Introduction
Much of our thinking about cities and towns – about the character of the urban – is based upon two, often unspoken, assumptions; that cities are man-made and modern. The first of these is, in a sense, simply stating the obvious; cities are necessarily constructed by human beings. How else could they be built? But hiding behind a statement of the obvious lies something less articulated, but equally clear, that cities are spaces in which the human will has imposed itself over nature. At one point in his City in History, Lewis Mumford, while discussing ‘the Crystallization of the City’ during the ‘First Urban Transformation’ c. 3000 BC, refers to the manner in which ‘the gigantic forces of nature were brought under conscious human direction’.Footnote 1 Such an interpretation suggests that the story of mankind has been one of the taming and directing of nature, and that the city – a product of human action – has been the instrument for doing this. Thus, there appears an antithesis between the man-made and the natural, the city and nature. In spatial terms, this translates into the contrast between the city and the country, a polarity which Ferdnand Braudel calls ‘the first and longest class struggle history has known’, but Raymond Williams argues acquired widespread usage in England from the last third of the sixteenth century, ‘with increasing urbanization, and especially the growth of the capital, London’.Footnote 2 Given the city–country antithesis, it could be argued that the urban historian's specific mission is to concentrate on the processes of human construction that allowed the city to become such a powerful force.
Implicit in the notion of a long-term, albeit sometimes faltering, process by which mankind tames and controls the natural world through the offices of the city is the notion of ‘the modern’ (including derivatives such as modernity, modernism and modernization). This is the other theme that those exploring the urban past instinctively gravitate towards. For John Jervis, ‘the city is where modernity happens; it is also where modernism happens’, and for Andrew and Lynn Hollen Lees, ‘cities were the places where modernity began and where it reached its zenith’.Footnote 3 For many commentators, such as Richard Dennis and Deborah Parsons, modernity has a very specific chronological and cultural locus, associated with the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 4 Ulf Strohmayer also emphasizes the idea of space in defining modernity: ‘the notion of the “new”. . .also points us to another geographical context surrounding modernity; its thoroughly urban, or better yet metropolitan character’.Footnote 5 This is a theme picked up by Miles Ogborn, whose Spaces of Modernity ‘takes a series of historical geographies of London in the period 1680–1780 and interprets them through the lens provided by theories of modernity’.Footnote 6 For those who feel that ‘the links between modern and urban are. . .too easily made’, it is not so much because they do not see any connection between the urban and the modern, but that this association can be found in a wide variety of historical epochs.Footnote 7
It is easy to slip from the marriage of the modern and the urban to a rather grander vision in which modernity equates to innovation, and cities – as the vectors of modernity – are the motors of human progress. The geographer Arthur Smailes claimed ‘cities flowered first in the Middle East. Their appearance was accompanied by great advances in human knowledge and technical equipment’, the sociologist Gideon Sjoberg that ‘from its inception the city, as a residence of specialists, has been a continuing source of innovation. . .the very emergence of cities greatly accelerated social and cultural change . . .as centres of innovation cities provided a fertile setting for continued technological advances’, and Peter Hall refers to the manner in which ‘every great burst of creativity in human history’ was ‘an urban phenomenon’.Footnote 8 Cities have thus been portrayed as in the vanguard of change and innovation, and as the vehicles through which human progress and civilization has been facilitated. As Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout declare in their City Reader, ‘cities are civilization. . .The culture of cities and our notions of civilization are virtually indistinguishable.’Footnote 9 In this scenario, where the urban and the modern are fused together, the history of civilization becomes one of how cities modernized and liberated the population as a whole from the shackles of a rural past.
