Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T04:53:06.717Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

A Pleasure Ground for the Noisy Herds? Incompatible Encounters with the Cotswolds and England, 1900–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Catherine Brace
Catherine Brace
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, School of Geography and Archaeology, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This paper draws on and forms part of the growing body of literature which examines critically the relationships between landscape and Englishness in the first half of the twentieth century. In particular this paper develops our understanding of the moral geographies of outdoor recreation and the popular discovery of rural England. It also shows how national identity itself was seen to be threatened by first, the alteration of the English landscape to accommodate new kinds of visitors, and second, by the apparent inability of those visitors to enjoy the English countryside in an appropriate way. These issues are explored through the variety of ways in which the Cotswolds were being discovered and encountered in the first half of the twentieth century. This was occurring at a time when rural England more generally was being ‘discovered’, explored, constructed and re-created both physically and in print through non fictional rural writing, guide books and topographical works. Discovering the Cotswolds and England was a deeply contested activity fraught with tensions and paradoxes which were themselves informed by ideas of class and culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , April 2000 , pp. 75 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1. See, for example, Brace, Catherine, ‘Gardenesque imagery in the representation of regional and national identity: the Cotsvvold Garden of Stone’, Journal of Rural Studies 15 (1999) 365–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brace, Catherine, ‘Finding England Everywhere: Regional Identity and the Construction of National Identity 1890–1940’, Ecumene 6 (1999), pp. 90–109CrossRefGoogle ScholarHowkins, Alun, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920, ed. Colls, R. and Dodd, P. (London, 1986)Google Scholar; Chase, Malcolm, ‘This is no claptrap, this is our heritage’, in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Chase, M. and Shaw, C., (Manchester, 1989)Google Scholar; Potts, Alex, ‘‘Constable Country’ between the Wars’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of National Identity Volume 3: National Fictions, ed. Samuel, R. (London, 1989)Google Scholar; Matless, David, ‘Definitions of England 1928–1989: Preservation, Modernism and the Nature of the Nation’, Built Environment 16 (1990), 179–191Google Scholar; Matless, David, ‘Regional Surveys and Local Knowledges: The Geographical Imagination in Britain, 1918–1939’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS17 (1992), 464–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matless, David, ‘Moral Geography in Broadland’, Ecnmene 1 (1992), pp. 127–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matless, D., Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998).Google Scholar

2. Matless, David, ‘Moral Geographies of English Landscape’, Landscape Research 22 (1997), 142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Matless, , ‘Moral Geographies of English Landscape’.Google Scholar

4. Brace, , ‘Finding England’.Google Scholar

5. Cresswell, Tim, In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression (Minneapolis, 1996), p. 3.Google Scholar

6. Cresswell, , In Place, p. 9.Google Scholar

7. Lowerson, John, ‘Battles for the Countryside’ in Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s, ed. Gloversmith, F. (Sussex, 1980) p. 260.Google Scholar

8. Lowerson, ‘Battles’; Chase, ‘This is no claptrap’; Potts, ‘Constable Country’; Gruffudd, Pyrs, ‘Selling the Countryside: Representations of Rural Britain’ in Place Promotion: The Use of Publicity and Marketing to sell Towns and Regions, ed. Gold, J. and Ward, S. (Chichester, 1994).Google Scholar

9. Lowerson, , ‘Battles’, p. 260.Google Scholar

10. Lowerson, , ‘Battles’, p. 263.Google Scholar

11. Batsford, H., How to See the Countryside (London, 1940).Google Scholar

12. Matless, David, ‘The Art of Right Living': Landscapeand Citizenship 1918–1939’ in Mapping the Subject – Geographies of Cultural Transformation, ed. Pile, S. and Thrift, N. (London, 1995).Google Scholar

13. Matless, , ‘Moral Geographies of English Landscape’, pp. 141–156.Google Scholar

14. Various Hands, ‘The Ways of Britain: IV The Severn Sea’, The YHA Rucksack, 1 (1933) p. 54.Google Scholar

15. Ducie, T., Deddoe, J. and Hallett, P., ‘Proposed – Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeology Society’, Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, 1 (1874) p. 15.Google Scholar

