes has come a long way since the days of O. G. S. Crawford and William G. Hoskins. Following their leads, the interdisciplinary study of landscape history and archaeology (LHA) by archaeologists, historians, geographers, ecologists, and others developed into a popular field and became a discipline on its own with seminars, journals, and a constant flow of books [End Page 105]that appeal to the academic as well as the general reader. The huge growth of available data from commercial development–led archaeology and by the Portable Antiquities Scheme asked for systematic study on a regional and even international scale, facilitated by techniques such as geographical information systems. To cope with such new challenges, the large-scale, interdisciplinary, and long-term research project English Landscapes and Identities (acronym EngLaId) was funded by an ERC Advanced Grant from 2011 to 2016. The project covered an extraordinary long period, from the Middle Bronze Age until the Domesday Book, studied by a team of archaeologists with specializations in different time periods. It is described as a big data project, as it attempted "to synthesize all the major data sets from English archaeology within a digital environment" (v). Within the discipline of archaeology I know of no other project in which big data were used on this scale. Five years after the project was finished, the present, impressive book was published. The first introductory chapter provides the backgrounds of the project, a short but clear historiography, and the main terminology. The other ten chapters are grouped into three main themes: data, broader patterns, and variability. In the first part, the creation of archaeological data is explored. It is fascinating to see the extension of the toolbox during the last century, with air photographs, new dating methods, palynology, statistics, and so on. In chapter 2 the availability and in chapter 3 the dispersion of archaeological data is analyzed. England has long been divided into a highland (gradually the northwestern half) and a lowland zone. The lowland zone has during most of the last millennia been more densely populated and more intensively used, but—as modern development is concentrated in these regions—there is also more development-led archaeology and hence more data. During the two centuries before the Domesday Book, part of the lowland zone, running from south to northeast England, developed to become the grain basket of medieval England, characterized by open fields and villages. It brought a number of authors, among them the ecologist Oliver Rackham, the geographer Brian Roberts, and the archaeologists Stuart Wrathmell and Stephen Rippon, to divide England into three major landscape regions (the mountainous Northwest, the medieval agricultural core of the Central Region, and the densely populated Southeast). Also for the EngLaId-project, these three major [End Page 106]regions were an important starting point. The sample regions and transects for which part of the data are collected cover both the twofold and the threefold division. In the second part, the researchers look for broader patterns, in chapters focusing on ecology, movement, cycles, field systems, and naming. Chapter 4 analyzes the long-term interactions between society and ecology. The text warns against determinism, which is traced within my own discipline of geography (108), yet there are of course complex relations between human society and the physical environment, and they are influenced by changes in both as well as in their interrelations. Within this theme, perhaps more could have been said about the changing demands and perceptions of the physical environment by different and dynamic societies. Later in the same chapter the important question of the chronology of forested and open landscapes is raised, partly by looking at the history of erosion and sedimentation. Although regional variation is huge, the authors conclude...

Is the Parish Church Worth Saving?

Since as long ago as the twelfth century, England has been organised into parishes for it was one of the most well-organised and prosperous realms of the Middle Ages. Parish churches have been a constant feature in the English landscape right up to the present: their towers loom out of the misty Somerset fens, their spires peep valiantly between the monstrous London skyscrapers or lurk behind a Grantham shopping centre. Whether in Scunthorpe or Woking they proclaim higher values than the market: something or someone who calls us to account. They assert a spiritual depth to reality.

ПЕРВАЯ ЭКРАНИЗАЦИЯ «ПРИКЛЮЧЕНИЙ АЛИСЫ В СТРАНЕ ЧУДЕС» (ALICE IN WONDERLAND, 1903)

The article is dedicated to the British silent film Alice in Wonderland by Percy Stow and Cecil Hepworth, which was found and restored in 2010. The 12-minute film was unusually long for early cinema. Almost all of the survived credits annotate several short scenes at once, showing their interconnection or, conversely, apartness from each other. This suggests that some scenes were sold not separately, but as a series of scenes united by a credit. Structurally, each fragment of the film, consisting of 2–3 scenes, is similar to one episode of series. Therefore, the origin of the principles of seriality in cinema can be associated with film adaptations of fairy-tale stories. The concept of space demonstrates the inner duality of the Wonderland. The private part of it looks like an English landscape garden, while the space of the Queen and her entourage is designed as a classicist regular park. In his adaptation (2010) of Carroll’s fairy-tale, Tim Burton will further unfold the theme of duality and conflict inside the Wonderland. In the 1903 film adaptation, Alice was played by May Clark, a grown-up girl who worked at the Hepworth studio. The dreamlike nature of the screen reality is emphasized by the restraint of the amateur performers’ play and the unobtrusiveness of the fantastic, when the screen fantasy world is both similar and different from the everyday life. The marriageable age of the heroine and some of the scenes that look like Alice’s “going through the torments” make us interpret the action as the embodiment of her unconscious. The magic garden, where a young girl is so eager to get, a symbol of the desirable joys of an adult life, becomes a nightmare for Alice. The film was released in the same year as the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was established, and it merged into an era of revision of Victorian ideals and rejection of the perception of women in line with patriarchal values. Tim Burton’s film, created in the era of the new emancipation and reconsideration of gender, largely corresponds to the first screen adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, presenting the Victorian world as a generalized image of a society that suppresses the individual and naturally provokes protest.

Brexitland’s dark ecologies: new British landscape writing

ABSTRACT This essay offers a taxonomy of the New British Landscape writing, first identified in 2008. It suggests five principal ways of organising this large and growing body of work: through the thematics of rewilding, trauma, folk horror, walking as counter-memory, and a fascination with provisional edgelands. The contextual framework suggests that landscape writing marks an attempt to bolster place against the abstraction of space in modernity, a tactic amplified by resurgence of nationalism since the financial crash of 2008. The distinct British version of this crisis has been marked by the sharply divisive Brexit vote, which inevitably cuts across many aspects of contemporary landscape writing.

