Any real-estate agent will tell you that the three keys to a sale are location, location and location. The land a house occupies is more than simple geography. It is a space in which lives will be lived, families will be raised and the human condition enacted within a circumscribed parcel of three dimensions. This view of location as a container for various life events, in which geography becomes the description of spaces characterized as ‘public’, ‘private’ and ‘social’ (to name only three) has much to offer historians who see that the settings in which ideas are discussed or events occur are just as important as the events or the ideas themselves.

As Paul A. Elliott describes in his fascinating and richly illustrated new book focusing on mid- to late eighteenth-century England, the geography of science's past is more than names on maps; rather geography refers to the spaces – be they schools, gardens, marketplaces, towns or associations – in which scientific activity took place and to the distinctive imprint each left on that activity. In Elliot's own words, ‘Exploring some of these disjunctive intellectual, metaphorical and experienced spaces is the primary concern of this book’ (p. 2).

As readers of this journal will know, Elliott is also the author of The Derby Philosophers: Science and Culture in British Urban Society, 1700–1850 (2009), which provided a focused account of provincial science in England during the restless era of industrialization and political reform. In Enlightenment, Modernity and Science, Elliott continues his study of localized geographies of scientific culture but does so with wider reach. Through a series of case studies, Elliott demonstrates how the usual geographies of eighteenth-century English science, most often set in London in such contexts as coffee houses, church sermons and public lectures, do not adequately capture the richness of the scientific enterprise and its consumption by practitioners and more general audiences. Elliott grounds his approach in the work of David Livingstone's Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (2003), which argues that the location of discovery matters immensely to science, and he builds upon the localized study of British meteorology offered by Vladimir Jankovic's Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820 (2000).

Chapter 1 describes the domestic settings of science in the eighteenth century in which the home was at once a private, public and experimental space. Erasmus Darwin's garden at Lichfield is the subject of Chapter 2 as Elliott explains how the locations ‘Darwin lived, worked, socialized in and experienced in other ways helped shape the content and character of his philosophical work’ (p. 49), specifically his understanding of Linnaean botany. Gardens are also the subject of Chapter 5, which looks at semi-private botanical gardens – Lichfield, Cambridge, Liverpool and Hull – with an eye to elucidating how they ‘became cardinal and characteristic Enlightenment spaces, idealised microcosms where the concern of improvement, medicine and systemic botany and botanical publishing intersected with commercial gardening, polite education and fashionable promenading’ (p. 125). Chapter 3 discusses science education at dissenting academies and illuminates how they influenced education well beyond the confines of their classrooms. Association is the subject of Chapter 4. Elliott provides a close study of the Freemasons, whose contribution to England's culture of science, he argues, has been little studied outside the initial pioneering work of Margaret C. Jacob and the articles by John Money. This is lamentable, Elliott claims, because ‘Freemasons promoted scientific publications whilst their institutional organisation provided a model for philosophical societies’ (p. 123). Chapter 6 explores counties and county towns as locations of scientific culture. Here Elliott wishes to challenge the notion that scientific knowledge disseminating from London was ‘unidirectional’ and to reveal that local communities did more than passively consume what was sent to them. Rather, science radiating from the capital was ‘contingent, negotiated and contested reflecting the reality of provincial and metropolitan identities as fluid, complex and interlocking rather than fixed and determined’ (p. 170). From those general conclusions, Elliott then provides a specific example with Chapter 7's assessment of Nottingham. As in the previous chapter, he is at pains to reveal how the local shaped provincial readings of nationally circulating notions of Enlightenment and science. Land cultivation and usage form the basis of Chapter 8 as it considers the ‘reciprocal relationship between the urban spaces of Enlightenment and the development of Enlightenment ideas’ (p. 219) by proposing that the physical shape of towns shaped their intellectual way of life. The book concludes with a chapter on Abraham Bennet, who worked and lived in the small town of Wirksworth. Nonetheless, Bennet's efforts in electrical experiments helped develop Alessandro Volta's electric battery. Elliott uses Bennet as an example of how local knowledge developed within a local setting could, through personal contacts and correspondence networks, influence national and international scholars. And for Elliott this is the point of the book: the national macrocosm character of Enlightenment-era England as one which embraced and promoted science was built upon the microcosm of counties, towns and localized settings containing people whose understanding of the natural world was deeply conditioned by where they lived and worked.