Landscape Of England Research Articles

Bird conservation and the land sharing-sparing continuum in farmland-dominated landscapes of lowland England.

Empirical evidence from many regions suggests that most species would be least negatively affected if human food demand were met through high-yield agricultural production and conservation of nonfarm ecosystems (land sparing), rather than through wildlife-friendly farming over a larger area (land sharing). However, repeated glaciation and a long history of agriculture may lead to different results in regions such as western Europe. We compared the consequences of land sparing and land sharing on breeding bird species in 2 lowland regions of England, The Fens, with 101 species, and Salisbury Plain, with 83. We derived density-yield responses for each species and then estimated regional population size under regional food production strategies, including land sharing and land sparing, a range of intermediate strategies, and a novel mixed strategy. In both regions, more species achieved maximum regional population size under land sparing than land sharing. In The Fens, the majority of birds were loser species (estimated to have smaller populations under all food production strategies than in the preagricultural baseline scenario), whereas in Salisbury Plain the majority were winners (smaller populations in the preagricultural baseline scenario). Loser species overwhelmingly achieved maximum regional population size under land sparing, whereas winner species achieved maximum regional population size under either land sharing or an intermediate strategy, highlighting the importance of defining which groups of species are the target of conservation. A novel 3-compartment strategy (combining high-yield farming, natural habitat, and low-yield farming) often performed better than either land sharing or land sparing. Our results support intermediate or 3-compartment land-sparing strategies to maximize bird populations across lowland agricultural landscapes. To deliver conservation outcomes, any shift toward land sparing must, however, ensure yield increases are sustainable in the long term, do not entail increased negative effects on surrounding areas, and are linked to allocation of land for nature.

Conflicts of power, landscape and amenity in debates over the British Super Grid in the 1950s

AbstractThe ‘Super Grid’ network of high-voltage power lines transformed the landscapes of England and southern Scotland in the 1950s. This article examines debates over the siting of pylons, with a focus on the public inquiries into the proposed lines across the Pennines in Lancashire. It brings together archives on electrification from the newly nationalised British Electricity Authority, preservationist groups and local government to reveal deeper insights into processes of local and national decision-making about and popular attitudes to the rural landscape. It uncovers how the public inquiries exposed tensions and differences about the definition of amenity, not just between the electricity industry and preservationists, but also between interests representing urban industrial districts and the National Parks, northern and southern England, and within the preservationist movement. The conflicts over pylons and amenity shows how narratives of landscape preservation were contested and riven with class, region and economic differences in the postwar period.

КУЛЬТУРНО-ИСТОРИЧЕСКИЙ КОНТЕКСТ МИФОТВОРЧЕСТВА Г.Ф. ЛАВКРАФТА

H.P. Lovecraft created an original mythology that has not only become science fiction and fantasy classics, but also determined horror genre development in general. In his literary works, Lovecraft used images derived from both ancient religious traditions and contemporary western esotericism, filling his imaginary worlds with mysterious cosmic creatures. The writer’s cultural and historic environment played a very important role as the cultural landscape of New England and theosophical concepts widespread at that time had a great impact on the author’s work and writing. The original “mythology” invented by Lovecraft later played a key role in development of some new religious movements. Besides, Lovecraft’s mythology and images are reflected in the modern popular culture. The paper analyzes Lovecraft’s works and religious motives that are used or reflected in them, cultural factors that influenced the writer and Lovecraft’s heritage place in occult concepts, practices and subcultures of today.

