Alternative political cartography: a more rational union

Most of this piece was written in 2017 (probably after another soul-destroying election result) but left in draft and I just came across it again. Depressingly, it still resonates; only more so. Some musings from a politically angry but ever hopeful soul.

Is it just me or is it not blindingly obvious that a more rational, modern and fit-for-purpose political geography might mean the 'united kingdom' of these islands has a chance to survive and prosper? You wouldn't know it from the woeful lack of progressive political discourse in Parliament and the media, either hell-bent on a reckless charge towards a damaging Hard Brexit and the then seemingly inevitable break-up of Britain (oh the irony!) or unable to voice an alternative narrative. A sleep-walk into changes which do little to address the grievances, disillusionment and inequality that abound within society.

What if we had a more grown-up polity, reflecting the geo-political realities of the country along a more federalised model (you know, like those moderately successful countries Canada, Germany and Australia)? Maybe something like the arrangement mapped above? 

Without a seemingly permanent Tory hegemony, which really doesn't reflect our complex society, maybe we could even have a fighting chance of responding better to the pandemics, environmental changes and other challenges of the future? Some notes to flesh out this Utopian dreaming are presented at the end of this piece.

Well its an interesting exercise for those who want to imagine what a better country might look like; a future not dragged down by a backward-looking Little Englander memory of what never was, policy-making in the hands of Populist leaders in thrall to disaster capitalists, neo-fascists and libertarian Svengali figures, only interested in short-term headline grabbing. People will disagree, maybe because they feel the time has come for Scotland to break free, Ireland to unite or Wales to rise up - and who came blame them really; others who cannot see beyond the Mother of all Parliaments, 'first past the post gives us strong government', England is Britain mythology. But - to me - such a devolved federal structure, or something like it, is the only positive way forward for these islands.

Sadly, such ideas seem like so much pissing in the wind in the current stifling political climate, dominated by reactive and inadequate responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, the pettiness and division of Brexit, pressures for Scottish independence and so forth; all the time the climate emergency gathering pace. Let's hope the next generation are able to participate in more positive debates to discuss options for and the practicalities of democratic rebirth rather than the divisive and dispiriting cant that we are currently having to put up with. We want our country back? Too bloody right. 

And a name for this brave new vision: Federal Republic of Britain? Albion Unchained? Well I suppose we would have to have a referendum on that ...  

Notes 

This model essentially builds on the devolved system already in place across Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales but, crucially, extends this to England. The idea is not to somehow extinguish England but to recognise that there is and always has been a strong regional element to its identity (which is a good thing!), it is by far the largest of the 'nations' within these islands and needs governance closer to the people but that does not dominate the other constituents of the union, and also a model that heads off the potential for 'anti-Celtic' English nationalism.

The English regions actually suggest themselves fairly easily: most have a deep historical resonance and unity, often stretching back to England's beginnings in the 'Anglo-Saxon' centuries, and provide fairly equal populations and diversity of cities/ towns/ country etc. The most obvious break from this is London. Large enough, confident enough, great enough to be a true city region - subsuming it in a 'South-east' region would do neither it or the surrounding shires any favours. This arrangement allows the Great Wen to punch its weight as a world city whilst remaining rooted in its British hinterland, its central government-Westminster village shackles and vices removed. And why Derby to take over the mantel for the National Parliament? Well it has to be out of London, the big cities wouldn't need it (they will be the heart of their own regions) and its somewhere central that needs a bit of a pick-me-up. 

There would be some debates to be had around the margins when drawing the boundaries of and naming these regions. I've put Northamptonshire in the East Midlands but it could be the included in Mercia or even the Home Counties. Hampshire is Home Counties but could be Wessex if history was the only consideration. Cumbria is usually lumped in with the north-west but seems to more naturally ally with the north-east. The North-west is a pretty uninspiring moniker but what's the alternative: Cheshire and Lancashire; Greater Mersey-Manchester? And so on.  

The 'Isles' get equal billing with Scotland as a nod to the feeling that they don't quite feel represented in such a geographically large domain (Scotland and the Isles looks huge in comparison to the English regions but its population is on a par with Yorkshire). Should/ would Northern Ireland sit well in this new arrangement or is it time for the island of Ireland to go its own way? This is still a raw and contentious issue. Some might even call for Ireland to be welcomed into a true British Isles model, but there is way too much baggage for that to seem anything but naive (and would, no doubt, seem deeply unappealing to the vast majority of Irish people). 

