England’s Green

David Matless is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Nottingham. His books include Landscape and Englishness (revd edn 2016) and About England (2023), both published by Reaktion Books, as well as In the Nature of Landscape: Cultural Geography on the Norfolk Broads (2014).

This is a sharply critical view of what England’s green and pleasant land has undergone . . . a brilliant environmental kaleidoscope . . . The book’s publication could not be timelier, in a world whose naturalness seems increasingly pressured. - Timothy Mowl, Country LifeMatless traces the meeting of English people and the environment from the 1960s over a period of six decades. His well-researched narrative explains how this starting point gave a ‘novel twist’ to environmental concerns, which began shaping a Green political agenda highlighted by its criticism of industrial society. - Jules Stewart, GeographicalEngland’s Green explores how the country's connection with the environment has shaped and reflected English national identity since the Sixties, touching on a wide range of issues including agriculture, climate change, folklore and culture. - Simon Evans, ChoiceEngland's Green is another masterly work by David Matless, tracking six decades of tussles over English identity and the land itself, lit up by insights into farming, gardening, geology, conservation and folk dancing. Mixing geographic specificity with sly wit, Proustian memory-dives with encyclopedic reference, Matless misses nothing: Kate Bush, the Clangers, Richard Mabey, PJ Harvey, all are accorded the same eloquent attention. What results is nothing less than a field guide to life in the Anthropocene. - Steve Waters, Professor of Scriptwriting, University of East Anglia, and author of The Contingency PlanIn England’s Green, David Matless offers an extraordinarily compendious history of the encounter between England’s ‘green and pleasant land’, that much invoked place of the imagination, and the ecological ravages of industrial development, suburbanisation, and the chemical-agricultural complex. What has happened, he asks, since the 1960s, when ‘green’ became a source of critique rather than celebration? Only Matless could answer this question by taking the reader from an imaginary episode of Blankety Blank to William Blake’s Jerusalem to the ‘Countryside in 1970s’ conferences to current debates about rewilding, or leave the reader quite so interested in gravel pits or the back catalogue of Genesis. - Matthew Kelly, author of The Women Who Saved the English Countryside