It is arguable, therefore, that those who study the urban past are hard-wired to focus on and find the man-made and the modern, whether this is in ancient, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment or contemporary society. What appears to validate this approach is the sheer success of cities: the long-term global trend towards urbanization (so much so that globalization, modernity and the city are frequently seen as natural bedfellows).Footnote 10 It is not necessary to subscribe to any simple linear notion of urban growth – cities can rise and fall, countries urbanize and de-urbanize – to recognize that, in the words of Penelope Corfield's conclusion to the recent Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History, ‘despite much turbulence, the collective urban saga has developed, not steadily but inexorably in the long term, from the first creation of “Babylon” into an urbanized world of “Babylonia”’; or to be overly progressive in belief to share her view that ‘becoming globally urban is one of our great collective achievements through time’.Footnote 11 The long-term trend – from a position where the vast majority of people lived in rural settlements and small towns to one where in many countries a clear majority, and in some cases a very substantial majority, occupy large towns, cities and metropolises, what may be called the ‘demographic reversal’ – is too obvious and global to ignore. Estimates place the proportion of the world population living in settlements of 20,000 or more in 1800 at 2.4 per cent, in 1900 at 9.2 per cent and by 2000 at just under 40 per cent; and in the case of Japan, Latin America, North America, Russia, Europe and Oceania, three-quarters of their populations were inhabiting cities of over 20,000 by 2000.Footnote 12 Cities could be seen to represent the present and future, and therefore the modern; and to the extent that they offered a solution to the problem of how to accommodate vastly growing numbers of people in tightly restricted spaces, they also represented the triumph of the man-made over the natural environment.
Urbanization and the demographic reversal have given rise to forms of culture that are overtly urban, man-made and modern: social and cultural institutions such as the coffee house, assembly room, club, public house, music hall, cinema and international exhibition: built environments incorporating streetscapes, squares, sporting stadia, department stores, grand planning schemes and complex infrastructures of communications, water supply and sewerage: and the sort of experiential culture enjoyed by the promenader and flâneur, and – arguably – forms of political culture such as fascism and democracy. However, and this is the central hypothesis to be examined here, urbanization and the demographic reversal, while at the same time as generating a man-made and modern culture, have also, paradoxically, stimulated the opposite response, a thirst – among urban populations – for the natural and the historic. As the pace of urbanization has accelerated, city and town dwellers have reacted more and more against the man-made and modern environment in which they found themselves, in the process creating an increasingly sophisticated counter-culture that urban historians have tended to shy away from exploring.Footnote 13
Green space and nature
This survey will focus on the case of England. Here, the levels of urbanization rose substantially during the early modern period, especially with the explosive growth of London from a city of 50,000–60,000 in the early sixteenth century to almost a million by 1800, and rose dramatically during the course of the nineteenth century. Whereas about one third of the UK population lived in towns of over 20,000 in 1850 and two-thirds in the countryside, by 1920, two-thirds lived in towns and a third in the countryside.Footnote 14 To what extent did this represent a triumph of grey over green space?
Green space had always been part of English towns. Outside the densely packed urban core, substantial unbuilt or semi-built space might exist within the walls of the larger medieval and early modern cities, such as Norwich and York, and there was also a considerable peripheral belt of fields directly associated with the city and town, much of it held as common land.Footnote 15 Moreover, the vast majority of pre-modern towns had no walls and were small in size, some no more than a few hundred people, with their edges merging easily with the surrounding countryside and their economies closely integrated with that of rural society. Seventeenth-century Warwick was not a small town by contemporary standards, but a county capital with about 3,000 inhabitants in 1700. Yet in the 1690s, the five suburban wards contained over 150 thatched barns, and a large expanse of common land lay to the west of the town on what is now the site of the racecourse.Footnote 16 Though this green space within and outside the town would very likely have been used for military training and recreation, its primary function was as working space, not only for agriculture but also industry, with plant such as kilns and tenting frames often present. Given its predominant economic function, it is questionable to what extent this space was perceived and experienced as ‘culturally’ green; that is, in some way expressive of ‘nature’ (though urban May Day rituals suggest that an element of this existed).
