Those familiar with Paul Readman’s previous work on landscape and its significance will turn with enthusiasm to his latest volume, the fruit of research in the library and in the field. In it he takes us to border areas (the cliffs of Dover and the Northumbrian border) and landscape associations with the preservation movement (the Lake District and the New Forest), before moving ‘Beyond the South Country’ to Manchester and the Thames. Using these as examples, he argues that landscapes in the long nineteenth century were ‘storied’, that is, valorised not just in aesthetic or moral terms, but also because they were associated with events or significant people from the past, or narratives about the past, or a general and often eclectic sense of long tradition and pedigree. He describes this as ‘the union of story and scenery’ (p. 132) and finds such storied landscapes in cities and industrial areas as well as rural ones. As his subtitle suggests, he argues that the territorial/geographical identity linked to landscapes, though rooted in the distinctiveness of a locality, could be more than local – in fact, national – and hence experienced by a wide range of people, resident in the locality or not, and evident in things like national newspapers and guidebooks for travellers, or outsiders’ interest in local dialects or old ballads, as much as in local newspapers and commentary. He further argues that the national identity to which the storied landscapes were linked was progressive, modern, inclusive, and democratic as often as it was nostalgic or elitist, and hence to be found in industrial, booming Manchester as well as in the secluded New Forest.

Readman is an engaging and convivial guide through the various landscapes, living up to the claim he makes in the introduction that writing history is an art. Using a wide range of source material, from periodical articles to popular song, as well as those named above, he gives new insights into areas that are staples of landscape and open space histories, the New Forest and Lake District for example, and opens up less familiar landscapes, notably Manchester. Though perhaps of less interest to readers of Rural History, the Manchester chapter is in many ways the most innovative and enjoyable. For me it brought back memories of a four-hour field trip in driving winter rain around many of the sites mentioned in the book – a tribute to Readman’s ability to call on readers’ powers of recollection and evoke a personal response to landscape along with his ability to construct an engaging intellectual argument.

My main reservation about the book was Readman’s bold use of ‘English’ in his subtitle. The English/British are notoriously confused as to which nation they belong to and the English language even lacks an adjective to mean ‘of the United Kingdom’ as distinct from ‘of Britain’. Readman is of course alive to this muddle, and his conclusion considers it and its further complication in the age of empire, but, given this and the fact that his abundant and welcome quotations often refer to a British rather than an English identity, I wonder why he opted for the singular ‘English’ identity in the subtitle. It might perhaps have been better to have adopted Leslie Stephen’s tactic in the Dictionary of National Biography, whose title declares its identity to be national without specifying which nation is under discussion – a stroke of genius that does not attempt to impose order where none exists.

But this is perhaps a cavil, and I warmly commend this book. It is attractively written and illustrated, reasonably priced, and light enough to be a good companion in the field as well as intellectually weighty enough to be compelling reading in the library.