REVIEW: English Urban Landscape
Bruce B. Reynolds
review.
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Philip Waller (editor). _The English Urban Landscape_. Oxford, New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 352pp. Illustrations, maps, further
reading advice, and index. Price: =A330.00/$45.00 ISBN 0-19-860117-4.
Reviewed for H-Urban by Professor Stephen V. Ward, svw...@brookes.ac.uk,
School of Planning, Oxford Brookes University, Headington, Oxford OX3
OBP, UK.
This book will be an attractive and fairly useful addition to the
bookshelf of any urban historian with an interest in England. There is
little here that would challenge or extend the existing dominant
understandings of the evolution of England=92s cities. It is, however, a
worthwhile digest of the fruits of recent work in a highly readable and
attractive form. Its form is collective, representing the work of
fifteen authors, all of them English-based and acknowledged experts in
the urban history field. There is an extensive introduction by the
editor, twelve substantive chapters and eleven detailed "cameos"
inserted into the text to highlight particular places or themes.
Throughout it is well illustrated, including a large number of excellent
and (mainly) well-captioned contemporary photographs. (An exception is
on p. 238 where an aerial view of Tyneside flats is wrongly attributed
to South London). The standard of design and production is consistently
good.
Like all collective works, _The English Urban Landscape_ can be read
both for its individual contributions and as a whole. However, like
many collective works, it is much better in its individual parts than it
is as a whole. The standard of each chapter is, in fact, consistently
high. All are lucidly written, showing deep knowledge of the topics
under discussion. They avoid overburdening the reader with detail while
spelling out important developments and illustrating them with telling
examples. Some readers might well be irritated by the absence of
references, however. It is significant that the illustrations are far
more carefully referenced than the sources for the text. The rather
brief advice for further reading and guidance that appears in the
narrative of the chapters is not an adequate substitute for those who
wish to follow up the issues raised. Only one chapter author (of
chapter 4) makes the best of this by ensuring that the further reading
advice actually ties up with the in-text references. It is a pity that
this fairly simple but useful approach, which takes up little space, was
not followed by other authors.
For a study of urban history, the work opens in rather surprising
fashion with an essay by the editor that focuses almost entirely on the
late 1990s, together with various speculations about the future. There
is a well-informed discussion about the recent Urban Task Force Report
headed by Lord (Richard) Rogers of Riverside, _Towards an Urban
Renaissance_ (1999)[1], which has lambasted the poor physical quality of
British towns and cities. Yet although all this is interesting enough in
itself, the reader is bound to wonder whether it is really the best way
of introducing the book. Of the organizing principles that hold the
whole work together, we learn nothing, other than a couple of sentences
on the rear dust jacket. The reader is left assuming that the theme of
the book and the understandings on which it is based are so self-evident
as to be able to be left implicit. Rather than being given a vision of
the book as a whole, we leave the introduction uncertain about what it
to follow.
To those familiar with the pattern of English urban historiography, the
chosen themes for the chapters that follow are sensible but
unremarkable. The first four follow an essentially chronological
pattern, together giving a succinct overview of human settlements to
1800. David Shotter writes on the Roman contribution to England=92s
landscape. David A. Hinton then writes about decay and revival in early
medieval landscapes, which examines the post-Roman period (that which
used to be called the Dark Ages). Derek Keene takes up the story about
the mediaeval urban landscape (900-1540), followed by Peter Borsay, who
writes about the early modern urban landscape to 1800. Only in the last
case, where the author is limited to a comparatively short period of 260
years, is there sufficient opportunity to explore the different
perceptions and understandings of landscape.
The next seven chapters are structured thematically, though with no
apparent logic to their order. All show a broad focus on the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, though their chronological emphases vary very
substantially. While most authors show the broad pre-1914 bias long
familiar in English urban history, several write at length about
developments after the First World War and beyond. In a few cases,
though, the twentieth century is treated in very perfunctory fashion,
leaving this reader at least wanting much more. Even in those chapters
that give fullest treatment to the twentieth century, recent decades are
not usually dealt with in any detail. This general impression is
heavily reinforced by the illustrations that overwhelmingly show a
pre-1914 landscape. None of this is to imply that there is anything
wrong with the individual chapters when judged on their own terms. It is
difficult not to sympathize with authors obviously struggling to
compress in a meaningful way the amount of potential material into the
space available. Yet this begs some important questions about the
overall conception of the book, which will be addressed later in this
review.