16. Ducie, Deddoe Hallett, ‘Proposed’, p. 15.

17. Ducie, Deddoe Hallett, ‘Proposed’, p. 15.

18. Ducie, Deddoe Hallett, ‘Proposed’, p. 15.

19. Haines, J.W., ‘Paradise’, Proceedings of the Cotteswold Naturalist's Field Club XXI (1923).Google Scholar

20. Searles-Wood, H.D., ‘The Annual Excursion – Cheltenham and Neighbourhood’, Architectural Association Journal XXIV (1909).Google Scholar

21. The British Association, Handbook for Excursion B: The Cotswolds (Bristol, 1930).Google Scholar

22. See for instance Anonymous, Knight's Tourist's Companion through the Land we Live in (London, 1853)Google Scholar; Winscom, J.A., Dear Old England: A Description of our Fatherland (London, 1861).Google Scholar

23. Cohen, L., ‘Nor Any Other Wold like Cotswold’, Great Thoughts (1937), p. 99.Google Scholar

24. Gissing, A., The Footpath Way in Gloucestershire (London, 1924), p. 22. Gissing was the son of a Botanist and had worked as a solicitor before moving to the countryside. He wrote several novels and included amongst his interests walking, archaeology and natural history.Google ScholarWho Was Who Volume III 1929–1940 (London, 1947).Google Scholar

25. Gissing, , Footpath Way, p. 23.Google Scholar

26. Gissing, , Footpath Way, p. 23.Google Scholar

27. Of course, the great paradox was that contact with nature as a means of inspiring the urge to love and preserve it also threatened to destroy it.

28. Shelley, P.B., ‘The Invitation’ in Gissing, Footpath Way, p. 202.Google Scholar

29. Gissing, , Footpath Way, p. 202.Google Scholar

30. Wright, Patrick, The Village that Died for England (London, 1995), p. 111Google ScholarMassingham, H.J., Wold Without End (London, 1932), p. 107.Google Scholar

31. Massingham, , Wold Without End, p. 261.Google Scholar

32. Massingham, , Wold Without End, p. 189.Google Scholar

33. Joad, C.E.M., The Book of Joad: A Belligerent Autobiography (Faber, and Faber, , 1935), pp. 118–19.Google Scholar

34. Joad, , Book of joad, pp. 118–119.Google Scholar

35. Joad, , Book of joad, pp. 120–121.Google Scholar

36. Timperley, H.W., The Cotswolds (London, 1931).Google Scholar

37. Timperley, , The Cotswolds, p. 128.Google Scholar

38. Timperley, , The Cotswolds, p. 32.Google Scholar

39. Burke, T., The Beauty of England (London, 1933), p. 30.Google Scholar

40. Matless, , ‘The Art of Right Living’, p. 94.Google Scholar

41. Matless, , ‘The Art of Right Living’, p. 95.Google Scholar

42. Joad, , Book of joad, p. 192.Google Scholar

43. Branch, H., Cotswold and Vale: or Glimpses of Past and Present in Gloucestershire (Cheltenham, 1907), p. 163.Google Scholar

44. Gissing, , Footpath Way p. 202.Google Scholar

45. Brown, Richard Blake, Mr. Prune on Cotswold (London, 1938), p. 25.Google Scholar

46. Brown, , Mr. Pnme, p. 25.Google Scholar

47. Henriques, R., The Cotswolds (London, 1950), p. 69.Google Scholar

48. Henriques, , Cotswolds, p. 70.Google Scholar

49. Henriques, , Cotswolds, p. 70.Google Scholar

50. Matless, , Landscape and EnglishnessGoogle Scholar; Cornish, V., National Parks and the Heritage of Scenery (London, 1930), p. 9.Google Scholar

51. Joad, , Book of joad, p. 195.Google Scholar

52. Lowerson, , ‘Battles’, p. 261.Google Scholar

53. Massingham, , Wold Without End, p. 145–146.Google Scholar

54. Mais, S.P.B., ‘The Plain Man Looks at England’ in Britain and the Beast, ed. Ellis, Clough Williams (London, 1938), p. 218.Google Scholar