However, during the early modern period, urban green space began to be consciously conceived of as representative of nature, particularly in London, whose dramatic expansion was creating a large concentration of population with only limited contact with the agricultural world. The result, as Raymond Williams suggests, is the emergence of the distinction between city and country, and – as a reaction to urbanism – of a town person's idealized notion of nature.Footnote 17 This manifested itself in various cultural forms, notably literary, but also in the first conscious identification and landscaping of public urban green space, with in the case of London the laying out of Moorfields early in the seventeenth century and the royal parks and commercial pleasure gardens a little later. These were highly contrived spaces involving a good deal of human artifice, but the intention to capture an idealized form of nature was clear enough. The London cases were originally sited on the edge of the metropolis, occupying a peripheral zone between town and country and mediating between the two. The same went for the provincial town walks and public gardens that began to proliferate from the later seventeenth century, many located on elevated sites that gave extensive and sometimes spectacular – as in the case of the Park Walk in Shaftesbury – views of the surrounding countryside. Many also ran along the banks of rivers, such as New Walk along the Ouse at York, indicative of the early inclusion of blue space into the urban idea of nature.Footnote 18
The greening of the urban landscape ran in parallel with a more widely researched and celebrated development, landscape gardening on the country estates of the British landed gentry and aristocracy. The story is well known and often told, with the rise of the English garden (or jardin anglais as it became known) during the eighteenth century, a hugely influential cultural export. It was characterized by its abandonment of Continental linear and geometrical forms of land and water landscaping in favour of free-flowing curvaceous ones that appeared to mimic nature.Footnote 19 The connections between green landscaping on the country estate and in towns is one that needs further research, particularly in relation to expanding cities and an increasingly urbanized landed elite. But Dana Arnold, deploying the concept of ‘rural urbanism’, has argued that ‘there is a strong relationship between country house building and the urban development of London’, and that the early nineteenth century ‘is a distinct moment in the history of London when the push towards modernity. . .harnessed methods developed by the elite for their country houses’.Footnote 20 It seems likely that the country estate played an important part in pioneering new notions of nature, and was influential in the design of urban residential estates, public parks, arboretums and cemeteries – even if they did not simply mimic their rural counterparts – that became such a feature of urban green space in the nineteenth century.Footnote 21 Country estate landscaping took a turn to the wild side with the emergence of more radical forms of natural gardening in the later eighteenth century under the umbrella of the picturesque movement. It was an approach forged within a group of aesthetically minded country gentleman who were friends and/or relatives (Richard Payne Knight, Uvedale Price and Thomas Johnes), and lived in Herefordshire, a county located on the edge of England and bordering ‘wild’ Wales. The smooth-scaping of Capability Brown was rejected in favour of the more rugged forms that were seen to better reflect ‘real’ nature. The solution in the case of Knight and Johnes was to take already dramatic river gorges on their remote estates, respectively Downton (Herefordshire) and Hafod (Ceredigion), and remodel them as ‘gardens’, bringing out, as they would see it, the inherently natural characteristics of the landscape.Footnote 22 Herefordshire was also the site of one of the earliest romantic hot spots in the form of the Wye Gorge, made famous – though already well appreciated before his appearance on the scene – by another theorist of the picturesque movement, William Gilpin, and his Observations on the River Wye (1783). No human remodelling of the landscape was attempted here – this was ‘unreconstructed’ nature – but Gilpin's guide did provide tourists with a toolkit with which to model their perception of the landscape.
