Lines in the Landscape: Ruins and Reveals in Britain

The landscape historian W.G. Hoskins is widely credited as a pioneer of local and landscape history. His 1955 book, The Making of the English Landscape, and the guidebooks and television series he wrote and contributed to, made a historical narrative of the English landscape available to a broad public. Hoskins’ work was radical—with so much of England damaged after the Second World War, Hoskins and his collaborator, the photographer F.L. Attenborough, gave ruination a context and insisted on the timelessness and permanence of the English landscape. This article describes the cultural and historical contexts that inform Lines in the Landscape, a new research project by the artist Corinne Silva and the curator/writer Val Williams, which will retrace the footsteps of Hoskins and Attenborough during their collaboration on the 1948 guidebook Touring Leicestershire. It also explores the project’s intention to discover the visual embodiments of change in urban and rural landscapes, and to explore the possibilities of interdisciplinarity and partnership in scholarship today.