Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives

A Sense of Place
2023-06-15 15:00 - 18:00 (Europe/London)

Travel writers and their landscapes
2023-03-24 10:00 - 13:00
Travel writers and their landscapes
Online symposium via MS Teams, Friday 24th March 2023
To register and receive the Teams link, please email Jeremy Burchardt – j.burchardt@reading.ac.uk
10.00 Welcome and introductions
10.05 Kathryn Walchester (Liverpool John Moores): ‘Landscape as Solace and Distraction in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Italian Letters (1747-56)’
10.25 Questions and discussion
10.45 Rebecca Ford: Landscape and the sense of place [title TBC]
11.05 Questions and discussion
11.25 Break
11.35 Matthew White (King’s College London): ‘“Those features … in strongest relief”: British Travellers in the American West & English landscape, c. 1870-1905’
11.55 Questions and discussion
13.00 Symposium ends

Changing Landscapes art history symposium
2022-12-02 11:00 - 13:00
Changing Landscapes art history symposium 2/12/22
We are delighted that at the next Changing Landscapes research network symposium, two of the UK’s leading art historians, Professor Malcolm Andrews (Gresham College) and Professor Ysanne Holt (Northumbria University) will be speaking about their new books.
The paper titles are:
Prof Malcolm Andrews – ‘Not Quite a Landscape…’?
Prof Ysanne Holt – ‘Dark skies, bogs and watery borders: creative engagements and conversation across the Anglo-Scottish borderland’

New approaches to landscape history: biographical and experiential perspectives
2022-09-23 11:00 - 16:00
Fifth symposium – New approaches to landscape history: biographical and experiential perspectives. 23/9/22
This final symposium aims to take the insights arising from the exchange of knowledge and ideas in the previous events and to explore new approaches to landscape history. It will conclude with a round table discussion of the most promising avenues for integrating the landscape insights offered by biographical and narrative approaches into applied landscape decision making tools.

Creative and Heritage Practice in Landscape Decision Making
2022-07-27 10:00 - 16:00 | Museum of English Rural Life
Fourth symposium – Creative and Heritage Practice in Landscape Decision Making. 27/7/22
This symposium explores how contemporary heritage practice might create a forum for landscape decision making. It will draw on the growth in participatory methodologies in heritage to explore how we might create spaces for democratising discussion around future landscape decisions. This approach engaged with academic research regarding emotion and heritage practice by exploring how narrative and biography inform the way in which we ‘feel’ about place and how this affects what we ‘care’ about and how we make decisions with regards to heritage landscapes. Hence this workshop will integrate current theory and methods around co-curation by bringing activist stakeholders into the conversation. Finally it will bring in creative practice to explore how heritage organisations might work with creativity to engage audiences with deeper issues around landscape and bring different voices into the debate. Based at the Museum of English Rural Life, the symposium draws on MERL’s Arts Council England designated collection of archival, library, object and art materials related to the changing English landscape. The collection includes both the archives of pressure groups such as the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England and policy archives from government bodies such as the MAFF. Collections will be used as prompts for discussion around past approaches to making, enacting, and resisting landscape decisions, with a focus on how narrative and biography were used both by policy makers and activists in this process. A creative installation will also be used as a prompt for discussion and to catalyse future academic-creative-stakeholder co-curated creative installations at the Museum of English Rural Life and beyond.

