defensive but they were also laden with a symbolism of imposed power that could ... North east France and western Belgium are crowded with memorials, perhaps the most .... The nearest American equivalent would be a log cabin in the.
Atkins, P.J., Simmons, I.G. and Roberts, B.K. (1998) People, Land and Time London: Hodder Arnold ISBN: 0340677147 and 0470236590 http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780340677148/ CHAPTER 19. LANDSCAPES OF POWER AND PLEASURE ‘Humans are preceded by forest, followed by desert’. Parisian graffito. INTRODUCTION Other than the bitter wars in the former Yugoslavia, Europe has not experienced a major conflict for fifty years, the longest period in its history. It is understandable, now that even the Cold War is fading, that many people feel complacent about peace and have begun to take it for granted. The same cannot be said of other continents where tank battles, guerilla infiltration, armed stand offs and even genocide with spears and machetes are common currency. The norm for the world is still instability and preparedness for war. It has been ever thus and in consequence there have been a myriad of modifications to the environment, both before and after battle. Ritualised forms of violence channelled into sport go under the umbrella term of hunting. This may be the relatively sedate élitist pastime of fox hunters riding to hounds through the hedged pastures of the English Midlands, but more typically on the continent and in north America it is a pedestrian and macho male preserve, the whiff of cordite blending with that of testosterone. In Malta this has a physical outcome because the island is littered with the hides, shooting butts and trapping grounds of hunters (Figure 19.1). This one small nation has a gun culture which surpasses almost any in the world and as a result no migrating bird is safe. Up to 500,000 turtle doves, and many rare birds of prey are shot each year as they cross to or from north Africa. In some villages over 40 per cent of the male population have gun licences (Fenech 1992).
Leisure time is an increasing part of the lives of many in western countries and rising disposable incomes have enabled people to indulge their desire to experience other cultures and environments. A visa in the passport and a suntan are relatively recent proofs required of holiday makers that they have achieved something worthwhile. They are phenomena of the jet age, since mass tourism in the 1960s discovered the delights of sun, sea, sand, sex and sangria. Before that vacations, involving any more than Sunday and the occasional Saint’s day, were rare for any outside the wealthy class.
LANDSCAPES OF CONFLICT AND WAR Pre-industrial warfare, despite its relatively primitive technologies, has left enduring marks on the landscape. Iron Age hill forts such as Maiden Castle in Dorset are still impressive today and the concentric castles of Edward I in north Wales even more so (Chapter 11). Both were principally defensive but they were also laden with a symbolism of imposed power that could scarcely be missed by the local populace and any potential enemies. The principal impact of these ancient relics of war on our landscape has been their authorship of place. They created nuclei around which people wished to congregate, at first perhaps only in times of strife but in many cases permanently in the form of a town. In the Old World the defensive factor has been a key to much urbanism.
Second, castles and battlefields have an enduring fascination for a public hungry for historical interest and leisure diversions. They have become important elements in the heritage landscape, with guided tours and battle re-enactments (Figure 19.2).
In the age of large-scale industrial warfare, beginning with the first globalized conflict between 1914 and 1918, there has been a shift from what we might call the picturesque of war towards devastation of landscapes over wide areas. The Western Front of the First World War is the example of this par excellence because of the reliance upon fighting from networks of interlocking trenches that were bombarded by heavy guns. The horrific results of shelling (Figure 19.3) were visually dramatic because of the de-natured appearance of the land in certain localities, but there were also more insidious long-term dangers for farmers from minefields and
other unexploded munitions. The officially declared régions dévastées in France covered 3,337,000 ha (Figure 19.4) and included 620 settlements completely destroyed and another 1,334 severely damaged (Clout 1996a, 1996b).