What were the implications of these developments for urban landscaping and green space? On the face of it, this was not good news. Aesthetic trends were pointing in the direction of wilder and remoter landscapes. Quite apart from the fact that these were likely to be located some distance from towns, in thinly populated areas, there was rarely the space in towns to garden on the scale most suited to the picturesque. However, towns were able to respond to and exploit the new cultural fashion in a variety of ways. First, though the classic picturesque sites were apparently remote, there was often a town relatively close by to service the locations, providing visitors with essential accommodation, transport and other tourist comforts. Indeed, it is arguable that without such urban services, the sites would not be viable as tourist spots. The classic Wye Valley tour was a two-day trip by boat, which began at Ross-on-Wye, broke off for its mid-point at Monmouth (guests staying perhaps at the Beaufort Arms) and finished at Chepstow. In reality, the Wye Gorge was not all that cut off from civilization; for example, with the arrival of the first steam packet boats in Chepstow in 1822, the Wye Valley became accessible to day-trippers from Bristol.Footnote 23 Hafod, Thomas Jones’ property in Ceredigion, was undoubtedly remote, in the sense that it was located a good distance from the English border, but it lay only a few miles from Aberystwyth, a port developing since the 1760s as a sea bathing resort.Footnote 24 This prompts a second point, and here it is as much about blue as green space. As well as developing a picturesque garden on his Herefordshire estate at Foxley, Uvedale Price built a holiday residence between 1791 and 1794 in Aberystwyth. Designed as a triangular marine villa by John Nash, Castle House was located on the very edge of the sea, with windows so angled as to catch the spectacular view across the bay towards the looming dark mass of what was to be named Constitution Hill.Footnote 25 The prospect embraced both land and water forms, and with the sea incorporated a form of nature even less subject to human control – all too evident when storms strike the mid-Wales coast – than the land. Aberystwyth was one of a category of towns, emerging across Britain from the early eighteenth century, of what we now call seaside resorts. With their bathing and boating facilities and extensive infrastructures of cliff walks, promenades and piers, resorts were geared specifically to providing visitors with the opportunity to experience untrammelled nature. Significantly, the first cluster of seaside resorts emerged in about the 1730s in the south-east of England (on the Isle of Thanet and the Sussex coast) at the optimum point to service London's Gargantuan population. Later phases of development brought into the resort system the west and east coasts of Britain, responding to the demand generated by urban growth in the Midland and northern industrial towns, and improved transport links.Footnote 26
Uvedale Price's house in Aberystwyth showed what a premium came to be placed on a sea view.Footnote 27 This sat in marked contrast to the traditional orientation of houses in coastal towns, which usually faced inland with their backs to a sea that was seen as wild and dangerous, a functional resource for travel and fishing, but one possessing no aesthetic merit.Footnote 28 With the rise of the seaside resort urban coastal residential architecture underwent a dramatic inversion, with hundreds of villas, terraces and crescents constructed along shorelines and cliffs to maximize sea views. The origins of these building types – particularly the terraces and crescents – lie partly in London, but more specifically in the spas, which acted as a model for seaside resort development well into the nineteenth century.Footnote 29 The crescent was an invention of Bath, and was designed to provide an elegant and elevated residential platform from which to view the surrounding countryside. This highlights the fact that spas themselves cultivated an ambivalent image that mixed the urban and the rural. On the one hand, they supported a highly urbane lifestyle and built environment; on the other hand, they were frequently located in rural locations surrounded by hills and were subject to intensive levels of green landscaping that blurred the boundary between town and country. The northern spas of Buxton, Matlock and Harrogate, and the later Victorian and Edwardian mid-Wales spas of Llandrindod, Builth and Llanwrtyd, were situated in upland/moorland locations. Though surrounded by less rugged countryside, Bath's late Georgian expansion was accommodated on the steeply rising Lansdown Hill, and Cheltenham was constructed in the shadow of the Cotswold escarpment.Footnote 30