Some details:

• The nine English regional assemblies, Scottish Parliament and the Northern Irish and Welsh National Assemblies would have devolved responsibility for day-to-day public services and regional policy, with local tax-raising powers to fund them (including an adjusted redistributive element to ensure richer areas support those with lower tax income), i.e. 'Devomax'.

• Federal elections for all of the devolved bodies through proportional representation (with public funding for parties, groups and individuals who meet set criteria for participation). I make no secret of my dislike of the Conservative Party (not to mention UKIP/ Brexit Party) but in a grown-up system they deserve to have a voice - or even dominance - in areas where they have support: it would be up to the other representatives to work with them or win the argument.

• A small National Parliament and part elected Second Chamber for policy and legislative scrutiny to replace the Westminster Parliament and House of Lords (with no hereditary members). Representatives of the elected members of the devolved bodies would make up the Parliament, with a leader or managing team elected by this group via cross-party secret ballot (the broken model of 'winner takes all' first-past-the-post adversarial politics and all-powerful Prime Minister would be consigned to history). The role of the Parliament would be restricted to foreign policy, planning for a sustainable future, strategic national infrastructure concerns, allocating budgets to the devolved bodies (based on a redistributive formulae) and promoting best practice across regions. 

• The National Parliament would not be a full-time body but would meet regularly rotating its location, perhaps annually, between Cardiff, Edinburgh and Derby. Its reduced central civil service would be based in one location, probably Derby due to its geographic centrality. 

• Scotland and Wales (and for that matter any English region) could secede from the union where a super majority (60:40) of the voting population of that entity backed independence. The process for getting to this stage would need to be carefully constructed (as we are being Utopian here, political parties would not be able to campaign during the voting process and a road map spelling out how independence would be achieved and what it would look like would be produced by an independent commission, with no reference to 'cake', 'sun-kissed uplands', 'unicorns' or Braveheart). Arrangements for Northern Ireland to secede would be as per the Good Friday Agreement.

• Members of the European Parliament (yes, in this brave new world we have rejoined the EU!) would be elected through proportional representation (as now) but represent the same geographical region as the devolved bodies and work in partnership with their peers in the devolved body. 

• Oh, and the monarch would be replaced as head of state with a directly elected president (though what, if any, leadership role this figure-head would have in the National Parliament would need to be thought through). The royal retinue would be pensioned off and live out a peacefully extinction. Royal properties would be handed over to the National Trust. This is probably the least important element of the whole package. 

• A written constitution to enshrine the principles of these democratic processes in law.

Digging the English landscape of radicalism and rebellion

"The power had been completely placed in the hands of the Norman nobility ... and it had been used with no moderate hand." Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott.

This was at one time to be a lengthy treatise on the noble tradition of English radicalism and rebellion woven into the history of the landscape in times past and still abroad. However, energy feeling diminished and lacklustre in the wake of the election result, it has become more of a modest poultice to salve the wounded progressive heart; a sketch of rememberings and reminders.

A wake indeed. In the afterword to his visceral story of doomed English resistance to the brutal annexation by William, Duke of Normandy (or rather Guillaume le Batard), The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth laments that "The Norman invasion and occupation of England was probably the most catastrophic single event in this nation's history. It brought slaughter, famine, scorched-earth warfare, slavery and widespread land confiscation to the English population, along with a new ruling class who had, in many cases, little but contempt for their new subjects". And at times like these, as the Bullingdon Club cements its neo-Norman hold on the levers of power and influence, does it not feel as though we have been waking up to groundhog day ever since? Held in a constant state of arrested development by the descendants (both real and in spirit) of William's blood-soaked and avarice-filled retinue. Even now, we are unable to free ourselves from the Norman yoke; fighting amongst ourselves, bitterness endemic, hope shrinking. Farage and the UKippers as rebellion? What a fucking joke.

But there is a counterpoint to all this defeatism; to the passive-reactionary Little Englander 'musn't grumble' mind-set (and away from the heady but combustible mix of Scottish progressiveness and nationalism). Thankfully England, as a temporal, geographical and imaginative entity, is as awash with ragged energy and free-thinking as it is held back by a veneer of respectable timidity and dothing of its cap to those Norman shadow-walkers. Rebels with a cause, pioneers of social justice and artists with a conscience abound throughout history.

So harness the radical spirit of Englishness ...