North east France and western Belgium are crowded with memorials, perhaps the most concentrated impact of warfare on the planet. They range from the massive Menin Gate at Ypres, intended explicitly by the architect Blomfield as a symbol of ‘the enduring power and indomitable spirit of the British empire’, to the many cemeteries and individual graves established and still tended by the Imperial (later Commonwealth) Wargraves Commission. These landscapes of remembrance were carefully designed, with immaculately kept lawns, tree
plantings and beds of native English flowers, to be a peaceful, even sublime haven amongst the destruction. By 1930 there were 891 such cemeteries for the British and colonial dead (Figure 19.5), with 540,000 headstones. Heffernan (1995) argues that such memorial landscapes are more than just records of the folly of war, or even sacred spaces. Their awesome grandeur overwhelms the senses and dulls the critical faculties of any visitor. It reifies and mythologizes the experience of war, a calculated decision by a government which refused to allow bodies to be repatriated and buried privately. ‘Thus memorialized, Britain’s war dead imposed a powerful block on the development of popular moral or political criticisms of the Great War, the political and military leaders who organized it, and the post-war world which these same leaders constructed’. Heffernan (1995, 313). Unfortunately the First World War was not ‘the war to end all wars’ but a curtain raiser to the most conflict-ridden century that history has seen. Increasingly powerful and efficient weapons have had a widespread impact, not just explosive devices but also chemicals. In the latter category defoliants were used by the Americans in Vietnam to devastating effect upon its ecosystems and people, and nerve gases and biological agents are also available. The Gulf War (United Nations versus Iraq) in 1991 illustrated the possibilities of precision bombing but the main impact of modern warfare remains indiscriminate, such as the long-term effect of landmines. Weapons need to be tested and troops trained and the manifestation of war therefore also include the preparation areas reserved for the armed forces. Although these occupy vast swathes of the countryside and restrict access by the public, interestingly their environmental consequences are sometimes positive because ecosystems may be preserved that would otherwise have been destroyed by intensive farming, house building or other land uses. What might be termed post-industrial warfare depends upon nuclear devices. Obviously the impact of the use of such weapons might be terminal for global civilization and would be destructive of environments and ecologies well beyond the immediate impact zone. So far, the visible effects have been restricted to Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan and to the various desert testing ranges around the world. The impression of warfare given so far in this chapter has been of landscapes exploded by shot and shell. If we modify the vocabulary slightly to conflict then the outcome is different but equally significant. Conflicts may last for generations or even centuries without resolution, the slow drip of hatred and low-level violence rather than hot war nevertheless having profound implications for the landscape. Over the last thirty years Belfast has been blighted by bombs but the most lasting impact of the Troubles has been its segregation into Protestant/Loyalist and Catholic/ Nationalist districts. Rather than the class war which marxists argue has divided modern cities into rich and poor landscapes, here we have a religious polarization with its roots in history and its manifestations on the ground in the form of blocked streets and high walls between the sectarian communities. This is a city physically divided and with a symbolic separation enhanced by street art. Equally divided, but with the centre of gravity of power clearly biased in one direction or another
we have landscapes of domination. In the South Africa of the apartheid era both the countryside and cities were divided into racially segregated zones where access to resources was very clearly arranged in favour of whites. In the West Bank the siting of Israeli settlements over the last thirty years has been calculated to occupy as much land as possible and to perform a surveillance role over Palestinian villages and towns (Chapter 20). Here even the environment has been politicized by conflicts over water for drinking and irrigation, and the visual appearance of the landscape has been dramatically altered to suit the goal of domination. LANDSCAPES OF LEISURE As we have seen in Chapter 18, the eighteenth century was an important threshold in the calculated investment of capital for the purposes of pleasure. Most landscape gardens created then had a subtext of status and power, but a few were dedicated to the profit motive by providing leisure facilities in semi-rural surroundings. These were the so-called pleasure gardens which formed a necklace adorning the suburbs of European cities. The London pleasure gardens are probably the best known. Names such as Vauxhall, Ranelagh and Sadler’s Wells were famous for such low-key delights as bowling greens, skittle grounds, chalybeate springs for taking the waters, cream teas, open air concerts, fireworks and zoos. They were varied in the number and status of their clientèle but the largest were singularly