RESE ARCH INTO PR ACTICE
Reading Green Unpleasant Land Green Unpleasant Land explores the English countryside’s colonial past. It covers many aspects of the history of landscapes, parks and gardens. The potential lessons for landscape practice will be explored over the next few editions of the journal. 1. ‘Green Unpleasant Land’ book cover Creative Responses to Rural England’s Colonial Connections - by Corinne Fowler.
Lucy Pickford
© Peepal Tree Press
Landscape Institute
1 Pg 246 Green Unpleasant Land – Report of the House of Commons, PKS315
Green Unpleasant Land looks at the origins of the money that built the English countryside and its parks and greenspaces. It considers the impact of this on our interpretation as well as the use of space today. Through the investigation of creative responses to this history, it raises many questions about how we not only acknowledge this history, but also ensure that it is contextualised and that its impact is addressed. Fowler’s work has received considerable publicity. In addition to being a research expert at the University of Leicester, she is also Director of Colonial Countryside: National Trust Houses Reinterpreted. The reports published by the National Trust have led to signficant controversy for both the author and the organisation. Fowler explains her motivation for writing the book is both political and emotional. One of her starting points is a family link to Caribbean sugar wealth. She notes, “our relatives either profited from empire, or were impoverished by it.” The book looks at the opening ceremony for the London Olympics and the National Trust’s publication of a report on the colonial connections of the properties that they manage. It then explores the changing features of rural Britain, and then considers
English rural writing in a global setting. There is also an analysis of the country house and of moorlands. One particular area of focus for landscape practitioners that the book addresses is the cultural history of gardens as shaped by empire and migration. Throughout the book, Fowler highlights the history of forms of control over the use of land employed by governments and landowners over the last few centuries. She looks at the Enclosure Acts of the 1700s as well as changing attitudes to the provision of allotments for those displaced within the UK. She notes that to this day there is still regulation over the use of space. Just recently this has been the case with people being locked out of parks and police officers sent to reprimand sunbathers and benchsitters during the COVID crisis. This may be in the use of public space for demonstrations, or ‘keep off the grass’ and ‘no ball games’ signs employed by the local administrators. Funding and the structural inequality in parks provision plays a large part in access limitations. Fowler cites research that showed “20% of the most affluent wards in council areas has on average five times more green space than the 10% of the most deprived areas.”1
The history of parks reflects a constant struggle between users seeking their self-defined pleasures and the municipal and other would-be circumscribers of behaviour in parks Alongside this, Fowler looks at access to the countryside and explains the way in which many minority groups feel unwelcome in a seemingly
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