The Medieval Clothier by John S. Lee

Reviewed by: The Medieval Clothier by John S. Lee Kailen Kinsey John S. Lee, The Medieval Clothier (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press 2018 365 pp., ill. The increasingly codified and evolving industry of cloth production in late medieval and early modern England has elicited questions as to the capitalist nature of the work, its level of reach and organization, and its importance to the society in which it existed. Some have suggested that its overseeing merchants were practicing an industrial capitalism that presaged the far later Industrial Revolution by centralizing production, improving productivity, and introducing new spinning and weaving technologies. Others have focused their arguments on the exact time when these changes aided in the rise of the English cloth trade, placing it variously after the Black Death or well into the century after it. John S. Lee, in his eminently accessible work, The Medieval Clothier, tackles these and other issues by examining the processes of cloth production, the workers who produced and sold the cloth, and the greater relationship between the government, the people, and the “clothiers” in England between 1350 and 1550. Lee begins his examination by first explaining the variety of tasks like spinning, weaving, and dyeing necessary to the creation of cloth. Wool is his primary focus due to its position as the most prominent material produced in England, but other lesser materials like linen receive attention as well. The subject matter included in this opening section would be well known to any specialist readers of his work, but their inclusion performs the important function of making The Medieval Clothier a useful introductory text to any student of medieval material culture or other general reader. The same is true of the proceeding chapter on the marketing of finished materials. Yet, Lee goes further, illustrating how the local and pan-European importance of the cloth trade during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries developed through both the extensive trade venues within England and the interest of members of different Hanseatic families and other Europeans throughout the period. Through this examination, Lee is next able to dive into the greater import of his [End Page 231] research: the why and when of this English rise to prominence. His next several chapters conclude that the rise was due in part to the post-bubonic plague accessibility of land and labor, the fourteenth-century downturn in Flemish cloth production, and the involvement of the government in subsidizing cloth production and regulating the industry. These causes, among others, saw cloth production spread outside its previously city-based bounds and into the country, where regulations were slower to take hold and fortunes were waiting to be made. This changed the social landscape of England, which now found successful clothiers all across the country. These men became benefactors to churches and members of the gentry as their largess and control over the multiple workers and processes of cloth production made them practicers of what Lee agrees was an early form of merchant capitalism. The volume is concluded with a chapter on four particular men whose success in the cloth industry, and subsequently the survival of their wills and other records, makes them excellent testimonies to the significance of the medieval English cloth industry. Miniature biographies of Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall and three others form Lee’s evidence for the great scale of the cloth trade, which has previously been argued to have been more meager than Lee’s work suggests. In addition to this important conclusion, however, is the humanizing capacity of this final chapter, which takes the work out of the realm of generalized facts and figures and into the tangible reality of how individuals experienced the rise of cloth production. Lee’s research in The Medieval Clothier is clearly presented, well organized, and helpfully reinforced by the inclusion of maps of English centers of production, tables of cloth prices, taxes, and varieties, reproductions of medieval depictions of cloth making, and several appendices which include the full text of the wills of Thomas Paycocke and others. Further, in this treatise on “labor, capital, and markets,” (156) Lee draws skillfully on public pleas, ulnage (cloth subsidy) accounts, trade records, literary references to clothiers...

Capturing the fast-food landscape in England using large-scale network analysis

Fast-food outlets play a significant role in the nutrition of British children who get more food from such shops than the school canteen. To reduce young people’s access to fast-food meals during the school day, many British cities are implementing zoning policies. For instance, cities can create buffers around schools, and some have used 200 meters buffers while others used 400 meters. But how close is too close? Using the road network is needed to precisely computing the distance between fast-food outlets (for policies limiting the concentration), or fast-food outlets and the closest school (for policies using buffers). This estimates how much of the fast-food landscape could be affected by a policy, and complementary analyses of food utilization can later translate the estimate into changes on childhood nutrition and obesity. Network analyses of retail and urban forms are typically limited to the scale of a city. However, to design national zoning policies, we need to perform this analysis at a national scale. Our study is the first to perform a nation-wide analysis, by linking large datasets (e.g., all roads, fast-food outlets and schools) and performing the analysis over a high performance computing cluster. We found a strong spatial clustering of fast-food outlets (with 80% of outlets being within 120 of another outlet), but much less clustering for schools. Results depend on whether we use the road network on the Euclidean distance (i.e. ‘as the crow flies’): for instance, half of the fast-food outlets are found within 240 m of a school using an Euclidean distance, but only one-third at the same distance with the road network. Our findings are consistent across levels of deprivation, which is important to set equitable national policies. In line with previous studies (at the city scale rather than national scale), we also examined the relation between centrality and outlets, as a potential target for policies, but we found no correlation when using closeness or betweenness centrality with either the Spearman or Pearson correlation methods.