Green men, wild men of the woods, silvitica,

Hereward the Wake,

Wat Tyler and the Peasant's Revolt,        Jack Cade,              John Dee,

The New Model Army,             Gerard Winstanley,

Tolpuddle Martyrs,      The Quakers,        Thomas Paine,           The Diggers,
          
                       John Clare,                      The Chartists,           

    William Cobbett,                                                       Charles Dickens,

William Blake and Jerusalem,

     William Morris,        Bertrand Russell,          The Independent Labour Party,

Aleister Crowley,                           Emily Pankhurst and the Suffragettes,

Trades Union Congress,              Peter Warlock,                        George Orwell,

                              The Kinder Scout Trespass,

Clement Attlee and 1945,       National Parks,                       CND,

E.P. Thompson,             Eric Hobsbawm,

            Lindsay Anderson,      Ken Loach,           Alan Clarke, 
                 
 David Rudkin,

     Billy Bragg,        Mark Thomas,                                 

Julian Cope,             

Colin Ward,                         Benjamin Zephaniah,  

The Poll Tax Riots,

                       
 'Rooster' Byron,    

                    Caroline Lucas,                  Common Ground,

         The Dark Mountain Project,                             Jeremy Deller,

PJ Harvey,          Owen Jones,

         (Who knows, maybe even) Russell 'don't vote' Brand ... 

This spirit, this genius rebellio, is esoteric, not always progressive; it waxes and wanes in the popular consciousness, but it's always there under the surface, ready to spring. In the words of David Horspool in his survey of The English Rebel: "Above all, English rebellion isn't exceptional. It is what has happened in this country for at least a thousand years, and we can safely predict that it will carry on happening." 

The Sad Road to the Sea: Walking a forgotten branchline by Jack Cooke

A guest post from Jack Cooke on the storied melancholia of walking a forgotten East Anglian branchline. 

No one departs, no one arrives

From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives.

They've all passed out of our lives

On the Slow Train, on the Slow Train.

(Flanders & Swann)

Ducking in behind the pawnbrokers on Saxmundham High Street the footpath leads north, following a sheltering embankment of cow parsley and crisp packets. After a few hundred feet and glimpses of neat allotments, I emerge alongside rails, picking up speed like a train pulling free of the town. Ahead of me, the track splits, the Lowestoft service passing on up the coast. How many of its passengers ever spot a sister track, half-hidden behind gravel sacks and wire? This forgotten line curves gently away to the east, disappearing into the hedgerows. I cross the rails, a necessary trespass to follow the old route to the sea.

Board a train anywhere in mainland Britain tomorrow and you have roughly eleven thousand miles of track ahead of you. You can coast along steels to every city, a thousand towns and even the odd village. Yet if you yearn to travel by rail into the small corners of the British countryside, you have missed your train by a margin of fifty years or more.

From the moment the first steam engine berthed in the 19^th century, British railways spread fast across the length and breadth of the islands. At its peak the system extended over twenty-three thousand miles of rail, hundreds of branch lines diverting from the main trunks and journeying into lonely valleys and onto isolated headlands. As the network expanded it became increasingly eccentric, with different operating systems and burgeoning costs. With the rise of the roads after the First World War, traffic from many of the smaller tracks found other means and some branch lines ground to a halt. Following nationalisation in 1948 this programme of closure accelerated but, by the 1960s, the warp and weft of the network was still haemorrhaging over three hundred thousand pounds a day.

In the midst of this deepening crisis, two opposing forces came head-to-head on the spider-web of British rail. The infamous Dr Beeching, rationalist and man of science, newly appointed Chairman of the British Transport Commission, and John Betjeman, romantic and man of letters, soon to be appointed Poet Laureate. These men were emblematic of polarised attitudes, on one side the desire to modernise Britain’s sprawling rail network and cut its crippling deficits, and on the other a passion for preservation, for conserving a rural and industrial past and the communities served by the branchlines. The ‘Beeching Axe’ was victorious. Link-by-link most of the remaining tracks were torn up or cut off; they became fading constellations in a universe of shrinking steel.  

Trains that end in the sea have always had a peculiar romance. As the ground falls away to the coast, the traveller seems to pick up speed, accelerating to meet land’s edge. For one hundred years and six, a small railway branch on the East Suffolk coast serviced fish, coal and passengers. Leaving the Lowestoft line it looped away from a junction, breaking for the sea on a long descent through small towns; Leiston, Thorpeness and finally to the shore at Aldeburgh.

