Preserving The English Landscape, c.1870–1914

ABSTRACT

This article examines the significance and ideological character of the landscape preservation movement in England before 1914. In these years, preservationist discourse had considerable resonance across all sections of society. At a time of change, mainstream English culture increasingly valued natural landscapes seen to be ‘relics' of ages past, or associated with historical figures, events and customs. This historicized reading of landscape was bound up with patriotic sentiment, but did not reflect the dominance of any atavistic ideology of rural Englishness. In late Victorian and Edwardian England, the preservationist dispensation ran with the grain of modernity, not against it.

Keywords:

• Englishness
• heritage
• national identity
• nature
• preservation