{"id":238,"date":"2020-07-06T19:02:52","date_gmt":"2020-07-06T18:02:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/changing-landscapes\/?p=238"},"modified":"2021-03-08T13:25:12","modified_gmt":"2021-03-08T13:25:12","slug":"pandemic-landscapes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/research.reading.ac.uk\/changing-landscapes\/pandemic-landscapes\/","title":{"rendered":"Unlockdown?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Jeremy Burchadt<\/p>\n

During the first UK lockdown this Spring, many people ventured out into the countryside who would never normally do so.\u00a0 Walking over the usually deserted Pewsey Downs in late May, I met dozens of walkers and cyclists, while paragliders swooshed past overhead, and the same was true, minus the paragliders, on Ladle Hill a fortnight earlier.\u00a0 \u00a0It wasn\u2019t just the numbers \u2013 as a regular walker you get used to seeing certain sorts of people out in the English countryside, mainly middle-aged and white.\u00a0 After the lockdown began, I noticed many more people in their teens and twenties, many more families and greater ethnic diversity.\u00a0 Ironically and exhilaratingly, the lockdown un<\/em>locked the countryside for millions of people who had previously been or felt excluded from it, that it was in some sense not available to them, \u2018not theirs\u2019.\u00a0 The Landscape Research Group<\/a><\/span> has been deeply concerned with this theme for years. \u00a0Thinking about how we can democratize landscapes and landscape decision-making to open it up to hitherto excluded or marginalized groups and individuals is also central to Changing Landscapes, Changing Lives<\/a><\/span>, the Arts & Humanities Research Council network Paul Readman (King\u2019s College London) and I convene.\u00a0 It\u2019s a theme that runs through everything we do and will be the explicit focus of our second symposium, \u2018Whose Landscapes?\u2019, which will feature the work of artist, photographer and network member Ingrid Pollard<\/a><\/span>.<\/p>\n

On closer inspection, however, perhaps the \u2018unlocking of the countryside\u2019 during the first lockdown went less far than met the eye.\u00a0 The multiple causes of differential access did not magically evaporate \u2013 where you live, whether you have a car, know how to read an OS map, are used to farm animals and many deeper-lying influences too.\u00a0 \u00a0Hence people flocked to urban green spaces, riverside paths, well-known local beauty spots and the national parks in far greater numbers than to the \u2018deep\u2019 countryside.\u00a0 In a pandemic-stricken world, this brought new problems \u2013 how can you maintain social distancing on a narrow footpath if hundreds of other walkers are traipsing along it in both directions?\u00a0 Would we all be safer back at home \u2013 has the pandemic turned the stereotypically Victorian notion that fresh air is healthy on its head?\u00a0 But more acutely it also raised familiar conflicts in new guises.\u00a0 In the first few weeks of the lockdown, Derbyshire Constabulary controversially used drones<\/a><\/span> to shame ramblers who they claimed were breaking the government\u2019s rules, Lancashire Police turned back a family driving from London to the Lake District<\/a><\/span> and relations between rural residents and urban visitors became increasingly fraught.\u00a0 Car parks were closed, roads blocked and a rash of improvised notices, ranging from the studiously polite to the gratuitously offensive, appeared on trees, gates and signposts.\u00a0 One widely circulated photo showed a vehicle and trailer blocking access to Lake Bala, Snowdonia, with \u2018GO HOME idiots – Covid-19\u2019 spray-painted across them.\u00a0 Other messages made the same point less abrasively.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"
Sign by the A836, Bettyhill, Sutherland (Scotland), 8th July 2020<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Although the pandemic has given them a new twist, these tensions between insiders and outsiders have a long history in rural England.\u00a0 Cyril Joad\u2019s The Untutored Townsman\u2019s Invasion of the Country<\/em> (1946) was in fact more sympathetic to access than its memorably provocative title might suggest, but it reflected widespread anxiety about noise, litter and pollution in connection with the rising popularity of the countryside among the \u2018wrong sort of people\u2019<\/a><\/span> in the mid-twentieth century.\u00a0 These concerns underpinned the introduction of the Country Code<\/a><\/span> in 1951. They also informed the creation of Country Parks under the 1968 Countryside Act.\u00a0 Country Parks were intended as \u2018honey pots\u2019 to draw and contain urban visitors, preventing them from intruding into the wider countryside.\u00a0 This\u00a0 deep suspicion, even scarcely veiled hostility, to those (stereotypically urban and working class) thought \u2018not to belong\u2019 in the countryside has never really gone away.\u00a0 It represents a rather extreme form of \u2018othering\u2019, seen in particularly virulent form in the Countryside Movement protests of the early 2000s (\u2018Say No to the Urban Jackboot\u2019<\/a><\/span>).\u00a0 Until we are able to achieve a more gracious, welcoming mutual understanding it is difficult to see how problems of overcrowding, littering, path erosion and traffic congestion in the honeypot locations to which visitors are purposely channelled can be overcome.\u00a0 We need a conceptual breakthrough, recognizing that the whole countryside can be a recreational as well as<\/em> an agricultural resource, analogous to the one Joseph Addison achieved for landscape gardening when he asked in a\u00a0celebrated<\/span> 1712 Spectator<\/em> paper<\/a><\/span> \u2018Why may not a whole estate be thrown into a kind of garden by frequent plantations, that may turn as much to the profit as the pleasures of the owner?\u2019<\/p>\n

In one sense, after all, whether we are residents or visitors, we are all<\/em> intruders in the landscape.\u00a0 That, again, became vividly apparent during the first lockdown.\u00a0 Wildlife flourished \u2013 out on my walks, I noticed that normally shy and retiring species such as Brown Hares and Fallow Deer had become emboldened<\/a><\/span>, even insouciant.\u00a0 Suddenly, one could gauge how overbearing the pressure of human activity is in \u2018normal\u2019 times, squeezing other animals with whom we share our planet to the hidden margins of the landscape.\u00a0 Roads and even skies were quiet, the air was clean \u2013 behold a vision of nature restored!\u00a0 Many, especially young people, began to ask what kind of normal we wanted to return to, vividly brought home to me by the chalk graffiti that appeared overnight on the footbridge across the motorway near where we live:<\/p>\n

\"\"\"\"<\/p>\n

The pandemic\u2019s transformation of the landscape, an unanticipated, even serendipitous, by-product of the lockdown forced upon us, opened up profound questions and perhaps new possibilities<\/a><\/span> about the way we live, what kind of society we are, and our relationship to the non-human world around us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Jeremy Burchadt During the first UK lockdown this Spring, many people ventured out into the countryside who would never normally do so.\u00a0 Walking over the usually deserted Pewsey Downs…Read More ><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":334,"featured_media":244,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"__cvm_playback_settings":[],"__cvm_video_id":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[11],"coauthors":[10],"class_list":["post-238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","tag-blog"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nUnlockdown?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dr Jeremy Burchardt explores how the pandemic has brought more people to the countryside and the effect their presence 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