Changing Landscapes, Changing Values
2021-10-22 11:00 - 16:00
Third symposium – Changing Landscapes, Changing Values. 22/10/21
How does it affect us when landscapes change, or when our requirements of them change?
Landscapes undergo continual modification as a result of environmental processes, associated ecosystems services, socio-economic change and political decisions. These changes are often gradual but can be disruptive and even catastrophic: for example, Parliamentary enclosure, conifer plantation, forest and heath fires, requisition by the armed services and the construction of large-scale infrastructure such as new roads, railways, housing estates and renewable energy installations. Biographical and narrative perspectives are crucial in elucidating the affective impact of different kinds, scales and rates of landscape change and also in explaining the often-chequered history of the restoration of disused landscapes such as former mines, quarries and airbases. The symposium will also examine how narratives of local, regional and national identity reconfigure landscape preferences over time.
Click on the blue links below, download and open the file to view presentations from this symposium. These presentations have been posted with kind permission from the speakers.
‘Quarrying in the Hadrian’s Wall setting: Local loss and national preservation, c.1930-c.1960.’
Dr Gareth Roddy, Northumbria University
‘What happens when Modernity stops being Modern? Technological Infrastructure in an Age of Zero-Carbon.’
Dr Ben Anderson, Keele University
‘Wind, land, sea: generating power, identity and meaning in twentieth century Britain.’
Dr Marianna Dudley, University of Bristol
‘“Something’s Got to Give:” Social Constructions of Disruption of the Underground in Proposed Shale Gas Sites in the UK.’
Dr Stacia Ryder, University of Exeter
‘Losing landscape – forest fires: mushroom, lichen and reindeer herding.’
Dr Andrew Butler, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Formas (Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development) ReaD Fire – Researching and Decolonising Foreset fires and Indigenous Landscape Relations (2019-01147)

Whose Landscapes?
2021-03-30 11:00 - 17:00
Second symposium – Whose Landscapes? 30/3/21
One of the major advantages of a biographical/narrative approach is the potential it offers to open up our understanding of landscape to a wider range of voices. A particular focus of concern in the UK context is the ways in which landscapes, especially rural landscapes, can be constructed as ‘white spaces’ that exclude ethnic minorities (Neal and Agyeman, 2006), an issue recently highlighted by MK Gallery’s ‘The Lie of the Land’ exhibition and Beth Collier’s ‘Wild in the City’ initiative. Class exclusion is a major and enduring structural feature of, especially, rural English landscapes, as the National Trust’s ‘People’s Landscapes’ initiative recognizes.
Click on the links below, download and open the file to view presentations from this symposium. These presentations have been posted with kind permission from the speakers.
The disruptive politics of Brexit: rural communities, dependency and migration
Professor Sarah Neal, University of Sheffield
Anti-blackness and the racialization of the British rural countryside space – how racial prejudice and place are intertwined yet contested
Maxwell Ayamba, Sheffield Environmental Movement
‘White and pleasant land?’ Racism and exclusion in the English countryside, 1948 – 2020
Lottie Jacob, University of Reading
Progression, extension, development, and the origins of The MERL
Dr Ollie Douglas, The Museum of English Rural Life
Green Unpleasant Land: English Rurality and Empire
Professor Corinne Fowler, University of Leicester
The problem with the preservationists: conflicts of class and amenity in the ‘industrial Pennines’
Dr Katrina Navickas, University of Hertfordshire
Footpaths, heritage, and limitations on popular access to land
Professor Paul Readman, King’s College, London