The spas had associations with blue nature through the presence of the healing springs. However, water therapy was a precarious foundation in Britain on which to build long-term success, and it seems that for many spas it was the access that they provided to green space, both their own and that of the surrounding countryside, that underpinned their long-term future. The Shropshire spa of Church Stretton, for example, acted as a base camp for those exploring the Long Mynd. Or take the case of Malvern. This emerges as a village spa of more than local significance in the mid-eighteenth century, but its growth into a genuine spa town spans the nineteenth century, with the resident population of Great Malvern expanding from 819 in 1801 to 6,049 in 1861 and 16,449 by 1901.Footnote 31 On the face of it, the town's growth was all about the attraction of its medicinal waters. They played a part. But it seems that by the later nineteenth century of equal and in all probability of greater importance to the success of the spa was its access to the striking chain of hills that rose steeply above it like a miniature Alps. Evidence of the new-found tourist potential of the Malverns was the acquisition in 1884 of a special Act of Parliament, a precursor of National Parks legislation, which sought to preserve the natural character of the hills. To this end, an organization, the Malvern Hills Conservators, was established, one of whose explicit duties was to manage the environment ‘for the use and recreation of the public’.Footnote 32 It was a responsibility that it executed with growing diligence and effectiveness as its powers and resources expanded.Footnote 33 An important pressure group in the struggle to obtain the act was that constituted by the hoteliers and businessmen of Great Malvern. This was a recognition, also reflected in the content of the local guidebooks, of the importance that the hills and environs came to occupy in the leisure routines of the visitors.Footnote 34
The spa town of Great Malvern and the Malvern Hills were tied inextricably together. But it was to the expanding urban centres of the West Midlands that they looked for their principal market. In this sense, the Malverns were really an extension of the green space of cities such as Worcester and Birmingham. Throughout Victorian and Edwardian England, picturesque – the word was continuously used into the early twentieth century in tourist literature – landscapes were being revealed and modelled (through guidebooks, fictional works, paintings and photographs) as recreational green spaces. The purpose was to quench the thirst of the country's expanding numbers of urban dwellers for contact with nature. From Dartmoor to the Lakes, from the West Country and Wessex to the Cotswolds and Broads, imagined countrysides and wildernesses were being created, tied umbilically for their lifeblood to the cities by the revolutions in personal mobility and transport provided by steamer, rail, cycle, charabanc and automobile.Footnote 35 In this sense, the rural landscape as a whole was being transformed into urban green space. Moreover, with the growing dependence by the late Victorian period on agricultural imports from overseas, added to the problems of an agricultural depression, the English countryside was being valued increasingly for its recreational rather than productive functions. The tendency to urbanize the countryside was most acutely felt on city edges. There, the centrifugal forces towards middle-class suburbanization, felt as early as the seventeenth century in London, but, it is argued, in the provinces not until the later eighteenth century, were creating an ever-expanding peripheral zone that hovered between town and country. Characterized by leafy streets, spacious residences and extensive gardens, the suburbs often expanded by absorbing existing villages. On some occasions, suburbia took the form of planned enclaves (such as Edgbaston in Birmingham), on others, loosely connected villas. There was an ever-changing, ever-mutating margin, as over time originally spacious suburbs became more densely in-filled, and the urban edge pushed further into the countryside.Footnote 36
Sometimes, the urban green fingers spread even further into what may be called ‘deep suburbia’, creating during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries exclusive settlements of large architect-designed (often influenced by the arts and craft movement) houses set in woods or fields, not directly connected to a town or city, though due to developments in transport, within close reach of it, in which prosperous citizens could play at being country lads/squires and lasses/ladies. Up until the late nineteenth century, Boars Hill, three miles south-west of Oxford, was a tiny and isolated hamlet, a part of the predominantly agricultural parish of Wootton. A genteel invasion by dons, retired colonial civil servants, painters and poets – John Masefield moved there in 