Today, it is a half-track, four miles of rail and four more of farmland. The dawning of the nuclear age has saved the first section as far as Leiston. The A, B, and coming C of Britain’s nuclear power complex at Sizewell beach provides enough traffic, construction and radioactive waste, to keep the steels in place. Beyond, the old track is marked only by its absence. There is little evidence left of the thousands of tonnes of fish sacks or coal stacks, or the people who used the line.

I wanted to recapture the views of fifty years long gone, to come to the sea as a tourist might have done half-a-century ago, not funnelled up a tarmac corridor but flying over the flatland. By following the line from beginning to end, along the repossessed nuclear railway and then on, to the traces etched in crag path and clearing, I hoped to rediscover a lost perspective on familiar country. I wanted to conjure, just for one day, the steaming splendour of ‘The Eastern Belle’, ‘The East Anglian’, and other trains that once took this track, loaded with ice-cream anticipation, sea visions and thoughts of escape.

Turning off down the branch line, the track is well ordered. New Magnox rivets secure the sleepers and steel and, once a year, a ‘weed-killer’ engine comes shunting up these rails, lacing the embankment in a chemical cocoon, keeping the passage clear for nuclear flasks passing in the night. In photographs these toxic containers look just like the classic cash boxes of great Hollywood heist movies; treasure chest-shaped and lying in state on single carriages. Their innocent form cloaks a dead weight of fifty tonnes, steel casing and lead linings housing radioactive waste in transit. I try to imagine the flasks passing me on the track, mistaken for holy relics washed up by the sea; a funeral procession on its way up the line to some inland place of rest.

The track is sloping toward the seaward horizon now. Elated calls of mating birds blend with the distant curses of lone farmers, spring bringing sex for one and toil for the other. I am walking in the long shadow of Good Friday, though the parish churches I glimpse from the embankment will be observing it in small, solemn congregations barely filling single pews, much like the last passengers on this branch line nearly fifty years ago.

My legs were not manufactured for this gauge of railway. Just too short to bridge sleepers with a single stride, I fall between the cracks, boots scudding on the aggregate and clipping alternate ties. After a mile of this halting pace, I catch a rotten sleeper and fall headlong with hands outstretched. I make to rise, looking back between my legs and ahead, embarrassed by my mistake. Then I remember where I am, exposed but alone, and settle back onto the railroad, balancing my head on the warming noon steel.

There is a strange magnetism attached to walking a railway. Just as a train is bound to the limits of the line, after an hour walking between the rails I feel locked in and unable to deviate. A pedestrian on rails is melded in my mind with ideas of the American West; frontier towns, steel-driving men, endless horizons. As I press on down the old branch line the comparisons with springtime Suffolk do not seem so remote. The sporadic shotgun cases of farmers and poachers lie alongside the bones of predated rabbits in the track bed. On either side spreads flat desert with patchy trees and silent tractors, loose metal sounding in the wind. The pancake of coastal East Anglia becomes twinned with territories in Wyoming or Utah, all ‘big sky country’. On old ordnance maps, used when this line still carried passengers, some of these fields bear the same colouring as Saharan sand.

I come off the line on the outskirts of Leiston, next to the town cemetery. I have avoided the thousand pound trespass fine with no more than a hostile look from an old woman at one of the crossing cottages. I wonder if she has made a phone call and the British Transport Police block the next crossing, lazy blue sirens spinning on the verge. In my experience, there’s never been such a good way to meet people as trespassing on their property. You’ve immediately given them the high ground, which makes them a lot more sociable. You can then proceed to roll over like a dog. Everyone loves dogs.

Eating the remainder of my lunch, pulverised pork pie and sweet tea, I look back at the blank hedge behind me with no sign of the railway hiding under its blackthorn ridge. Like the Suez Canal, it takes a moving object to make you aware of what lies concealed in this landscape. The blackthorns form a ha-ha, hiding the margin into the next field and history in their shadow.

In 1872 an iron safe was installed in the Leiston ticket office. The volume of trade and passengers on the line had reached such levels that the Station Master regularly found fifty pounds worth of fares burning through his pocket at nightfall. In contemporary cash, that’s nigh on a grand. As I enter Leiston’s suburbs, walking in the shade of post-war housing estates, I try to conjure a cantering 19th century villain, shotgun under arm, cresting the rise ahead of me and bent on the day’s takings.