Scaling Down: H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Tono-Bungay (1909), and the Uppark Dolls House

In H. G. Wells’s semi-autobiographical novel, Tono-Bungay (1909), he recounts playing with the eighteenth-century dolls house at Uppark, a country estate in West Sussex where his mother was the housekeeper. Drawing on Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking (1978), I argue that Wells remakes his fictional worlds in Tono-Bungay and The Time Machine (1895) from the Uppark dolls house. To unpack the function and symbolism of the dolls house within Wells’s texts, I refer to work by dolls house experts, cultural historians, and Wells scholars. When read together, Tono-Bungay and The Time Machine reveal the material dimensions and history of the dolls house that are at work in both novels. As a small-scale country house, the Uppark dolls house puts into perspective the antiquated paradigms that continue to exert control over the physical, social, and cultural landscapes of England. This is most clear when we consider the dolls house as an off-shoot of the curiosity cabinet, which evolves into the public museum – an evolution reflected in both novels. The dolls house, curiosity cabinet, and country house relate to the potent yet obsolete ideology of the microcosm, which Wells critiques explicitly in Tono-Bungay and implicitly in The Time Machine. The concept of play and the miniature are serious matters for Wells, who knows that small-scale objects can exert great influence on the ‘real’ world, clarifying and amplifying the material conditions that they model. Miniaturization is a high-stakes game – giving us the ability to control, comprehend, and remake our world into a rational paradigm.

Nesting behaviour and breeding success of Willow Tits Poecile montanus in north-west England

ABSTRACTThe British Willow Tit Poecile montanus has undergone a substantial decline in abundance and a severe contraction in range since the 1970s, for reasons that are poorly understood. Breeding failure, due to nest-site competition and predation, has been suggested as a potential factor in the decline, but limited data exist for the nesting ecology and breeding productivity of the species in Britain. We studied a sample of 128 Willow Tit nests in a habitat mosaic of early successional woodland, scrub and wetland in a post-industrial landscape in north-west England, which is increasingly becoming a key refuge for the species in Britain. Results showed that nesting began in April, with standing deadwood of silver birch Betula pendula, common elder Sambucus nigra and black alder Alnus glutinosa being the most frequent nest sites, and the characteristics of nest sites are described. Daily survival rates and overall probability of nest survival are calculated, and details are given for the timing of breeding, clutch size, nestling survival and number of fledglings produced. Overall, 55% of nesting attempts were successful, although many first breeding attempts failed due to Willow Tits being evicted from their nest cavity by Blue Tits Cyanistes caeruleus, or nests being predated by Great Spotted Woodpeckers Dendrocopos major and, potentially, grey squirrels Sciurus carolinensis. Repeat breeding attempts were relatively more successful, but produced fewer fledglings on average. The results are discussed in the context of other studies of Willow Tits and some related species, and also the implications for the conservation of Willow Tits in Britain.

Land cover and vegetation data from an ecological survey of "key habitat" landscapes in England, 1992–1993

