Conflict in Landscape

Historian and Broadcaster, Joe Kerr, explores some of the arguments around landscape that faced the Institute when it was created, and considers what lessons we can draw from them today.

Given the uniquely British obsession with landscape, our reaction to this ninetieth birthday celebration for the Landscape Institute should perhaps be tinged with surprise at its relative youth, rather than admiration at its maturity. Depending on one’s particular viewpoint we’ve been improving and reshaping the landscape for at least three centuries, or mutilating and destroying it.

But of course what marks out the 1929 foundation of this august body, and makes its activities distinct from the work of predecessors, was its ambition to professionalise the work of its members: to place them on a par with architects and planners. This really only became a possibility once landscape practitioners had leapt the private garden fence and taken their place in the public and commercial realms, an ambition that was largely achieved in the twentieth century. Indeed in retrospect, the Institute has proved remarkably successful in elevating the status and influence of landscape practitioners, to the point where what were once ideals of landscape have become embedded in our physical environments. Without them it’s difficult to conceive that the protection and support now in place for our most valued environments, and the degree of access provided to them that we now all enjoy, would have been remotely possible.

So it’s clear that congratulations are in order as the Landscape Institute enters its tenth decade, and studying the timeline of achievements and events that it has been associated with, one can read a narrative of steady progress: from an uncertain world in which nature was vulnerable and undervalued and unmanaged, through a near century of campaigning, activism and legislation, to the point where our landscape is safely and lovingly deposited in professional hands. But this widely accepted narrative of steady upward progress – however reassuring, might be outdated. Just as we no longer believe that, say, public health, housing or education have travelled on an unbroken path of enlightened reform and improvement to the present day (as many of us were once taught) we should not make the same assumption about our attitudes to the landscape.

Kinder Scout Mass Trespass 1932.

© Courtesy of Chorley Historical and Archaelogical Society

Indeed, I would argue it is the central paradox of our love affair with the British landscape that in reality we have never, ever been able to agree on any single or universal aspect of the subject: we do not cease to argue about such fundamentals as what function it should serve, who should own it, who should have access to it, who is qualified to an opinion about it, or even where it should be located!

It is not within the scope of this brief essay to discuss every dispute on landscape over the last ninety years, but by considering some of the significant debates and events that were raging at the time of the Institute’s inception, and then to assess where things stand today, it is possible to tease out the importance of conflict and disagreement in shaping our policies and our feelings towards landscape, one that challenges any sense of a seamless and harmonious progress and development. At the heart of all these disputes lie those two most intractable of conundrums, namely the manageable and sustainable relationship between city and country, and the right of access to those landscapes.

The Landscape Institute was born exactly midway between the two world wars, themselves inevitably crucial in shaping contemporary attitudes to landscape, but it was in the two decades in between that so many important debates about the land and its uses were played out, with viewpoints becoming ever more polarised.

Thus whilst the horror of the Great War, and its haunting images of nightmarish landscapes, stimulated a new concern for the countryside and its restorative properties, the interwar years heralded unprecedented threats to our rural environments. In particular, landscape became one of the crucial battlegrounds between modernist ideologies of science and objectivity, and romantic and nostalgic narratives of pastoral innocence. If we consider some specific battles that helped to shape both public and professional attitudes to landscape in the inter-war years, and which remain contentious to this day, we start to raise pertinent questions about the status of landscape in contemporary society.

So what kind of arguments ranged around the issue of landscape when the Institute was created, and how do we experience them now?

The first and most familiar of these concerns the “right” to the countryside. The phenomenal growth in such health-giving outdoor pursuits as hiking entailed unprecedented numbers of people seeking access to beautiful but vulnerable landscapes, aided and abetted by the railway and bus companies, and by motoring organisations, with their numerous maps and guides. The conflicting responses to this weekend urban exodus echoed in a modest way the contemporary international arguments about trade and tariffs; on the one hand there was a desire to limit access, especially for those judged not to be worthy of the experience, or even outright exclusion through asserting property rights; on the other hand was the great campaign, quasi-religious in its fervour to gain access for all. It culminated in the Mass Trespass of 1932, “a demonstration for the rights of ordinary people to walk on land stolen from them in earlier times”, as one of its Manchester leaders claimed at his trial. This fundamental and class-based conflict concerning access and ownership lies at the heart of the progressive narrative, because of course it was eventually to lead to the formation of the National Parks, thus affirming the landscape as part of our common democratic heritage. However, the increasing precariousness of those constitutional settlements today suggests that they might prove to be temporary victories at most, as increasing exclusion and inequality threaten to roll back all of those mid-century aspirations.

‘Hiking’ 1936, James Walker Tucker.

© Tyne and Wear Museum, Bridgman Images

But the greatest threat to the landscape, and the most intractable arguments concerning it, arose from the unprecedented encroachment of cities upon the countryside; it is sobering to realise that London actually doubled in physical size between the wars through unchecked speculative housebuilding, or to borrow Clough Williams-Ellis’s memorable image: like the spreading tentacles of an octopus. It is easy in retrospect to condemn this unplanned encroachment, but if there was one idea that had widespread currency in early twentieth century planning debates, it was that that the Victorian cities we had inherited were wholly awful and unsuitable for human life, although there was little consensus about how to deal with this perceived evil.

On the one hand the Garden City Movement, which first flourished before the Great War but whose most significant influence fell in the 1920s, believed that our existing cities were beyond redemption and that the only recourse was to build new communities away from existing urban formations to provide a healthful life through the provision of low-density housing set within the landscape, at least for a privileged few. In many ways, the speculative housebuilders were merely following their lead as they ploughed up the fields of Middlesex to plant their housing developments, but neither the pioneers of Letchworth or Welwyn nor their commercial imitators, proposed solutions for the great mass of humanity trapped within the urban realm.

