Invention of the English Landscape

Peter Borsay was Professor of History at Aberystwyth University, UK, a member of the advisory boards of Urban History and the Journal of Tourism History, and a committee member of the British Pre-Modern Towns Group. His books include The English Urban Renaissance (1989); The Image of Georgian Bath, 1700-2000: Towns, Heritage and History (2000); and A History of Leisure: the British Experience since 1500 (2006). He has co-edited Resorts and Ports: European Seaside Towns since 1700 (2011) and Leisure Cultures in Urban Europe, c. 1700-1870: a Transnational Perspective (2016).Rosemary Sweet is Professor of Urban History and Director of the Centre of Urban History at the University of Leicester, UK. She is the author of The English Town, 1680-1840 and The Writing of Urban Histories in Eighteenth-Century England.

A masterly work- wide-sweeping, provocative, readable- by one of Britain’s leading cultural historians. Peopled with poets and novelists, antiquarians and fossil collectors, churchmen, hack journalists, artists and composers ( Elgar, Butterworth, Vaughan Williams) , Borsay’s book recounts the story of the imagining and reimagining of England’s landscape, as the nation was transformed by industrial urbanisation and the insatiable rise of London, the transport revolution, Romanticism, and the racist snobbery of Empire.

• Introduction Part I: Before the Victorians: c. 1500-1837 1. Revealing the Early Modern Landscape 2. Ideas and Representations 1500-1837 Part II: Reconfiguring the Landscape 3. Ideas and Representations 1837-1939 4. New Topographies 5. Timescapes Part III: Economic and Social Change 6. Economic and Social Change 7. The Transport Revolution Part IV: The State, Politics and Identities 8. State, Place and Politics 9. Identities and Experiences Conclusion: The Second World War and Beyond Bibliography