1917, but left for the Cotswolds in 1933 when apparently he found it too suburban – transformed it into an urban Arcady. Sustained by poetical myth in the form of Matthew Arnold's verse – ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ (1853) and ‘Thyrisis’ (1866), deeply nostalgic threnodies to rural England set in the Boars Hill area – it was home to the curious Jarn Mound (erected 1929–31 and intended as a viewing platform) by another resident, the Oxford archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum 1884–1908).Footnote 37 The area was also the focal point of much of the early attention of the Oxford Preservation Trust, founded in 1927, which pursued its green agenda by purchasing property on Boars Hill in the late 1920s (including, with the help of Evans, the Matthew Arnold Field) to protect the area from over-development and ‘secure for the enjoyment of the public the views commemorated’ in Arnold's poems.Footnote 38
The apparently relentless march of shallow and deep suburbia in the UK meant that by the inter-war years there was a growing chorus of complaints about the threat of urban sprawl, castigated by Clough Williams-Ellis in England and the Octopus (1928) as ‘this malformation of the town by “tentacle growth”’.Footnote 39 Earlier in the twentieth century, the urban planners had attempted to resolve the problem of unregulated urban expansion, and the threat that this posed to the idea of the countryside, at the same time as satisfying the ever-increasing appetite of urban dwellers for green space and nature, by evolving the notion of the Garden City. This was an attempt, in the words of its formulator, Ebenezer Howard, to create a ‘third alternative’ to town or country life, in which ‘all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect combination’.Footnote 40 In truth, by the inter-war years, the game was up; the ‘real’ countryside was inexorably fading away as it was replaced for the majority by an imagined countryside that was an extension of urban green space. Indeed, as Paul Brassley and others have argued, the so-called revival of the English countryside and village in the inter-war years was ultimately dependent on urban wealth and commitment.Footnote 41
The past
In 1910, the prolific guidebook writer A.G. Bradley could report of finding at Bidford, nestled in the Avon valley between Stratford and Evesham, ‘a hotel on the river, a beer garden, and every accommodation, including boats for giving the Joes and Jills of Birmingham a happy day’.Footnote 42 In decamping to the banks of the Avon, these Brummy day-trippers were not only entering green space but also historic space. For the small town – scarcely more than a village by the early twentieth century – of Bidford-on-Avon lay within Shakespeare Land, a mythic territory, located temporally somewhere between medieval and ‘merrie’ England, in whose turbulent history it could be argued an English identity was forged. Its nerve centres were the historic towns of Warwick, Kenilworth and Stratford-upon-Avon – the former two the possessors of spectacular medieval castles, the latter the home of the Bard whose literary works defined the region and its cultural meaning. Adjacent lay Royal Leamington Spa, an undoubtedly modern town, but one that in many respects acted as the tourist service centre for the region. The precise notion of Shakespeare Land probably only emerged in the late nineteenth century, but built upon an established Shakespeare industry already well embedded into the economy and identity of Stratford and the region.Footnote 43 Judging by the British Library's catalogue, the first use of the term may have been in the 1880s and 1890s with John Macpherson's Land of Shakespeare (1889), C.J.R. Turner's Shakespeare's Land (1893) and George Morley's Rambles in Shakespeare's Land (before 1895).Footnote 44 By the 1930s, at least a further five books had appeared with ‘Shakespeare Land’ in their title.Footnote 45
The role of a literary figure in defining an imaginary region that mixed green and historic space was a common one. Nicola Watson has explored ‘the ways in which reading’ during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘became progressively and differentially locked to place’.Footnote 46 Unlike Shakespeare, who was unwittingly dragooned into the role, Thomas Hardy was consciously complicit with the creation (or re-creation) of Wessex. As he wrote in the introduction to a later edition of Far from the Madding Crowd,
I believe I am correct in stating that, until the existence of this contemporaneous Wessex was announced in the present story, in 1874, it had never been heard of, and that the expression, ‘a Wessex peasant’, or ‘a Wessex custom’, would therefore have been taken to refer to nothing later in date that the Norman Conquest. . .Since then the appellation which I had thought to reserve to the horizons and landscapes of a merely realistic dream-country has become more and more popular as a practical provincial definition; and the dream-country has, by degrees, solidified into a utilitarian region which people can go to, take a house in, and write to the papers from.Footnote 47