impressive to contemporary observers. For concerts and assemblies, Ranelagh Gardens had a rotunda which had an internal diameter of fifty metres. Miss Lydia Melford in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker likened it to: ‘the enchanted palace of a genio, adorned with the most exquisite performances of painting, carving, and gilding, enlightened with a thousand golden lamps that emulate the noonday sun’. Wroth (1896, 203). A more exclusive part of the eighteenth century leisure landscape was the spa. Bath, Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells were as much part of the social season as they were health resorts and they were forerunners of the sea-bathing which became popular in the nineteenth century at Brighton. The coastal vacation experience of the twentieth century, with variations from Blackpool to Benidorm, has its roots solidly in the past. Our case studies will take a broad view of leisure. We will look at two British examples that are rarely considered by the British themselves and will be unknown to most foreign readers. The first looks at the search by middle and working class people for a rural retreat in the form of a small plot of land and a cottage. The nearest American equivalent would be a log cabin in the woods or mountains. The second concerns the creation of collective spaces for growing vegetables. CASE STUDY: THE SPONTANEOUS LANDSCAPES OF THE BRITISH PLOTLANDS All countries have their vernacular landscapes, authored anonymously by the spontaneous decisions of countless ordinary people. These vary infinitely in their modes of origin and their form, and most lack the regularity and geometric symmetry that are characteristic of planning from above. But such spontaneity has been squeezed in the twentieth century by the bureaucratic framework of modern town and country planning and by the construction sausage machine of
property developers and builders. Any new development which escapes these strictures seems like a popular triumph. One example of the makeshift landscapes which emerge under loose planning controls is the plotlands that were settled in Britain between the world wars (Hardy and Ward 1984). These were on cheap marginal land or were acquired by squatting. They were often areas liable to flood or on steep slopes that were not attractive to conventional development. They were occupied by people at the low end of the income scale and the accommodation was in wooden huts, small bungalows, recycled railway carriages or redundant buses. Their physical infrastructure of roads, sewers and main utilities was poor, and other community facilities, such as schools and shops, were minimal. The plotlands were of essentially two types. In Essex and south of the Thames there were plotlands established by people migrating out of London for a quieter life, usually individually or in small groups. Some had small holdings attached for keeping horses or growing vegetables but most were tucked away in patches of woodland or in inaccessible locations. On the south coast the motivation was creating a second home for holidays, and here the clusters were larger and more concentrated. Contemporary commentators, who were mostly middle class, at best deplored their untidy appearance and at worst called for their demolition as rural slums. The plotlands are a modern manifestation of the desire for a piece of Arcadia. This has long been part of the British psyche: from the seventeenth century Diggers to the 1970s hippy teepees of central Wales, there has been a tradition of seeking one’s own salvation away from city-centred mainstream civilization. The newly established roots have never been deep, however, and within a generation or two such experiments dissolve and leave little trace. Thus it was with the plotlands, many of which have been abandoned or upgraded into more substantial properties. Peacehaven on the Sussex coast may be taken as one example of a people’s landscape. It was not typical of the plotlands perhaps, because it had a greater appearance of order and was not hidden discretely down an unmade track. It was conceived by the developer, Charles Neville, in 1915 as a garden city by the sea. He bought a large tract of land and divided it into a grid. Individual plots were sold somewhat haphazardly to holiday-makers, ex-servicemen and others seeking the health-giving properties of fresh air, retired couples and a miscellany of other incomers. The result over the next two decades was not a normal housing estate but a random collection of low-cost bungalows and chalets that were called ‘a colony of shacks, a long ungainly street of houses that all seem ashamed of themselves’ (S.P.B. Mais 1938, quoted in Hardy and Ward 1984, 84). Canvey Island in Essex, had in similar history. Large tracts of land were bought up by Frederick Hester from 1899 to 1905 and divided into plots for the development of a holiday resort to be known as Canvey-on-Sea. In the event Hester was declared bankrupt but the construction continued without him as plot owners multiplied, particularly from the 1930s when London’s East Enders enjoyed day trips to Southend and many decided to build second homes on Canvey. In 1951 three quarters of the permanent dwellings on the island were ‘light structures of the bungalow or chalet type’ but many were destroyed in the 1953 floods which affected the lowlying island particularly badly. Relatively little of the plotland landscape survives today.