Shiny Black and Layers of White: Japanned Papier Mâché, Race and the British Empire

Abstract Race, class and empire in nineteenth-century England inflected understandings of japanned papier mâché, influencing both its brief popularity and its abrupt demise in the 1860s. Although the material was rarely used as an explicit signifier in nineteenth-century literature or theory, or indeed mentioned at all, its inclusion in the Great Exhibition suggests its cultural and industrial centrality. This article proposes that this disparity results not from an absence of meaning, but from too great a complexity and too clear a set of implications. As an imitation of an East Asian form, japanned papier mâché represented an Orientalizing fantasy; as a shiny black surface, japanned papier mâché tapped into both desires and anxieties surrounding racial Blackness; as a backdrop for depictions of recognizably British landscapes and architecture; and as a distinctively British industry, japanned papier mâché offered a kind of national identity-fashioning. Tying a ubiquitous but understudied material of the English mid-nineteenth century to broader histories of the British empire, this article demonstrates the tidy encapsulation of the fraught and complex 1850s and 1860s into the materiality, forms and failure of japanned papier mâché.

Landscape syncope: desire, power and the presence–absence of landscape

ABSTRACT The article conceptualises the notion of the landscape syncope: a political landscape performance generated by desire, which affects landscape perception. The syncopal mode involves a core of absence that pertains to a topographical gap mediated by suspension, movement and revelation. The article explores three case studies that address designed and seemingly natural landscapes – the ‘ha-ha’ in the English landscape garden, the Baroque gardens of Vaux-le-Vicomte, and the landscape of Israel’s eastern border. These case studies point to the scope of the landscape syncope, which operates as a counterpoint in the landscape. The analysis builds on an interdisciplinary inquiry that addresses the critical discourse on landscape, garden and art history, as well as critical psychoanalysis and cultural discourse. The discussion links the Lacanian notion of objet (petit) a and the structure of (partially satisfied) desire with the ambiguity and elusiveness of landscape, and its ontology of lack and absence. The article suggests the syncopal mode as an interpretation of landscape, as a manifestation of power and a political performance of desire.

„Sztuczne raje” — motywy i sposoby upiększania krajobrazu w literaturze i kulturze początków XIX wieku

The present article focuses on a tendency to artificially beautify landscape, a tendency that was particularly strong in European culture of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, having been anticipated in Renaissance and Baroque culture. This is associated with landscape being assigned a cultural character, transformed by humans on the basis of natural resources. This tendency became a fluid process partially documented by literature. The process ranged from the introduction of decorative elements into gardens (statues like the famous Apennine Colossus in the garden of the Villa di Pratolino), through unique garden designs to the creation of landscape parks adapting natural spaces for purposes dictated by aesthetic theories (English landscape parks). French landscape gardens, which brought to the fore anthropologically viewed human beings living in a world built with geometric precision and order, were contrasted with the English landscape parks designed completely differently. The transformations taking place in culture, literature and art at the turn of the nineteenth century (Romanticism) went hand in hand with actions aimed at aestheticising landscape on the basis of natural resources. This was accompanied by important changes in customs resulting from new concepts of viewing landscape. The resulting development of tourism, consisting in its gradual popularisation, led to the emergence in the way of viewing nature of a certain hierarchy of values of various topographic sites (famous mountains, valleys, waterfalls, lakes, springs etc.). The desire to increase their attractiveness assumed the form of artificial beautification through the addition of artificial elements to landscape (grottos, temples, ruins, cascades, bowers). Many technical novelties were used to increase the effectiveness of hydrological elements (galleries under waterfalls, displays of waterfalls through coloured glass, boat trips to waterfalls). This tendency evolved further with the development of tourism. The period saw a rise in the role and attractiveness of health resorts, with an increasing role being played in their spatial arrangement by parks with fountains, bowers, artificial waterfalls. Access to sites known for beautiful vistas in the mountains was facilitated (steps cut in rock and stairs built on mountain slopes, galleries, gloriettes, viewing decks or even viewing towers). In this process of artificial aestheticisation of landscape an increasingly important role was played by the railways enabling people to observe landscapes through the windows, which was impossible for those travelling by stagecoaches. Artificial sluices above waterfalls were used to bank up water, released upon a fee. Changes in their infrastructure were accompanied by a theatricalisation of the setting (Ossianesque imitation, artificial folklorisation, blind musicians, children offering flowers to tourists, special acoustic effects like echo).

Visual Capacity Assessment of the Open Landscape in Terms of Protection and Shaping: Case Study of a Village in Poland

This article describes the methodology and results of research on landscape visual capacity. The aim of the project was to develop a tool that would support planning and design decisions at the level of communal management in rural areas in Poland through systematic application of visual criteria. Their importance in the protection, management and shaping of space is underlined by the document produced at the European Landscape Convention of 2000 (ELC). To date, ELC recommendations have not been fully implemented in Poland. The author of the study used the methods of the Krakow School of Landscape Architecture in assessing cultural landscapes and referred to the assumptions of the British Landscape Character Assessment (LCA). The analysis was based on the results of a landscape identification conducted in a part of the Cekcyn commune. The assessment of visual capacity was conducted for the village of Nowy Sumin, located in that commune. The effect of the study is the classification of open landscapes with respect to the assessment of visual changes resulting from potential residential development. The results obtained prompt the conclusion that the applied method can effectively support local spatial planning as it takes national conditions into account.