On the other hand, the radical new architectural and planning ideas of the Modern Movement, which were filtering into this country from continental Europe as the Landscape Institute was born, proposed a total inversion of these ideas. In particular Le Corbusier proposed what today we might term a re-greening of the city: a city in which its citizens would live in modern apartment blocks set in verdant parkland that flowed continuously around and under the architecture. This seductive vision remained largely unbuilt in this country, but there were a very few exemplary fragments constructed of this theoretical future, most notably the Highpoint apartment buildings designed by the Russian émigré Berthold Lubetkin. Here Corbusian inspired housing units float above a lush landscape, which whilst resolutely conventional in its design, is more than sufficient to evoke Le Corbusier’s vision of the “tower in the park”. But whilst these two opposing sets of ideas offered either a town in the country or a city in the park, the built reality lay somewhere in between: a low-density suburban realm that was neither city nor country.

One other polarised dispute over the British landscape, one that pitted amateur enthusiasm against professional expertise, has proved surprisingly enduring despite its apparently peripheral concerns. In 1921 the brewer and amateur polymath Alfred Watkins experienced a Damascene encounter with the landscape on a hill in his native Herefordshire: the apparent discovery of what became known as Ley lines, the pathways on which he believed ancient monuments and natural topography aligned with arrow-straight precision. This esoteric “discovery” gave birth to a popular movement of devotees and a pastime that offered the same health-giving exercise as the contemporaneous rambling movement, but without the ethical underpinning. Unsurprisingly, archaeologists largely rejected and ignored this popular movement, creating an enduring split between professional and amateur interest in the origins of the landscape.

Southern Railway Poster.

© MERL Archive

But in retrospect we now have to ask whether we have just been privileged to live in a unique era in which our landscapes enjoyed precious but ultimately fragile protections, in which the expertise and ambition of landscape professionals was listened to and acted upon, as more and more of those permanent victories now seems to be under sustained threat. For we now live in a society where the notion of public good or cultural value are not sufficient justifications on their own to cocoon potentially exploitable environments from those who perceive them as essentially unproductive.

So in the first decade of the Institute’s life debates raged about who could access the landscape, how we might live in it, and what we might uncover if we dug into its history: all fundamental questions on which we might imagine a consensus view could be formed. In the aftermath of the Second World war, it seemed that many of these questions had found answers, as the welfare state era ushered in both unprecedented consensus about what constituted public good and then crucially the legislation to enforce the necessary protections for our countryside and to enshrine our right of access to them. Indeed, the protection of the landscape was promoted in wartime propaganda campaigns as one of the key justifications for why we were fighting. Those great landmark Acts of the first postwar decade that established the Green Belts girdling our great cities, and threw a protective ring around the first of our national parks, spoke of preserving landscapes “for posterity”, and even “in perpetuity”, inducing the sense that final victory in these historic battles had been won. Our cities were greened as never before, as planners insisted upon a specific percentage of urban environments be given up to parkland, something easily achieved amongst our bomb sites; and of course, those environments themselves were transformed into valued assets with the establishment of new kinds of children’s playgrounds. New mass housing schemes utilised high-rise solutions in order to situate their striking modernist monuments within generous allocations of open parkland. Most of us have grown up with the consequences of those victories, and have enjoyed their fruits as of right, in realisation of the dreams of those intrepid pioneers of 90 years ago.

If we now review those battles of the interwar years, then it is impossible to avoid a sense of increasing foreboding for the future of our open spaces. Ironically so many of our most cherished environments are as much the victims of their own success as those mass trespassers who first pushed open the gate to the wilderness, and those progressive legislators who enshrined our national parks in law, failed to appreciate that it is the very access that they fought for that is now proving so potentially damaging to fragile ecologies. Furthermore, the current controversy surrounding fracking and other forms of resource exploitation may only be a foretaste of the threats yet to come to even our most protected environments, as worrying developments in America now illustrate.

As for the perennial question of the proper, sustainable relationship between city and country, the postwar consensus that restrained urban growth in favour of protecting our open spaces, that is now more fractious than ever, with significant and sustained encroachment on the Green Belt a reality with much more to follow. This is now a new threat to the kinds of open space that modernist architects and planners had designed into their mass housing schemes; the new phenomenon of “densification’ has placed many housing blocks, including some of immense architectural significance, under threat of demolition in order to enable a private land grab of the open and publicly accessible parkland within which they sit.

Fracking campaign.

© Shutterstock

So what are we to learn from this?

Firstly, that those battles that were won many decades ago were not permanent and irreversible victories, and that these disputes are destined to be played out in recurrent cycles, with each generation charged with maintaining vigilance in defence of the landscape.

Secondly, that the opposition between city and country remains as intractable as ever, but with the stakes getting ever higher, new and radical ideas are desperately needed.

Thirdly, that the old model of professionalism that has undoubtedly achieved so much in the past ninety years, cannot be guaranteed to offer the same into the future; the old demarcations between experts and amateurs are not just meaningless but are increasingly counterproductive in facing the battles of the very near future.

And so whilst we celebrate this impressive anniversary of the Landscape Institute, we must simultaneously prepare ourselves for new conflicts that require new tactics and modes of organisation in order to meet challenges greater than anything faced by our predecessors.

Joe Kerr is a historian, writer and broadcaster who divides his time between the city and the country. He is currently working on a project to celebrate the centenary in 2021 of Alfred Watkins’s controversial “discovery” of Ley lines.