The Re-making of the English Landscape: in the footsteps of WG Hoskins and FL Attenborough’

This abstract announces a new project being undertaken by cultural researchers Val Williams and Corinne Silva. Using photographs writing, oral history, performance and the visual arts, and taking their inspiration for WG Hoskins’s seminal publication 'The Making of the English Landscape' . Using the book as their starting point and also the collection of photographs and slides made by Hoskins’ colleague Frederick Attenborough and Hoskins himself.
Photographer Corinne Silva and curator/writer Val Williams are collaborating on a new project, which will explore the English landscape in the 21st century. Taking their cue from WG Hoskins’ seminal 1955 book ‘The Making of the English Landscape’ this new project continues Silva’s work around the photography of the politicised space and Val Williams ongoing interest in the fragmentary and the obscured in British cultural history, as seen through photography and the wider visual arts.
If Hoskins emphasised the importance of the landscape obscured by layers of agricultural and social change, Williams and Silva take an opposite tack, by chronicling and exploring the obvious and dramatic ruins of the English landscape- as dereliction over takes them. The research asks the question, among others, ‘How do we use photography, testimony and the visual arts to create a new understanding of the English landscape? “
Together, these two cultural researchers/practitioners will travel England retracing the footsteps of Hoskins, and also making new pathways, to discover the visual embodiments of change in our urban and rural landscape. From the ruined ‘Hughes’ department store in Bradford to the eerie new landscape of Greenwich Millennium Village in London, from abandoned urban gardens and parks, this powerful project will document England in a way that has been largely absent since the critical British landscape photography of the 1970s and 80 as represented by the photographer John Davies, among others.