New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited - (Proceedings of the British Academy) by Linda M Ross & Katrina Navickas & Ben Anderson & Matthew Kelly

About the Book

How did rural Britain become modern during the twentieth century? New Lives, New Landscapes examines how the development of modern infrastructure in Britain transformed both its landscapes and the lives of those who lived within them. Shifting the focus away from the city, the narrative challenges us to rethink what we mean by modern Britain.

Book Synopsis

In 1970, the Architectural Press published New Lives, New Landscapes, Nan Fairbrother's optimistic account of how the British landscape was materially transformed in the post-war decades. Reservoirs, power stations, television and radio-transmitter masts, electricity and telephone pylons, as well as local authority housing and new or improved roads, produced a new rurality. So too did state-subsidised agricultural intensification, wider public access to the countryside, and environmentally protective measures. These included landscape designations such as National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Central to Fairbrother's approach was the concomitant transformation in how British people interacted with these new landscapes in an age of increased mobility. This new edited collection of essays, New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain brings a fresh historical perspective to bear on Fairbrother's concerns. It examines how the changing relationship between government, state, and citizen gave rise to a distinct rural modernity during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

About the Author

Matthew Kelly is Professor of Modern History at Northumbria University and a member of the Editorial Board of Past & Present. He has published widely in the history of modern Britain and Ireland, particularly on environmental activism, the politics of landscape preservation and nature conservation, and the role of the state. Recent books include The Women Who Saved the English Countryside (Yale, 2022) and the edited volume Nature and the Environmental in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Liverpool, 2019). He is beginning new work on a study of Max Nicholson (1904-2003), one of Britain's leading environmentalists.

Ben Anderson is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental History at Keele University. His research interests range from how participatory, arts-based methods can inform the heritage of carbon culture, to the global politics and culture of ultraviolet light in the late-twentieth century, and European mountaineering as a practice of modernity in the years around 1900. He has published prize-winning articles on the latter, which is also the subject of his first monograph, Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020).

Katrina Navickas is Professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire. She is a historian of protest and social movements in Britain, with a focus on how protesters shaped space, place, and landscape. She has previously published Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 (Manchester University Press, 2016), and she is currently working on a history of contested public space in England, 1750-2000.

Linda Ross is a Research Fellow with Kingston University, working as part of the Nuclear Spaces: Communities, Materialities and Locations of Nuclear Cultural Heritage (NuSPACES) project. She focuses on the fusion of technological, social, and cultural histories, specialising in the relationship between energy infrastructure and communities. This is something she assessed during her PhD with the University of the Highlands and Islands and Historic Environment Scotland, which investigated the impact of the nuclear industry on the north of Scotland. As a Research Assistant at the University of Glasgow, she expanded her focus, mainly concentrating on the development of anti-nuclear protest. She is Reviews Editor for Northern Scotland.