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Participants (abstracts)Prof. Jonathan Bignell (University of Reading, UK) This paper analyses the conventions of rural representation in photographic and film images from the collections at the Museum of English Rural Life (at the University of Reading, UK). Their iconography is in dialogue with stated and unstated assumptions about the role of the English countryside, for example in relation to food production, the preservation of rural life and rural heritage, the role of technology and patterns of labour. The MERL was founded in 1951 to reflect and record the changing face of farming and the countryside. Its collections contain artefacts, books, archives, photographs, film and sound recordings and are ‘designated’ by the Arts Council of England as being of national importance. The collections document a time of great economic, social and technological change in the countryside, and the photgraphic, film and video collections include material from individuals but also from agricultural firms and government agencies. As records of rural labour, technology and social organisation they are a unique resource. Representations of English agrarian culture are central to understandings of modernity and technology, and changes in rural work, leisure and heritage. There is a substantial body of work on urban culture and heavy industry in studies of documentary photography and film (e.g. Housing Problems, Coal Face). But there is little research on how promotional and informational images represent cultural, technological and social change in the country. The people visible in the MERL images were the agents of change, and its beneficiaries and victims. The photographs and films were made by enthusiasts, but also by the suppliers of the workers’ machines, the government agencies responsible for their professional education, health and safety, and their inculcation into changing state priorities for agricultural production. To study these images opens up a new way of understanding existing histories of the land and its uses in post-War Britain. For example, the film The Living Soil, produced by the Ford Film Unit in the 1960s, shows how new farm machines enabled new kinds of working practices, representing the landscape as a material asset in an uneasy dialogue with discourses of natural beauty and rural traditions. International Harvester’s Haytime – Your Annual Race with the Sun is a film about a new hay-baler, and represents communities working on the land in a manner reminiscent of Soviet film documentary. State organisations that produced such images also include the Milk Marketing Board, the National Dairy Council, and interest groups including the Council for the Protection of Rural England and the National Farmers Union. Analysis of these images opens up broader issues of cultural history, cultural geography, accounts of social change and political intervention into English rural life.
Dr. Kate Corder (University of Reading alumni, independent artist and researcher, UK) Before Heathrow Airport construction the land in the area was grade one farmland suitable for growing substantial amounts of vegetables and fruit for London. Since the airport was built and opened (1944-46), tarmac, concrete and buildings have gradually covered over the fertile soil. A few large historic barns remain, punctuating the land, as an indication of former agricultural wealth in the region. Land surrounding Heathrow Airport has for sometime been continually contested, because of human yearning for airport expansion. This situation perpetuates any lingering agricultural land as unstable and subject to decay. The area is a geological ‘site of time’ (Robert Smithson) with a human utilitarian purpose. The landscape surrounding Heathrow reveals surprising contradictions and can be seemingly tranquil. Outside the airport’s boundary apple trees remain as residue in ancient orchards at either ends of the runways. The fertile soil in the area was deposited as river sediment and accumulated on a deep layer of gravel during glacial melt. Fields at Harmondsworth and Sipson, (contested villages adjacent to the airport), are mined for gravel, degrading the grade one agricultural land. A viewpoint from a bridge on Sipson Lane observes a road leading to and from the airport and a large 19th-century barn sitting in the middle of a gravel farm. The size of the barns in the area indicates the former prosperity of the agricultural land. A long brick wall, once integral to an orchard farm, remains as a monument to the fruit trees and fruit it once supported. Here, the airport sits at a distance; the farmland acts as a buffer to the global travel industry. In 2014 I started a series of research Walks, acting as a tour guide to the “grade one” agricultural land in the environs of Heathrow airport. I invite others to participate in exploring and observing the area, recognizing the land as a former site of prolific nutritional plant food cultivation and experiencing it as a speculative aesthetic. I plan the Walk routes using aerial photographic maps combined with research in to surrounding cultivation histories. During the Walks social dialogues occur; I speak about the terrain, participants converse and conversations happen with local residents encountered in the course of the event. Monuments of cultivation in the area are visited, which can include a squatted market garden, the ancient Harmondsworth Barn and a recently planted yet already decayed orchard in Sheraton Heathrow’s hotel garden. This research looks at aspects of rural spaces in the UK from a contemporary art perspective. I use Walking as a medium to convey experiences of rurality and highlight a historic landscape affected by global air travel industry.
