Novelist William Boyd on Re-Reading Hokins

William Boyd: Rereading The Making of the English Landscape by WG Hoskins

Novelist William Boyd discusses rereading Hoskins's Making of the English Landscape for Guardian Books.  Hoskins provided his readers with an innovative lens through which the history of the English countryside could be decoded – and inspired in me an enduring fascination with the land around me, says William Boyd in Guardian Books  [Read More]

The Making of the British Landscape

The Making of the British Landscape, by Francis Pryor.

A perfect up to date counterpoint to Hoskins. Pryor quickly shows, the neolithic, iron and bronze ages are really not [empty] at all. Under his gaze, the landscape starts to fill with tribes and clans wandering this way and that, leaving traces that can still be seen today. Pryor shows us bumpy ridges, the kind of thing you might ignore on an afternoon's walk, which turn out to be the surface traces of bronze age fields, together with some untidy stumps that are actually the remains of a buried forest. Kathryn Hughes The Guardian. (Read Full Review).

Class 2: Darkening Hills

The Slides for Class 2, Dakening Hills, can be downloaded from here.

 

Class 1: Unravished England

The slides for Class 1, Unravished England can be downloaded from here.  They are in Adobe PDF format, you will need Adobe Reader (a free download) to view and print them.

W.G. Hoskins and the Making of the English Landscape

Have you ever wondered by the landscape around us looks as it does, who shaped the fields, villages and towns that we live in and when?  Nearly sixty years ago the Leicester landscape historian W.G.Hoskins published The Making of the English Landscape, a book that for the first time set out to explain the evolution of the English landscape as we know it.  This seminal book and Hoskins’s approach to the study of landscape had a profound impact on landscape studies influencing things as diverse as the format of Time Team to ideas of what it means to be English.  

This website accompanies a series of classes run by me (Keith Challis) for the Workers Educational Association (WEA) in Burton Joyce, Nottingham in Autumn 2013.  During the classes we will embark on a guided reading of Hoskins’s book taking in the development of his ideas, discussing their relevance today and examining new evidence gathered over the sixty years since publication and their impact on our appreciation of Hoskins’s world view.  

As the classes progress I will use the website to share lecture content and slides, make reading recommendation via the on-line course bookshop (run by Amazon) provide digital copies of handouts and other resources and expand on ideas discussed in class.