Towns had always been concerned about their histories. Indeed, the notion that towns were or should in some way be ‘modern’, spearheading change, would have seemed odd to medieval and early modern urban dwellers. They were forever looking to the past to justify current political agendas as well as their overall status and identity, frequently rehearsing and embroidering their foundations myths, and jealously guarding their civic histories.Footnote 48 Arguably all this changed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the shakeup in the urban hierarchy and the emergence of ‘new’ towns whose economic success depended upon innovatory technologies, commercial creativity and the adaptability and industriousness of their workforce. William Hutton recalled that when he first encountered the inhabitants of Birmingham in 1741, ‘they were a species I had never seen: They possessed a vivacity I had never beheld: I had been among dreamers, but now I saw men awake.’Footnote 49 Birmingham, the nascent industrial giant, would seem to have exuded the very essence of change and modernity, and the spirit of improvement by this period was beginning to be celebrated by many towns. Yet ‘new’ towns such as Birmingham – and Birmingham was in fact not a new but a medieval town – far from embracing the future unhampered by the baggage of their history, or imagined history, were among those places that did most to promote and cultivate their past. By the nineteenth century, the industrial towns and ports of the Midlands and north were, as the research of Rosemary Sweet has shown, among the most likely recipients of the proliferating number of urban histories.Footnote 50 The urge to legitimate the present by drawing on the past could be seen most spectacularly in the grandiose town halls and public buildings of Victorian England's industrial and port cities. Early on, classicism – Grecian, Roman, Renaissance and neo-classical – was the favoured style, allowing the cities and their rulers to draw on the rich historical resonances of this tradition. Monumental structures, such as the town halls at Birmingham (1832–4) and Leeds (1852–8) and St George's Hall at Liverpool (1841–54), were a direct rebuke to any who might think these places urban upstarts.Footnote 51 Classicism had a long association with city building and civic autonomy, so Manchester's adoption of a full-blown early English gothic style for its town hall (1867–77) might seem odd. But by this time, the gothic revival was in full flood, and under the influence of figures like Augustus Pugin and John Ruskin was able to draw upon a different historical tradition and idea, no less steeped in the past or powerful than that of classicism, the sacred city of the medieval period.Footnote 52
If some towns were using the past to mask their comparative youth, other towns were exploiting their ‘real’ age as a commercial asset. From the eighteenth century, it is possible to see the emergence of a domestic market – paralleled on the Continental front by the Grand Tour – of heritage tourism, and with it the tourist-historic city. The favoured past for much of the eighteenth century was probably a classical one, and a few English cities, such as Bath and York, were able to exploit this. But in truth Roman remains were few and far between. What really opened up the potential of English towns for heritage tourism was the gothic revival, as the fear of a Catholic counter-reformation declined after the failure of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, and medieval architecture slowly lost its stigma as papist and barbaric. If England's historic towns were short of classical remains, there was a surfeit of medieval churches and ruined abbeys, not to mention castles, though walls and gates were rapidly being dismantled during the course of the eighteenth century. In his 1720s Tour, Defoe might have famously rejected the need to record historic features – ‘matters of antiquity are not my enquiry’Footnote 53 – but by the end of the century, a guidebook writer could not afford to be so dismissive. During the nineteenth century, the tourist gaze was widened to incorporate not only medieval fabric but also Tudor and Stuart buildings, but it was not until the early twentieth century that historic Georgian architecture began to attract the attention of visitors and their guides. Selling a place on the basis of its past became an important business line for many towns. One device that a number of towns resorted to in the early twentieth century to boost and advertise their historic profile was the historical pageant.