Dr. Kerry Featherstone (Loughborough University, UK) Over the last six years, Mark Goodwin has established a reputation as a poet of rural and wild landscapes, mostly in the British Isles. He has also developed an experimental form of broken words, within lines or as the result of enjambment, and unexpected gaps between words. In consequence, his poetry was included in Harriet Tarlo’s The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry. In addition, he has developed a practice of creating audio recordings of his work, often reading them aloud in the rural setting about which they were written. This paper will discuss how Goodwin’s focus on rural landscapes – and their urban boundaries – is expressed through challenging and playful poetic technique. One section of the paper will give a close reading of Goodwin’s depictions of the rural; its textures and meanings. The focus is on landscape and wildlife, but also on the presence of humans. This will include how the writer himself features as a subject in the rural landscape: ‘Borrowdale’s details digest my soul’. The following section will be an examination of how the experimental form of broken words contributes to staging this experience of the rural on the page: ‘we enter slants of late light man/ gling in red bracken… suns’s win/ ter membranes pla(y)…ting mass’. Goodwin’s development of this form is a key aspect of his writing, and can be read as means of rendering the shapes and challenges of the landscape itself. Finally, the paper will address how Goodwin’s rural engages with transformation and the liminal space of what he refers to as the ‘rurban’: ‘scarp along Don’s arch shall ow hanging/ loops of pow er-lines…’ Goodwin has written extensively about the ‘city rim’ spaces of Sheffield and Leicester; both large centres of population surrounded by rural landscapes. His poetry also marks the past transformations of the rural: ‘tongue tree roots/ remem bering human dead humans effort lessly/ with buried effort for get a wire…’ He is alert to the Victorian mineshafts, the graves of previous inhabitants and the empty mill building of the Peak District. The paper proposes, therefore, to trace Goodwin’s depictions of rural Britain, to explore his poetic method of broken words and lines, and to pay attention to how the poet experiences the landscape, both in the wild spaces of Scotland and the transforming rim of cities, where the rural meets the urban.
Dr. Georges Fournier (University Jean Moulin-Lyon 3, France) The inception of light and handy filmic instruments represented a revolution for the directors whose vocation was to record the state of the world. It largely accounted for Dziga Vertov’s and Robert Flaherty’s endeavours to offer city-dwellers images of distant and deserted places that up until then had been staged by literature and painting only. Rural life occupied a specific place among early British films. While big cities testified on the modernity of Britain, it was still the privilege of rurality to bear testimony to the identity of the country as a whole. With Night Mail, Harry Watt and Basil Wright staged the conquest of remoteness by modern technology. The journey from London to Scotland corresponded to a survey of the identities of the country, bringing together diversity and unity. Even though documentary is the favourite genre, when it comes to accounting for reality, conquered and domesticated rural life is what was offered by The Draughtsman's Contract, Peter Greenaway’s fiction film. Conquered nature is tamed nature and this conquest of man over nature implies the loss of its main characteristics that, for many, lie at the heart of the British identity. In all the examples mentioned above, nature prevails through landscape. Conversely, more recent films show the necessity to search for rural life in urban areas. Such is the case with Patrick Keiller’s films: in London the British filmmaker searches the gardens of the capital city in an attempt to try and find the traces of a glorious and remarkable past. More recently, a search for the traces of rural life was undertaken with Robinson in Space and Robinson in Ruins about the evolution of rural Britain. Based on Patrick Keiller’s trilogy, this work will try and explain some of the salient features in the evolution of British rurality which should undermine clichés fostered by much advertised films on urban Britain.
Dr. Thierry Goater (University of Rennes 2, France) Thomas Hardy’s ‘Wessex novels’ in particular have greatly contributed to his being often presented as ‘the poet of the English landscape’, as a ‘rural idyllist’. The aim of this paper is to analyse how Thomas Hardy’s writing actually oscillates between the re-creation and deconstruction of the pastoral genre and how his representation of rural spaces generates contradictory images and symbols resulting in an ambivalent reception of his work by critics and society as a whole.