Beyond Leiston, I come to Crown Farm siding, where radioactive waste leaves the coast for its long journey North for reprocessing. In a gap at the end of the street, the titanic globe of Sizewell B sits, half-buried in its seaside bunker of sand and shingle. An elderly man, shuffling out of the adjacent Sizewell Social Club, looks at me suspiciously. “Yer awright boi?” he says, fag in mouth. Here men come to play pool and poker in the lee of the reactors, successive phases of British power sculpted by father and son. I give a thumbs up and scuttle off into the undergrowth behind the loading bays. There are no nuclear flasks lying upended in the scrub.

Past the bays and winches and the rails end abruptly, a sharp transition from steel to sand. Only rabbits use this railroad now, the old grooves providing perfect speedways for bunnies going about business. The ghost of the track remains in the landscape; rows of gorse bushes clinging to an unseen ridge; gate posts facing each other across fenceless margins.

Clouds gather and a light rain falls on a group of cabbage pickers, working under pylons in the field beside the track. Watching their progress I am surprised to turn forward again and find myself on a long, narrow lawn, running straight for two hundred feet toward a small bungalow. I pause outside, wanting to go in and compliment the owners on their well-mown piece of railway history.  Beyond the bungalow, abandoned in a small grove is Thorpeness Halt, the penultimate stop on my journey. I find the platform buried in brambles. Ambitious trees have rooted themselves in its spilt lip and tall thistles are the only travellers, swaying as they wait for a train that will never come again. Somewhere beyond the weeds is the Meare at Thorpeness, the resort vision of John Barrie, and behind that the town and the sea washing its back. I kneel on the ruined platform, bewitched by the mummified air surrounding a station that no longer exists as a mark on the map. If you take express trains across Britain there is a degree of comfort as you speed past tantalising, half-glimpsed stations, that you might one day alight there. The only way to return to Thorpeness Halt is on foot.

Continuing on down the last seaside miles to Aldeburgh, something drifts across the path behind me, dry leaves and dust. All the absent elements of the old railway, the steels, the broken ties, the shifting rock of the embankment, reassemble in my head. The wind through the firs that line the path starts to gather strength and then subsides, like the memory of an engine that won’t start anymore. Is this the first whispers of a ghost train soon to come steaming around the weeds and deadwood? I conjure a gleaming Pullman bearing down on the dog-walkers, bird-watchers and cyclists, all trespassing on its route.

I arrive at the end of the line at nineteen minutes past four in the afternoon – a late-running service. A journey that once would have taken twenty-two windswept minutes has lasted five hours on foot and the sun is already low in the west. What it must have been like, to come rolling in at dusk with ducks skimming off the marsh and the lightships slowly flickering to life out at sea. On the promenade a wind whisks salt rain over the houses and clouds bunch overhead. The advent of a storm is imminent, but even under dark skies The Railway Inn at the ruined end of the line is full; beer and chips spilling out onto the street once home to the terminus. That business should be so good makes me wonder, did Dr Beeching destroy a sleeping fortune?

The scratched plastic of the shelter spots with rain as I wait for a bus back to the working rails and the city. My thoughts turn to the future on this stretch of coast. When East Anglia sinks into the mud of the North Sea, what will become of this small embankment; a barely-visible lip, breaking the incoming tides that flood the land around it? Perhaps in another hundred years people will swim across these fields, long since underwater. Looking down through clouded masks they may glimpse a strange line of aggregate, fading slowly into the silt. Who amongst them will recognise the golden age of rail, lost beneath the sea?

You can find out about more of Jack's writing projects on his website.

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene

"I thought of walks in the English countryside, where people start shouting at you as soon as you stray from the footpath".  

A statement by George Monbiot from his thought-provoking new work Feral that, like the book as a whole and the concept - rewilding - that it advocates, both resonates and slightly infuriates at the same time. 

'Rewilding' is certainly trending in environmental circles at the moment. However, its not so much the prospect of the return of the wolf, lynx, beaver and other predators and large herbivores to the uplands and wilder parts of the British Isles and Europe that is in my thoughts (though I do have some practical and intellectual problems with this idea that may be explored at another time). The above quote struck a chord with me because it also hints at a more basic, anthropocene concern when considering the future of landscapes and ecosystems; namely, perhaps before we rush headlong into facilitating the theoretical 're-introduction' of the straight-tusked elephant that roamed European forests and plains 40,000 years ago, we should address the more fundamental concern of land ownership, access and control. 

