In Shadow Sites: photography, archaeology, and the British landscape 1927–1955 (2007), Kitty Reference HauserHauser delineated a modernist ‘neo-Romantic’ sensibility in thinking about the British landscape in the middle decades of the twentieth century, which, unlike the ‘counter-modern’ variety of neo-Romanticism, valued the land as a palimpsest, reconciling many layers of history including the present and (showing a utopian streak) the future. The hero of her story was Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, first Archaeology Officer of the Ordnance Survey from 1920 and founder of the journal Antiquity in 1927. In Bloody Old Britain she now provides a full-blown biography of Crawford. The two books overlap but are nicely complementary. Shadow Sites staked a claim for a more widely prevalent sensibility in art, design, landscape photography, film and historic preservation, as well as archaeology; it required her to cast her nets generously and to allocate a diverse cast of characters to several varieties of neo-Romanticism. Bloody Old Britain allows her to showcase Crawford in all his glorious idiosyncrasy.

Crawford shared with many of his generation the evolutionary, utopian visions of Patrick Geddes and H G Wells, but he was unusual in devoting equal care and attention to past and future stages of human evolution. This peculiarity was owed largely to Crawford’s unique experience as a pioneer of aerial photography in the Great War, as a result of which he developed his unusual synthesis of the old (archaeology) and the new (photography and the airplane). Aerial photography, in Crawford’s vision, provided a non-invasive means of excavating the past that permitted the archaeologist to record and preserve past and present simultaneously. It also provided a new technology and a new basis of expertise for the class of philosopher-scientists that were much in vogue in the inter-war Left. Although Hauser calls this professionalization, Crawford’s vision was more exclusive; he was, as she grants, ‘a snob and a rebel’, and the only professionals he recognized as peers were a small and self-proclaimed ‘heroic band’ of fellow visionaries. He revelled in his marginalization by polite society, and, indeed, by his bosses in the Ordnance Survey, and, unsurprisingly, adored the vanguard spirit of Bolshevik Russia.

From this point of view his later, darker, embittered stage of railing against the backwardness and incompetence of ‘Bloody Old Britain’ – the title of a sprawling, unpublishable rant Crawford compiled just before the Second World War – represents not an about-turn but a natural extension (albeit an exaggeration) of his original sensibility. Britain was bloody just as his imagined Russia was blooming. But the Second World War did mark a turning point for Crawford. A lot of his work for the Ordnance Survey went up in smoke in a bombing raid on Southampton in November 1940. He found other war work and never returned to the OS. His mouthpiece, Antiquity, gradually shrivelled up. Revelations about the highly unscientific character of the Soviet Union after the war deprived him of faith in the future. Real professionalization had overtaken his heroic brand of archaeology. Although he was surprisingly prolific as a writer and broadcaster in his last years, Crawford cut an increasingly eccentric and isolated figure, until his death in 1957.

A lot of Crawford’s work was unpublished – his account of his trip to the Soviet Union, his putative magnum opus ‘Bloody Old Britain’, his laboriously compiled photograph albums of contemporary Britain that (like the work of Mass-Observation and ‘Bloody Old Britain’ itself) were intended as an ‘anthropology of ourselves’, though a very gnomic one. It is often difficult to decide if Crawford was speaking to anyone but himself, even in Antiquity. Some of his ideas were shared and disseminated in a more palatable form by bodies such as the Design and Industries Association and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England. In these respects it might not have mattered if Crawford had never existed, and those aspects where Crawford’s distinctive neo-Romanticism did feed into wider currents have already been covered by Hauser in Shadow Sites. It is, therefore, quite a triumph for Hauser to have made such an entertaining and instructive book out of such unpromising materials, and out of such an odd (and, in many ways, distasteful) personality. Her touch is light and generous, and, as a result, Crawford rises above the Basil Fawlty or Victor Meldrew characters that he might otherwise evoke. Best of all, she rescues many of his quietly beautiful photographs from the obscurity of the archive, presenting them in the style of W G Sebald, without captions or commentary, allowing them to speak for themselves (or for Crawford). It might even be worth buying the Granta hardcover to enjoy these eloquent testimonies, so execrably are they reproduced in the paperback edition.