Dr. Yvon Le Caro (University of Rennes 2, France) From the invention of the English country landscape in the modern times (Hoskins, 1955) to the rural idyll of the last century (Buller, 1997) and the present “back-to-the-land” movement (Halfacree, 2006), the English countryside has become such a reference in English-speaking cultures that it seems difficult to say anything in a critical way about the countryside policies implemented in England and Wales. Our research focuses on the evolution of the farmed countryside (fields, grass, barns, paths, dwellings and natural places included in farming systems) in rural communities, both in England and France (though my research mainly focuses on England’s Mid-Devon, I will borrow from previous research carried out in France to examine the situation with a fresh perspective). This paper aims to analyse, from a French perspective, the English planning policies concerning rurality. Under the Planning & Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, countryside planning is organised at national level through the planning policy statement “Sustainable Development in Rural Areas” (PPS 7), a 20-page document reviewing the general perspective of the Town & Country Planning Act 1947 (TCPA 1947), that mainly advocated conservationism. Countryside gentrification (Gilg, 1996) and the conflicts between farmers and the community (Griffiths, 2007) are the main issues that result from the local implementation of such a statement, in addition to other contested policies such as the “access to the countryside” (Kay and Moxham, 1996). Methodologically, the contents of 15 semi-structured interviews conducted in the Creedy-Taw area (Mid-Devon, UK) between May and July 2009, along with the planning policies detailed in the Local Development Framework (Core Strategy 2006 and Development Plan Documents 2007) published by the Mid-Devon District Council, will serve as the primary sources of our analysis of the countryside planning process in England. This qualitative approach will allow us to understand how the planners, farmers and local inhabitants deal with the implementation of these planning policies. Ordnance survey maps and orthophotographs will be used to show the spatial impact of these policies in the Creedy Taw area, and an overview of the 2010 up-to-date version of Mid-Devon local documents will help us establish to what extent and for what reasons the District councillors are trying to improve their rural planning policies. The French planning policies and their implementation in the Coglais (Pays de Fougères, Brittany) will be simply used as a comparison to show that English planning policies are not the path but only one path to build a post-industrial countryside. A similar comparative pattern was established by H. Buller and K. Hoggart (1994) when they analysed the French countryside from an English perspective. The main results can be summarised in two main points. On the one hand, development permission is so scarce in the hamlets and small villages that farmers are pressed to sell barns as new residences for huge amounts of money, which allows them to invest in their business, but speed up the gentrification of Devon’s countryside. On the other hand, these policies contribute to preserving an idyllic vision of a traditional agricultural English landscape, and have positive consequences on the rural economy through tourism, on residential attractiveness and for the recognition of farming externalities. It seems that local stakeholders make do with the weaknesses resulting from rural conservation (lack of affordable dwellings, poor quality of local road networks) because they adhere, even the farmers, to the idealised vision of a landscape-oriented countryside. The first point to be discussed is the critical analysis that a French perspective enables us to engage. In both countries, despite their enormous differences, the planning systems tend to protect farmed space. But our survey shows that what is a historically based principle in Britain is rather the product of social relationships in France. In Coglais, farmers have lost more acres, but their social importance has increased with the sprawl of dwellings. In Devon, the acreage remains, but farms and farming seem to be more and more disconnected from the rural communities. In the two areas, nevertheless, post-productivist farms enable both to spare space thanks to a better valorisation of the land and to culturally reconnect agriculture to the general and now urbanised local community. The second point of discussion concerns the evolutions in Mid-Devon planning policy. In early 2015, the Mid-Devon Planning Core Strategy 2006 still remains operative, but the Development Plan Documents (DPD) have been replaced by the Allocation and Infrastructure Development Plan Documents (AIDPD 2010). An overview of the modifications that took place at the parish level will enable us to know if some significant changes occurred. References
Jessica Le Flem (University of Rennes 2, France) In Rosamond Lehmann’s novels the rural space stands as a potential shelter from the threats of the modern world. Lehmann dedicated her work almost exclusively to portraying the British upper class in the aftermath of World War I. The characters that inhabit the author’s literary work are all haunted by the trauma of the First World War, a turning point that embodies the end of an era and the loss of landmarks for the British aristocracy. Indeed Lehmann’s representation of rural spaces is tied to a reflection on history as her pastoral landscapes are often tinged with nostalgia, a longing for bygone days which can never be lived again. However Lehmann refigures the conventions of such an aesthetic frame and redefines the rural landscape by pondering over the process of visual and literary representation and by borrowing from modern painting such as Impressionism or Expressionism. Her depiction of rural Britain hovers between tradition and modernity and consequently conveys a sense of otherness as an in-between landscape takes shape. The reassuring quality of the countryside is progressively forsaken along with obvious representations of British landscapes in order to give way to more and more unstable photograph-like décors. As modern visual techniques replace the touches of the brush the British rural space turns into a maze, allowing the feminine character to take possession of the “empty pastoral scene” (The Echoing Grove, 1953, p. 24) in order to capture the modern condition of being. The purpose of this study will be to show how Rosamond Lehmann’s representation of the British rural space evolves from a fairly traditional to a modern British landscape by articulating various visual media, notably painting and photography. The rural space constitutes an unstable cornerstone to look into the past as well as into the present, and Lehmann subverts the codes of the pastoral construct to picture the modern human experience.
