Publisher's Synopsis
Matless examines a wide range of material, including topographical guides, health manuals, paintings, poetry, architectural polemics, photography, nature guides, and novels. Taking readers to the interwar period, he explores how England negotiated the modern and traditional, the urban and rural, the progressive and preservationist, in its decisions over how to develop the countryside, re-plan cities, and support various cultures of leisure and citizenship. Tracing the role of landscape to Englishness from then up until the present day, he shows how familiar notions of heritage in landscape are products of the immediate post-war era, and he unveils how the present always resonates with the past.