CASE STUDY: ALLOTMENT GARDENS Allotments have varied origins. In eighteenth century England, during the process of parliamentary enclosure (Chapter 7), cottagers were often allotted small areas of land to compensate for their loss of access to common resources, and in the nineteenth century it was customary in many areas for farmers to allow their labourers to cultivate patches on the edge of the fields. Communally grouped vegetable garden plots seem to have been provided by some estate owners and the Poor Law authorities in a few parishes from about 1800 onwards. It was popular as a device to reduce the Poor Rates and by 1833 allotments were provided in 42 per cent of parishes, especially those in the south of England where agricultural wages were low (Report 1969, 5). Birmingham, Nottingham and a few other cities made vegetable gardens available for rent but it was not until 1907 that this became a statutory duty. These urban allotment sites, still visible today in the suburbs and alongside railway lines, were dominated by industrial workers. The plots are usually standardized in units such as ten rods (250 square metres), but the regularity of the boundary baulks is overwhelmed by the informality of planting and improvisation of recycled materials into potting sheds which has made the allotment an expression of the ordinary male arcadia (Figure 19.7). The use of the gendered adjective here is deliberate because allotments have traditionally, especially in working class areas, been misogenistic landscapes, the alternate of female domesticity. For miners in particular, the allotment seems to have provided not only an element of subsistence during periods of short time working but also a compensating pride in self-help away from the alienating conditions of labour at the pit. Now the mines have largely gone and the welfare state has reduced the need for voluntary community initiatives but the allotment leisure culture remains strong. In the north east of England there is a continued loyalty to the cultivation of prize vegetables, especially leeks, and the rearing of pigeons in crees, together making a popular stereotype of Geordie life.
The use of allotments for purposes other than vegetable and fruit growing is common on the continent where chalet gardens on small plots are popular as summer retreats from city life. In Britain the weather does not invite this use, nor would most councils grant planning permission for second homes, even if they were only huts.
CONCLUSION In this Chapter we have discussed landscapes that are often overlooked in the literature. The reasons for this are plain. Warfare creates landscapes of destruction which are too negative in connotation for the aesthetes who have written much of the published appreciation of scenery, and popular leisure landscapes have similarly been lost to view in the somewhat élitist vogue for landscape gardens. Fortunately the new wave of cultural studies is now redressing this imbalance. FURTHER READING AND REFERENCES There are few substantial texts yet published on the cultural interpretation of the landscapes of warfare and leisure, but the following references contain much interesting and relevant information. In particular see also Simmons (1996, 335-48) and Urry (1990). Clout, H. (1996a) Restoring the ruins: the social context of reconstruction in the countrysides of northern France in the aftermath of the Great War, Landscape Research 21, 213-30 Clout, H. (1996b) After the ruins: restoring the countryside of northern France after the Great War Exeter: Exeter University Press Fenech, N. (1992) Fatal flight: the Maltese obsession with killing birds London: Quiller Press Hardy, D. and Ward, C. (1984) Arcadia for all: the legacy of a makeshift landscape London: Mansell Heffernan, M. (1996) For ever England: the western front and the politics of remembrance in Britain, Ecumene 2, 293-323 Simmons, I.G. (1996) Changing the face of the earth: culture, environment, history 2nd edition
Oxford: Blackwell Urry, J. (1990) The tourist gaze: leisure and travel in contemporary societies London: Sage Report, Departmental Committee of Inquiry into Allotments [Chairman: H. Thorpe] Cmnd 4166 (1969) London: H.M.S.O. Wroth, W. (1896) The London pleasure gardens of the eighteenth century London: Macmillan