Abstract. Since 1978, a series of national surveys (Countryside Survey, CS) have been carried out by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) (formerly the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, ITE) to gather data on the natural environment in Great Britain (GB). As the sampling framework for these surveys is not optimised to yield data on rarer or more localised habitats, a survey was commissioned by the then Department of the Environment (DOE, now the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, DEFRA) in the 1990s to carry out additional survey work in English landscapes which contained semi-natural habitats that were perceived to be under threat, or which represented areas of concern to the ministry. The landscapes were lowland heath, chalk and limestone (calcareous) grasslands, coasts and uplands. The information recorded allowed an assessment of the extent and quality of a range of habitats defined during the project, which can now be translated into standard UK broad and priority habitat classes. The survey, known as the "Key Habitat Survey", followed a design which was a series of gridded, stratified, randomly selected 1 km squares taken as representative of each of the four landscape types in England, determined from statistical land classification and geological data ("spatial masks"). The definitions of the landscapes are given in the descriptions of the spatial masks, along with definitions of the surveyed habitats. A total of 213 of the 1 km2 square sample sites were surveyed in the summers of 1992 and 1993, with information being collected on vegetation species, land cover, landscape features and land use, applying standardised repeatable methods. The database contributes additional information and value to the long-term monitoring data gathered by the Countryside Survey and provides a valuable baseline against which future ecological changes may be compared, offering the potential for a repeat survey. The data were analysed and described in a series of contract reports and are summarised in the present paper, showing for example that valuable habitats were restricted in all landscapes, with the majority located within protected areas of countryside according to different UK designations. The dataset provides major potential for analyses, beyond those already published, for example in relation to climate change, agri-environment policies and land management. Precise locations of the plots are restricted, largely for reasons of landowner confidentiality. However, the representative nature of the dataset makes it highly valuable for evaluating the status of ecological elements within the associated landscapes surveyed. Both land cover data and vegetation plot data were collected during the surveys in 1992 and 1993 and are available via the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.5285/7aefe6aa-0760-4b6d-9473-fad8b960abd4. The spatial masks are also available from https://doi.org/10.5285/dc583be3-3649-4df6-b67e-b0f40b4ec895.

The Half Moon Photography Workshop and Camerawork: Catalysts in the British Photographic Landscape (1972–1985)

The history of the radical photography collective Half Moon Photography Workshop has not so far been the subject of in-depth research in accounts of 1970s British photography. At a moment when photography was gradually gaining recognition as an art form, its radical voice and independent stance played a fundamental role in shaping the photographic landscape in Britain. Between 1972 and 1985, Half Moon Photography Workshop initiated pioneering debates on the politics of photographic representation and the reinvention of documentary practices and was instrumental in the emergence of photographic theory. Based on archival research and interviews conducted with some founding members, this detailed history examines the initial project, tensions, and evolution of the organization, which started as the Half Moon Gallery in 1972, became the Half Moon Photography Workshop in October 1975, and eventually Camerawork in 1981, taking the name of its successful photography magazine Camerawork published from 1976. As a gallery, a publishing project, and a resource center equipped with darkrooms open to all, the East End organization acted as a catalyst in the expanding British photographic landscape of the 1970s. The new political context of the 1980s and unresolved internal tensions caused its demise in 1985.

How grazing affects soil quality of soils formed in the glaciated northeastern United States.

Historically, much of the New England landscape was converted to pasture for grazing animals and harvesting hay. Both consumer demand for local sustainably produced food, and the number of small farms is increasing in RI, highlighting the importance of characterizing the effects livestock have on the quality of pasture soils. To assess how livestock affect pasture on Charlton and Canton soils series in RI, we examined soil quality in farms raising beef cattle (Bos taurus), sheep (Ovis aries), and horses (Equus ferus caballus), using hayed pastures as a control. We sampled three pastures per livestock type and three control hayed pastures in May, August, and October 2012. Hay fields and pastures grazed by sheep had statistically significant (P < 0.001) better soil quality than pastures grazed by beef cattle or horses. This was driven by parameters including penetration resistance, bulk density, aggregate stability, and infiltration rate. Hayfields also showed higher soil quality measures than grazed pastures for organic matter content and active C. In addition, significant differences in nitrate and phosphate concentrations were observed among livestock types. Respiration and infiltration rates, pH, and ammonium concentrations, on the other hand, did not differ significantly among pasture types. When all soil quality indicators in this study were weighed equally, soil quality scores followed the order: hay > sheep > beef cattle > horses. The results of our study provide baseline data on the effect different types of livestock have on pasture soil quality in RI, which may be useful in making sound land use and agricultural management decisions.