To be fair to Monbiot, rewilding is a useful and imaginative stalking horse for stimulating debate on this issue and future direction in the wider policy fields of agriculture, conservation, energy, housing, transport and land-use. My own ruminations on the bizarre situation that we in these islands find ourselves - an increasing population, in many ways more autonomous than ever before, excluded from living and working (or even visiting) the larger part of the land mass on which we dwell - have cooked up a righteous soup of thoughts around community food production, noble, peaceful trespass and the hidden history of the tyranny of enclosure. How can it be right that '...nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line' (Simon Fairlie)?

A number of recent readings and 'Twitter-leads' have helped to stimulate this well-spring. The most striking being Gerry Conley's blog post on The right to roam land and shore, 'but for the sky, no fences facing', which eruditely brings together many of the touch-stones of this subject: Norman land grabbing, eighteenth and nineteenth century Parliamentary Inclosure, John Clare, the Diggers of St George's Hill, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, Marion Shoard, Right to Roam legislation, corporate land ownership and the creeping privatisation of public space. These themes have also been essayed in articles by Peter Lazenby and, again, George Monbiot. 

The Diggers, a radical group of proto-socialists who occupied St George's Hill in Surrey in 1649 are fascinatingly chronicled in the 1975 film, Winstanley. In many ways, this doomed five month attempt to establish the concept of the 'Common Treasury' of the land for all, ruthlessly quashed by the reassertion of the primacy of private capital and ownership, occured during a pivotal period in history for the English landscape and society; a course was being set for the processes of enclosure and 'improvement' of the land, of successive agricultural, industrial and post-industrial revolutions that sculptured the environments and socio-economic realities of subsequent generations, and still resonate today: 'Winstanley had a dream of a wonderful, gentler, more just and happy world; a dream that came again to other people in succeeding centuries, but for whose realisation we are still waiting' (David Gardiner).  

The arc of this story is well rehearsed, and well written, ground that I am not going to retread. Instead, I am leaving the path, plunging into the undergrowth; exploring the concepts of access, private ownership and enclosure, and maybe rewilding of the self, head on and with the 'muddy boots' of empiricism. Taking, in Richard Mabey's words, '...the opportunity to experience it (nature) face to face, with its qualities of wildness and renewal intact'. So, rather than using an Ordnance Survey map to pleasingly link up the anarchic network of dashed lines indicating public rights of way, hill tracks and unmetalled lanes, I have devised a mildly subversive circuit through hill and dale that studiously avoids legally prescribed routeways: a Trespass Way. 

The landscape that Thatcherism created

"Where there is harmony, may we bring discord. Where there is truth, may we bring error. Where there is faith, may we bring doubt. And where there is hope, may we bring despair."

"I see no joy, I see only sorrow; I see no chance of your bright new tomorrow; so stand down Margaret, stand down please, stand down Margaret".

Reflections on a year of Landscapism

And so my first 12 months of blogging on the landscape - of landscapism - reaches an end; a repository of thoughts given their head.

My aim has been to provide a forum to bring together, promote and discuss themes, subject matter and marginalia of all kinds on landscape: finding the connections across the landscape divides.


To ask questions about landscape management, the false dichotomy of urban v rural, tensions between sustainable transport, biodiversity and community food production and the new National Planning Policy Framework; to propose a Manifesto for a Working Landscape.

 To provide an evolving gazetteer to exploring landscape on the web; and suggest a biblio-resource for reading the landscape, ranging far and wide, from William Morris' News From Nowhere to Ross Raisin's God's Own Country; from Urban Wildscapes to Writing Britain: from Wasteland to Wonderland; from a wild utopian trilogy to a midwinter handlist to help survive the dark months.

To find wildness, places to be left alone with yourself; to seek out Robert Macfarlane's holloways, old ways and wild places, meander on paths and trackways, wander amongst ash: the shaggy signs of Pan and ramble on the urban fringe. To eulogize the watery life blood of the landscape where, men  may come and men may go, but I go on forever.

To explore landscapes of the past: a triptych of ruins, carved into the landscape, Avebury stone circle: 'an uncanny landscape', Dial Garreg: a story of stone and war propaganda films; to feel the history of a temporal space. As well as remembering more personal cognitive artifacts, a scrap of a memory: Arcadian dreaming.

