LANDSCAPE AND ENGLISHNESS.

By David Matless. London: Reaktion. 2001. [pound]14.95

'Girls with men are jazzing to gramophones in meadows' exploded one custodian of the inter-war English landscape as popular tourism and its trappings descended on the apparent calm of the English countryside.

David Matless' engrossing and important book is a welcome recent reissue in paperback. Beneath the agitated and often opposing arguments about the proper treatment and use of the rural landscape are many and deep reverberations, touching issues of social, economic, aesthetic and political sensitivity. Inevitably, a moral dimension dominates, both in the unstinting fight against the physical disfigurement of the countryside by advertising or development and in the idea that access to its beauties and benefits was for the deserving, much as the Victorians believed. In these pages, intermittently and engagingly peopled by eccentrics, ghosts of long-forgotten committees and causes lost in distant memory, the material veers unnervingly 'between cultural proximity and cultural distance' as Matless puts it.

One compelling conclusion is the degree to which the qualities of rural life and landscape were brought into play to modernize England. Against the anti-urban stance of the organicists, fringe figures often inhabiting the political far right, Matless presents a cavalcade of progressive individuals and ventures -- before, during and after the last war -- ranging from the Cambridgeshire Village Colleges, the post-war New Towns and even the careful pilgrimage route of the CND marchers. Matless' concluding paragraphs suggest that there is already another book to be written on this subject (we must hope by the same author) as the old certainties of scale and locale dissolve yet again.