Beyond Reformation: An Essay on William Langland's Piers Plowman and the End of Constantinian Christianity

<i>Beyond Reformation: An Essay on William Langland's</i> Piers Plowman <i>and the End of Constantinian Christianity</i>

Emerging schooling landscapes in England: How primary system leaders are responding to new school groupings

In England the balance of responsibilities between national and local government for the governance of education is changing. Relationships between schools are shifting and new structures, groups and alliances are being created in response to national policy. The article is part of a project to understand how the new local education landscapes are emerging. Primary schools are relatively reluctant to embrace key aspects of national policy. We analysed interviews with primary system leaders in three contrasting local authorities to find out how they were responding, and why, and the nature of the groups they wanted to join, create or cooperate with. We identify concerns, interests and motivations that conflict with key aspects of national policy. In the process, we supplement earlier contributions as to how school groupings might usefully be categorised.

Copyright and the Political Economy of News in Britain, 1836–1911

This article explores nineteenth-century efforts to obtain legal protection for news in relation to shifts in the media landscape in Britain. It shows how the campaign to repeal the stamp duty led a handful of London publishers to lobby for a special copyright in news. These efforts failed but not without sparking debates in Parliament and the press about how best to guarantee public access to quality journalism. Later in the century, lawsuits brought by the Times clarified the scope of protection for news articles, including reports of public speeches, but efforts to protect news and information as such continued to face opposition. The article concludes with the Copyright Act of 1911, which explicitly recognized copyright in newspaper articles but not for the underlying factual details of news that some publishers had fought for.

The importance of landscape characteristics for the delivery of cultural ecosystem services

The importance of Cultural Ecosystem Services (CES) to human wellbeing is widely recognised. However, quantifying these non-material benefits is challenging and consequently they are often not assessed. Mapping approaches are increasingly being used to understand the spatial distribution of different CES and how this relates to landscape characteristics. This study uses an online Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) to elicit information on outdoor locations important to respondents in Wiltshire, a dynamic lowland landscape in southern England. We analysed these locations in a GIS with spatial datasets representing potential influential factors, including protected areas, land use, landform, and accessibility. We assess these characteristics at different spatial and visual scales for different types of cultural engagement. We find that areas that are accessible, near to urban centres, with larger views, and a high diversity of protected habitats, are important for the delivery of CES. Other characteristics including a larger area of woodland and the presence of sites of historic interest in the surrounding landscape were also influential. These findings have implications for land-use planning and the management of ecosystems, by demonstrating the benefits of high quality ecological sites near to towns. The importance of maintaining and restoring landscape features, such as woodlands, to enhance the delivery of CES were also highlighted.

Silenced voices: the disappearance of the university and the student teacher in teacher education policy discourse in England

The teacher preparation landscape in England has been subject to radical policy change. Since 2010, the policy agenda has repositioned initial teacher preparation as a craft best learnt through observation and imitation of teachers in school settings. Simultaneously, a market-based approach to the recruitment of pre-service teachers has led to significant changes for prospective entrants to the profession. In the enactment of policy between 2010 and 2015, the roles of universities and voices of prospective teachers were systematically silenced. Using critical discourse analysis, we demonstrate how both actors have been positioned in, and have accommodated and resisted, the current policy discourses. These findings highlight the importance of problematising and understanding these emerging issues at local and international levels.