Lifecourse, Narrative and Landscape
2020-12-04 11:00 - 16:00
First symposium – Lifecourse, Narrative and Landscape 4/12/20
Biographical perspectives are especially relevant to the ways landscape use and needs change with age (Bailey, 2009; Fincher, 2007). Both children and the elderly have distinctive needs and patterns of use in relation to landscape that have only recently begun to be acknowledged (Sleight, 2016; Wen et al, 2018). Conservation organisations such as the National Trust have achieved significant progress in adapting their properties and gardens to the needs of both younger and older visitors, but can this approach be extended to landscapes, and landscape decision-making, on a larger scale? Is it possible to give children and young people (of all backgrounds) a meaningful voice in landscape decisions, perhaps through social media and online discussion forums? How can biographical perspectives and personal narratives of this kind help landscape stakeholders to manage land assets in age-inclusive ways?
Click on the links below, download and open the file to view presentations from this symposium. These presentations have been posted with kind permission from the speakers.
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Music for the Landscape: Preserving Leith Hill Place, Dorking.
Parker T. Gordon, University of St Andrews
Abstract: Folksong-inspired melodies and pastoral soundscapes are commonly recognised tropes in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s music, but this paper shows that his interactions with the landscape extend much further. Connections to Leith Hill Place and the surrounding Dorking countryside are specific and evident across Vaughan Williams’s lifetime. Leith Hill Place was his childhood home and the ancestral family home on his mother’s side. Vaughan Williams composed and conducted for the Leith Hill Musical Festival from its inception in 1905 until 1953. After two decades of living in Chelsea, the composer returned to Dorking to live at The White Gates, where he composed many of his mature works. And, with the collaborative efforts of his neighbours, the novelist E. M. Forster and producer Tom Harrison, Vaughan Williams contributed music to two local pageants that emphasised not only the history of the surrounding area but also the importance of the landscape’s future. Searching for allusions in a composer’s music can be problematic, but we can identify Vaughan Williams’s engagement with the landscape more clearly through his activism and efforts to support preservation.
Thinking Life Course, Narrative and Landscape Through Ideas of Time, Affect, Atmospheres, Ecologies of Memory and ‘the Wake’.
Owain Jones, Emeritus Professor of Environmental Humanities, Bath Spa University
Abstract: This speculative paper seeks to question ideas of life course and what it might be to be in the (heritage) present in terms of space and time. This should have some relevance for the objectives of the programme in thinking about ‘how landscape stakeholders manage land assets in age-inclusive ways?’ This paper draws extensively on the work of Jan Slaby of the Free University of Berlin and his work on violence, affect and time. Particularly the paper “The Weight of History: From Heidegger to Afro-Pessimism” (2020). This also extends previous work I have done on the past in relation to nonrepresentational theory (NRT), and also ecologies of memories. There is no simple pay-off here in terms of management, but a series of starting points are made. Any life course and point in it, should not been seen as too defined, knowable, linear and fixed, but more as a living turbulence or a wake in time. Every individual life course maybe much more ecological and mysterious than can be easily known. As the film “Our Little Sister’ shows so wonderfully, children can carry burdens and sorrows as a freight of life experience, just as much as an older person can, and joys too. My suggestion is that there is a need to manage landscapes so they are that are as rich, varied, and mutable as possible, teeming with affective possibilities; messy, makeshift, always on the brink of other possibilities. This might make them places in which people, as varying flows of affective becoming out of time, can find connections, spaces and possibilities. Also, the (violent) history of any place must be acknowledged. Any heritage project needs to see itself as part of a collective truth and reconciliation endeavour. If that sounds extreme, consider Hicks (2020) analysis of museums which are, in their current forms, ‘sites of unending violence, ceaseless trauma, colonial crimes committed again every morning as the strip lights click on’ (Riley, 2020). Also drawing on Slaby – the role of affect and atmosphere in place is critical. How these are ‘engineered’ in any given place is a key question.
Rethinking Inclusive Landscapes: History, Culture and Sensory Diversity in Landscape Use and Decision Making.
Dr Clare Hickman (University of Newcastle) and Dr Sarah Bell (University of Exeter)
Abstract: This session will highlight and encourage discussion based on the work of the AHRC network, ‘Unlocking Landscapes: History, Culture and Sensory Diversity in Landscape Use and Decision Making’ led by Clare Hickman and Sarah Bell. One of the central aims of the network is to complement landscape management and decision-making approaches that foreground biodiversity with a focus on human diversity. Through the network, we will consider the complex ways in which landscapes become meaningful to diverse individuals and groups through their senses, personal memories and shared histories. As part of this approach we will use this session to share early reflections by network members about people’s varied landscape relationships and perceived challenges in terms of embedding social inclusion in future decision making in this area. We will then open up the discussion to all attending. As the project is considering diversity as something that is influenced by cultural, physical and historical aspects, we are keen to learn from others about what designed landscapes mean for them.
‘In all the Stages and Stations of our Lives’: Landscape and Lifehistory in the travel writing of Celia Fiennes (1682 – 1712)
Professor Nicola Whyte, Associate Professor in Landscape and Social History, University of Exeter
Roundtable Discussion
Dr Jeremy Burchardt, Professor Clare Griffiths, Professor Paul Readman, Dr Rosemary Shirley