To listen to songs which, like the grass, are evergreen; the sounds of PJ Harvey - Let England Shake, the Roman Roads of Land Observations, Dennis Wilson's River Song and the radical call to arms, The Land Song. To proclaim Here's a Health to the Barley Mow!

To gaze upon the local topographies and vaster world's of Pieter Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow, David Hockney's A Bigger Picture, maps of the Old Straight Tracks of Glastonbury and the beginnings of a rising Pandaemonium stoking the Industrial Revolution.

To return to special places, the landscapes in particular of Kenilworth Castle, Bolton Abbey, Cold Ashton, Worth Valley and Hergest Ridge. To turn off the gadgets and experience the landscape where the path, winding like silver, trickles on; to ask, is there no end to this accursed forest? and enjoy being stumped.

To find new discoveries and different perspectives; a sense of hope in the age of collapse, the alternative future vision of the Dark Mountain Project, the practice of walking as drifting and seek inspiration from a new Westcoasting life. 

And to drift around the margins: listening to sound mapping, musing on a comedy of landscapes, enjoying Jimi Bush and the palimpsest designed landscapes of rural riding. 

All the while, perhaps, seeking Jerusalem; a personal, progressive and magical 'land of dreams'.

Manifesto for a working landscape

This article draws on and expands upon a number of posts recently written for the Landscapism blog and appears on the Save Our Woods website.

My rationale for starting up this blog was straightforward: as someone who is constantly immersed in the landscape, both physically (as we all in fact are) and conceptually (a more specialised pursuit) I am just as fascinated by theoretical concepts of cultural and physical landscapes as spending a day walking in a National Park or observing the natural history of an ancient woodland; or indeed looking at a collection of landscape paintings or photographs, experiencing an urban adventure in a new city or working to landscape my own modest garden. I could go on with further diverse examples of landscapism. To my mind these are all naturally linked activities and areas of interest, and I do not consider myself unusual in this regard.

The frustration that I, and many other like-minded souls, have felt is observing these landscape themes, which should be organically but messily inter-twined, grow further and further apart from each other as the individual professional, academic and organisational structures develop into their 21^st century maturity; this is the curse of specialisation, an evolving feature of Western society since the heyday of the Enlightenment and Victorian polymaths.

Yes, there are many examples of relatively modest inter-disciplinary exchange and collaboration in academic research or conservation projects, and some more enlightened local authorities have taken steps towards a more holistic approach to landscape planning. Maybe if a cultural geographer, a landscape art historian, a farmer, a landscape architect, a mountain-biker, an ecologist and a landscape archaeologist were put together in a room you would hope for a degree of common ground and certainly some lively discussion; but each would soon return to the familiarity of their divergent agendas and objectives back in the workplace.  Moreover, in responding professionally to a government policy proposal, a threat to a particular landscape or some other specific challenge (a hose-pipe ban for instance) they would narrow their focus to one of self-interest, because this is the received wisdom of how a pluralistic society operates.

Why does this matter? Well, I would argue that this segregation has contributed to the marginalisation of landscape in terms of both government policy and public opinion. Given the importance that many people attach to their local, regional and national environments and landscapes as an essential part of the bedrock of who they are and where they come from, should this not be a central motif of public policy, given the same weight as key elements of education, health and economic development? Instead landscape has been channeled into the comparative back-waters of the environment, planning, heritage and tourism, from where it modestly shouts to be heard but is often pushed back by more assertive beasts: ‘global warming!’, ‘jobs and growth!’, ‘housing targets!’.

Landscape management for our times?

The list of government bodies, NGO's and charities that have a remit to conserve and enhance our natural, historic and cultural landscape and environment is impressively long:

English Heritage, Natural England, the Environment Agency, Countryside Council for Wales, CADW, Scottish Natural Heritage, Historic Scotland, the Forestry Commission, National Park Authorities, the National Trust, Wildlife Trusts, RSPB...

This well-established infrastructure of landscape management is, in many ways, very reassuring; and, due to devolution and the inertness of the Coalition Government's risible 'quango-busting' exercise largely intact in these times of 'austerity', give or take the odd wobble over selling off forests.

There is also an enormous well-spring of expertise and experience wrapped up in these bureaucratic structures and a clear record of achievement and progressiveness over the last sixty years or so: our landscape is in a better place than it would be if this safety net had not been active during a period which will be remembered in history as one, founded on hope and idealism, but dominated by rapacious capitalism and consumerism.

And yet...