Dr. Brendan Prendiville (University of Rennes 2, France) The tranquil countryside has long been pitted against the bustle of the city in the British cultural mindset. It is an image which sits alongside clichés of political agitation being confined to urban spaces while rural space is seen as a timeless haven of tradition and social stability. Such clichés die hard but are increasingly outdated, particularly since the Countryside March of 2002 put rural protest firmly onto the national political stage. This paper proposes to analyse the question of protest in rural spaces in Britain on two levels. Firstly, by studying the struggles since the 19th century to protect and have access to these spaces as well as introduce alternative spatial practices within them. Secondly, by attempting to explain the reasons why rural space(s) and rural identity have become issues of conflict in Britain in a relatively short space of time
Prof. Richard Tholoniat (University of Le Mans, France) During the long 19th century (1814-1914) most French travellers formed their opinion about the English countryside when they visited London and its environs. 450 wo/men wrote about their experiences in and around the metropolis (see R. Tholoniat, London through the eyes of French travellers (1814-1914), thèse d’Etat Lyon II, 1993). Their writings, paintings, engravings, photographs covered not only London but the neighbouring counties as well. London and Paris were at that time vying for political and cultural (if not economic) supremacy. The countryside around London was no exception to the unleashing of French quarrels about a part of England (Britain) which represented a problematic mirror to Paris. Over the years, the Thames Valley upstream from London came to represent the French ideal of rural beauty. The ‘picturesque’ landscapes west of the capital city contrasted sharply with the ‘sublime’ banks of the industrial and commercial Thames or the hideous sights of inner-city slums. Conservative French (wo)men envied the parks and country houses redolent of the hierarchical ordering of social relations. More progressive or eugenics-minded ones (especially after 1870) praised the association of ruralness and sports for both sexes. Both categories loved to reminisce about the poets and painters who had been inspired by this part of Britain and enthused over the relaxed coexistence of people, animals and plants. Together with the London parks, the Western approaches to London represented the undisputed superiority of the British capital city over Paris and were one of the positive stereotypes which contributed to the Entente Cordiale. Based on the writings, paintings, engravings, photographs, etc. produced by the French travellers in 19th-century England, my paper will examine the representation of the English Countryside that their productions constructed and how revealing it is to see why French controversies over the countryside around London were less serious than for other aspects of the capital.
Dr. Madeline Zielinski (University of Rouen, France) As a number of scholars have proposed, verbal and visual depictions of landscape are powerful ways of representing the idea of the nation as a unitary entity and of stimulating national identity. The English landscape has been the prime subject of rival visions of national identity. During the Second World War, visions of the English countryside commonly were invoked to conjure the various geographic features and styles of living that exist within the nation state. Less frequently, urban landscapes were also deployed, especially those of war-ravaged London. This urban representation, however, depicted the nation at war, whereas the countryside symbolised its historical permanence. The British remained profoundly ambivalent during the war about whether countryside or city could lay claim to representing « the authentic nation », an ambivalence born, in part, from the place of the rural in the nation. The countryside in 20th-century Britain was both central and peripheral to the nation, its positioning underscored by a war that revealed an ongoing conflict between rural and urban/industrial interests and ways of life in spite of, and often in response to the unifying pressures of wartime. The war shook up the geography of England, unsettling people and their objects, transforming landscapes, removing things to where they weren’t before. The particular events of war gave Englishness a chance to gain a position of considerable cultural and political power in war and reconstruction. The various consequences of the war – the transformation of agriculture, the evacuation of city children and mothers, the bombing of cities – altered the terrain on which this modern Englishness moved, and opened up a space for it to claim and exercise authority. Landscape in itself and through its representations is a manifestation of culture, and by studying it, we are participants in its continuous and often contentious re-evaluation. Bibliography
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