In chapter 5, John Davis writes about the growth and reconstruction of
modern London. This is followed by Michael Winstanley on "Temples of
Commerce: Revolutions in Shopping and Banking." Both these chapters
attempt to do reasonable justice to the enormous changes wrought by the
twentieth century. This is not, however, the case in the following
chapter by R. J. Morris, writing about the nineteenth century industrial
town, with only the merest glances at the twentieth century. John
Armstrong contributes a chapter on transport, which says remarkably
little about the motor vehicle=92s enormous impacts on cities in the
second half of the twentieth century. In chapter 9, Richard Rodger on
"Slums and Suburbia: The Persistence of Residential Apartheid" gives a
much fuller account of twentieth century developments, at least in state
housing provision. John Walton returns to a largely pre-1914 time frame
when he describes the pleasures of urbanity. Geoff Tyack, on public
buildings and spaces, manages to give broadly similar emphasis to both
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The final chapter, by Stana Nenadic is quite different in that it moves
from the material world of buildings and spaces to the perceived
landscape of the creative imagination. It focuses on landscape in art,
literature, film, and other media, covering the period from the early
eighteenth century to the present. This allows Nenadic to comment on the
totality of the English experience of industrialism and modernity. Her
final words form a familiar conclusion for the book: "In the popular
psyche, England is still a rural place; our towns and cities are
intrusions in the Garden of Eden" (p. 341). In many senses, this same
point is made in another way by the recent Rogers Report, which the
editor of this present work quotes so approvingly in his introduction.
One of the most powerful pressure groups in England is, in fact, the
Council for the Protection of Rural England. Tellingly, Lord Rogers has
recently called for a Council for the Protection of Urban England to
counterbalance its influence. Here at last, the reader (fleetingly)
thinks, is laid bare the hidden larger theme of the book: the
fundamental English distaste for the urban, the consequences of which
still make most English towns and cities the most unprepossessing in
Western Europe.
Unfortunately, as one looks back through the book, there is little to
support the conjecture that this is the hidden big theme. The
disappointing truth remains that no larger theme is pursued sufficiently
to make the whole book worth more than the sum of its (extremely
impressive and well polished) parts. Problems that could provide overall
themes are largely ignored or treated only in passing. Thus the
critically important issue as to whether "English" signifies something
distinctive that has been generated in England or is merely that which
happens within its territorial bounds is ducked. Yet it is a question
that has major significance for understanding the twentieth century,
when the distinctive Englishness of the urban landscape eroded. (It
would have been interesting, for example, to see a chapter on the
American contribution to the English urban landscape).
Similarly the changing meaning of "urban" is also left tantalizingly
vague in this collection. Again the changes wrought by the twentieth
century have strained traditional notions. Quite simply, there has been
an increasing lack of congruence between the functional and the spatial
city. The reality is that almost the whole of England now functions, to
borrow Jean Gottmann=92s term, as a megalopolis, a giant urbanized region.
Yet this reality is easy to overlook because most of it is still
disguised as countryside. It often seems that one of the principal aims
of the English planning system is to perpetuate this disguise. What
then, in these circumstances, is the "urban" landscape? The problem is
briefly acknowledged in the introduction but not followed through in the
main body of the book.
Two related characteristics that are often attributed to the English
(not least by themselves) are their empiricism and their mistrust of
anything that is too conceptual or theoretical. These traits are the
source of both great strengths and weaknesses. And truly, this is a very
"English" book.
[1] _Towards and Urban Renaissance_ Final Report of the Urban Task Force
Chaired by Lord Rogers of Riverside, London: E & F. Spon, 1999.
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Bruce B. Reynolds, Independent/Legacy Systems Consultant: Trailing Edge
Technologies, Glenside PA---Sweeping Up Behind Data Processing Dinosaurs