55. Lowerson, , ‘Battles’, p. 263.Google Scholar

56. Times Literary Supplement, 30th January 1937, p. 79Google Scholar in Lowerson, , ‘Battles’, p. 263.Google Scholar

57. Massingham, , Wold Without End, p. 64.Google Scholar

58. Massingham, , Wold Without End, p. 64.Google Scholar

59. Massingham, , Wold Without End, p. 211.Google Scholar

60. Diddecoy – gypsy or itinerant tinker.

61. Massingham, , Wold Without End, p. 211.Google Scholar

62. Priestley, J.B., English Journey (London, 1984), p. 48. First published 1934.Google Scholar

63. Moore, J., The Cotswolds (London, 1934), p. 90.Google Scholar

64. Moore, , The Cotswolds, p. 90.Google Scholar

65. Anonymous, , Guide to the Cotswolds with Special Sections on Natural Life and Antiquities by H.J. Massingham and Architecture by Clough Williams Ellis (London, c. 1947), p. 101.Google Scholar

66. Anonymous, , Guide to the Cotswolds, p. 101.Google Scholar

67. Anonymous, , Guide to the Cotswolds, p. 102.Google Scholar

68. Priestley, , English Journey, p. 39.Google Scholar

69. Massingham, H.J., Cotswold Country: A Survey of Limestone England from the Dorset Coast to Lincolnshire (London, 1941–1942), p. 80. First published 1937.Google Scholar

70. Henriques, , Cotswolds, p. 69.Google Scholar

71. Joad, , Book of joad, p. 204.Google Scholar

72. Joad, , Book of joad, p. 204.Google Scholar

73. O'Connell, Sean, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring 1896–1939 (Manchester, 1998).Google Scholar

74. O'Connell, , Car in British Society.Google Scholar

75. Joad, , Book of joad, p. 127.Google Scholar

76. Burke, , Beauty of England, p. 30.Google Scholar

77. Anonymous, , Guide to the Cotswolds, p. 10.Google Scholar

78. Liniado, Mark, Car Culture and Countryside Change (Cirencester, 1996).Google Scholar

79. Hissey, James John, A Tour in a Phaeton through the Eastern Counties (London, 1889)Google Scholar; Hissey, James John, Across England in a Dog Cart (London, 1891)Google Scholar; Hissey, James John, An English Holiday with Car and Camera (London, 1908).Google Scholar

80. Liniado, , Car Culture, p. 4.Google Scholar

81. Liniado, , Car Culture, p. 5.Google Scholar

82. O'Connell, , Car in British Society, p. 79.Google Scholar

83. Murray, A., The Cotswolds (Gloucester and London, 1930), p. 17.Google Scholar

84. Murray, , The Cotswolds, p. 17.Google Scholar

85. Evans, H.A., Highways and Byways in Oxford and the Cotswolds (London, 1905), p. 314.Google Scholar

86. Evans, , Highways and Byways, p. 315.Google Scholar

87. Hissey, James John, A Leisurely Tour in England (London, 1913), p. 307.Google Scholar

88. Hissey, , A Leisurely Tour, p. vii.Google Scholar

89. Hissey, , A Leisurely Tour, pp. 337–338.Google Scholar

90. Priestley, , English Journey, p. 3.Google Scholar

91. Guiney, L.I., ‘Some Account of Arcady’, Blackwood's Magazine, MCLXXIV (August 1913), 274.Google Scholar

92. Hissey, , An English Holiday, p. 6.Google Scholar

93. Gissing, , Footpath Way, p. 110.Google Scholar

94. Gissing, , Footpath Way, 110.Google Scholar

95. Joad, , Book of Joad, p. 198.Google Scholar

96. Joad, C.E.M., The Untutored Townsman's Invasion of the Country (London, 1938), p. 73.Google Scholar

97. Joad, , Book of Joad, p. 197.Google Scholar

98. Joad, , Book of Joad, p. 197–8.Google Scholar

99. Joad, , Book of Joad, p. 198.Google Scholar

100. Joad, , Book of Joad, p. 198.Google Scholar

101. Joad, , Book of Joad, p. 54.Google Scholar

102. Joad, , Untutored Townsman's Invasion, p. 206.Google Scholar

103. Joad, , Untutored Townsman's Invasion, p. 207.Google Scholar

104. Cresswell, , In Place.Google Scholar

105. Cresswell, , In Place, p. 10.Google Scholar

106. Cresswell, , In Place, p. 96.Google Scholar

107. Cunningham, V., British Writers of the Thirties (London, 1993), p. 231.Google Scholar