“It was a sweet view – sweet to the eye and the mind.” Jane Austen og det pittoreske landskab

It is obvious in Jane Austen’s novels that she was interested in the ongoing debate of ’the picturesque garden’, and in all her novels the characters are discussing how to look at the landscape, how to ‘improve’ the estates according to certain rules, and how taste and moral are connected to each other. The picturesque garden is inspired by paintings from the 17th century by Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin, and in that way a clear line can be drawn back to Theocritus and Virgil, who introduced topoi as ‘locus amoenus’ and the ‘pastoral’. This article is examining how the relation is between these topoi, which are ideal landscapes that only exist in literature and painting, and the discussions of the design of real physical landscapes of contemporary England. It is difficult to decide on which side Austen was in the discussions of the picturesque. The article concludes that Austen’s voice is to be heard in the narrative, the development of the characters, and that she ends up with an attempt to reach an authentic relationship with landscape and nature that foreshadows a romantic feeling of nature. An appendix shows the later reception of Austen’s relationship to landscape, by analyzing a scene from modern films based on Jane Austen’s novels.

The impact of the women of the Technical Section of the Admiralty Air Department on the structural integrity of aircraft during World War One

In 1917, as the air war raged in Europe, some of Britain's finest mathematicians, engineers and scientists engaged in their own battle to understand the fundamentals of aerodynamics and aircraft construction. In London, Wing Commander Alec Ogilvie led the Technical Section of the Admiralty Air Department, which included a number of individuals dedicated to addressing aircraft structural issues; amongst them were three women, Hilda Hudson, Letitia Chitty and Beatrice Cave-Browne-Cave. In this article I describe the aeronautical landscape in Britain during the second decade of the 1900s, the place of these women within it, and their contributions to the structural integrity of early, British military aircraft.

Biodiversity and cultural ecosystem benefits in lowland landscapes in southern England

Evidence of the link between biodiversity and cultural ecosystem benefits (CEB) is scarce. Participatory workshops were used to explore perceptions of CEB attributable to biodiversity in lowland arable and semi-natural grassland landscapes in southern England. Increased biodiversity was found to be associated with greater perceived benefit, mainly at the habitat and landscape scale. It was, however, difficult to separate the effects of biodiversity from those of abiotic and human-made features, all of which combined to provide an important sense of place. Furthermore, CEB were strongly linked with supporting infrastructure, notably public access. It was observed that CEB were generated through socio-psychological 'pathways' as people interacted with environmental settings, such as acquiring knowledge, feeling regenerated and communicating with others. CEB were also attributed to provisioning and regulatory services, questioning the validity of partitioning cultural services. The findings have implications for practitioners designing programmes to enhance nature's contribution to people.

The Journey of Adrienne Rich

The Journey of Adrienne Rich

EcoGothic Disjunctions: Natural and Supernatural Liminality in Sarah Orne Jewett's Haunted Landscapes

Following the Civil War, northern New England communities in the nineteenth century experienced change that registered for the human inhabitants as a crisis of decline. Despite the continuance of a timber industry, traditional life was affected by deindustrialization (with loss of jobs to larger producers in the southern region and other urbanized areas) as well as a shift in agrarian practices wrought by a number of market factors, including declining wool prices and competition from larger western grain farms. The rural areas that lacked rail access were depopulating at an alarming rate, with “massive out-migration” to more industrialized areas. This “desertion,” as it were, gave rise to an iconic image: “During the last quarter of the century, the specter of the ‘abandoned farm’ arose to haunt” the northern New England landscape (Brown 137). It is no wonder then that writers like Sarah Orne Jewett found the gothic a fit mode of expression to capture the pastoral beauty and despair of the New England communities she depicted. The American perception of New England in decline was evidenced in popular magazines of the period: “Between 1890 and 1910, titles like ‘Broken Shadows on the New England Farm’ and ‘Is New England Decadent?’” (Brown 150) appeared frequently to remind Americans of the disturbing transformation occurring in the Yankee land from which the country derived much of its mythic conception of the self-sufficient, republican American character. In reality, the change taking place was more complicated than simple decline as contemporary scholars dispute the magnitude of regional destabilization that actually occurred in relation to other rural areas (Adams 122–23, 152). For example, resilient farmers, relying on concepts of intensive farming, deliberately allowed some acreage to revert to forest “in order to maximize output from their better land” (Brown 138) in line with current theories of market and agrarian science as well as a response to the chronic labor shortage.