In 1905, the small Dorset town of Sherborne mounted a historical pageant to celebrate the 1200th anniversary of the founding of its school and the appointment of Aldhelm as first bishop of Sherborne. A cast of 900 local people were recruited to perform 11 episodes recreating the town's history from 705 to 1593. Initially, the signs of success were not auspicious, yet the press caught wind of the enterprise, publicized the event, and soon ‘pageantitis’ swept across predominantly, but not exclusively, southern Britain. Sherborne was followed by pageants at Colchester and Warwick in 1906; Bury St Edmunds, Oxford, Romsey, Liverpool and St Albans in 1907; Chelsea, Gorleston, Cheltenham, Dover, Pevensey and Winchester in 1908; Bath and York in 1909; and Chester in 1910. During the inter-war years, the movement spread across British towns as a whole, including the major industrial cities and ports, but at this early stage, the focus on self-evidently historic tourist towns and cities was clear.Footnote 54 Pageants involved mounting a series of theatrical tableaux depicting what were perceived to be key episodes in a town's past. The event was usually orchestrated by a professional pageant master, but was organized by local grandees. Taking into account committee members, back room staff and amateur actors, hundreds and even thousands of local people could be actively involved in a mass engagement with the past. In the Bath Pageant of 1909, the number of performers was of the order of 3,000 with about 400 in the eighteenth-century scene alone.Footnote 55
In Bath's case, the pageant was part of a much larger project to raise the historical credentials of the town to attract tourists, as the appeal of its medicinal waters began to fade. It was a similar story to the way that other spas like Malvern were turning to green space as their economic saviour. Moreover, in the cases of both Bath and Malvern, it was not simply a matter of either nature or the past; Bath, as we have seen, exploited its natural environment to raise its green appeal, while Malvern and its adjacent hills and countryside were rich in old villages, historical artefacts and legends. Both were part of spaces that during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became tourist zones embedding historic cities, towns, villages and archaeological monuments in what was perceived as a basically rural environment. In these areas, nature and the past were entwined together. A trip into the country was a trip into the past. When in the 1890s the members of the Warwickshire Photographic Survey, a part of the Birmingham Photographic Society, undertook their personal and collective excursions into the county's urban and rural nooks, crannies and byways – capturing images of half-timbered cottages, ancient country houses, castles and rural labourers – they were sharing in the creation of a mythical time-space zone, crystallizing into Shakespeare Land, that was at heart the creation of the urban imagination.Footnote 56 It was the parallel, but an inverse one, of the explorations being made at the time into deepest and darkest Africa. One was outward looking and imperial, the other inward looking and localizing; but both were journeys of discovery to find spaces that existed more in the mind than on the ground.
The Survey was part of a movement that had begun in the 1840s with the formation of the natural history societies, many based on counties or large towns, which were engaged in a remarkable exercise in discovering and mapping the natural and human history of their regions. Their membership was drawn predominantly from the towns in the region, and especially the professional middle classes, and their classic mode of investigation was the day ‘excursion’, the visit to a particularly iconic natural and/or historic spot by the society's members, with lectures and investigations on the spot, followed by collective jollification at a local inn, and reports for annual transactions.Footnote 57 There was no better symbol of the way that the town was remodelling historic and rural England as its recreational space.
Conclusion
The central claim of this survey is that urban historians have understandably tended to focus on the man-made (or grey space) and the modern, and have paid relatively little attention to nature (or green and blue space) and the past. The latter elements seem the very opposite of what the town stands for, but there is every reason to believe that they have always been part of the urban mix. However, paradoxically, nature and the past as cultural products become an even more important part of the city and town as urbanization gathered pace, particularly from the eighteenth century, and as the balance of the population shifted decisively, and in the case of England dramatically so, from the country to the town. Change stimulated a counter-cultural reaction. This is not to claim that the man-made and the modern were not crucially important aspects of an urbanizing culture. It is simply to suggest that nature and the past were also part of that complicated mix. To see the impact of nature and the past, we have in part to look inside the town; the domestic garden, public walk, promenade, pleasure garden, park, civic building, castle, cathedral and such like. But the greatest impact was probably on the urban edge and beyond; in the suburbs and deep suburbia, the maritime margins and the imaginary territories being created, especially from the late nineteenth century. As economic production concentrated more and more in the cities and large towns, so the countryside, its smaller historic towns, and much of the coastline, became less economically ‘functional’, and more and more a recreational resource for the urban population. Today, the appeal of nature and the past is huge, and with it notions of eco-systems, bio-diversity, conservation and heritage. Underpinning this, there is often a yearning for the ‘real’ and a vague anti-urbanism. But this return to authenticity is a chimera. There never was an authentic and pristine nature or past. The notions of nature and the past that we now celebrate are as much a part and product of urban culture as the man-made and the modern.
