This recent response to Simon Jenkins by Trevor Rowley in the pages of 
SALON-IFA (the newsletter from the Society of Antiquaries and the 
Institute of Field Archaeologists) will be of interest to those list 
members following the ongoing debates over the status of the 20th century 
landscape in British archaeology and heritage management. 

Details of Rowley's new book, The English Landscape in the Twentieth 
Century (2005, Hambledon/Continuum), are here: 
http://www.hambledon.co.uk/system/index.html

The review in the Sunday Times by Simon Jenkins is online here: 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-2182671.htm

Finally, copied below is the text from SALON 140, followed by the letter 
from Trevor Rowley from the latest issue (SALON 141)

(forwarded with permission from Chris Catling, to whom thanks are due for 
this news item)

DH


FROM SALON 140

Books by Fellows/MIFAs
Conservationists who bewail insensitive development that has no respect 
for the heritage partake in a long tradition of rhetoric based on 
presenting a nightmare vision of an England left soulless by progress: in 
1937, E M Forster wrote: ‘In the last fifteen years we have gashed England 
to pieces with arterial roads and trimmed the roads with trash’, while 
Clough Williams-Ellis, in 1928, complained of the ‘cumulative effect of a 
myriad petty vandalisms ─ the quarrying of commons, dumping of junk, 
architectural dissonance, destruction of ancient bridges, pink asbestos 
bungalows’.

Now Trevor Rowley, FSA, is trying to change the rhetoric and persuade us 
that The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century (the title of his 
latest book, published by Hambledon and London) is not as bad as we 
sometimes think ─ a task as difficult, surely, as persuading us that John 
Prescott and Ruth Kelly are loveable, cuddly conservationists. 

Reviewing Rowley’s book in this week’s Sunday Times, Simon Jenkins, FSA, 
applauds the author’s attempt ‘to apply to the urban landscape a similar 
affection to that granted to the rural [as] it might lead to a greater 
appreciation of the visual and social virtues of towns and thus encourage 
their conservation’. However, Jenkins feels that the problem not 
acknowledged sufficiently in the book’s central thesis is that so much 
modern development is achieved at the expense of what we already have that 
is valuable, and that this need not be the case ─ indeed, that the purpose 
of planning policy should be to ensure that that is not the case ─ a point 
that needs to be drummed into those politicians at national and local 
level who make and apply planning policy and law.


From SALON 141

Letter from Trevor Rowley on The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century
Salon 140 made reference to the Sunday Times review by Simon Jenkins, FSA, 
of the new book ─ called The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century ─ 
by Trevor Rowley, FSA. Trevor feels that the review (and the Salon notice) 
did not give an accurate account of the themes and content of his book, so 
Salon is happy to publish his letter setting out what the book is really 
about.

‘You picked up on Simon Jenkins’s claim that I was an apologist for the 
twentieth-century landscape ─ in particular, the suburban sprawl that 
characterised the last quarter of the century. Nothing could be further 
from the truth. Simon Jenkins’s review took particular issue with the 
paragraph with which I conclude the Introduction: “It is my intention in 
this book to look at the contribution of the twentieth century to the 
English landscape, to use some of Hoskins’s methods of landscape analysis 
to look at many of the things which he found so distasteful, to try to 
understand what we have created and why. And suggest here and there that 
perhaps it isn't all quite as bad as we sometimes think.” However, he only 
quoted the second part of the last sentence, which enables him to get the 
wrong end of the stick and then to prod me with it. Jenkins accuses me of 
having a laissez faire approach to the landscape; in fact on many 
occasions I point out the importance of post-Second World War planning 
legislation ─ particularly development control in the countryside ─ which 
has so far prevented the excesses to be found in parts of the USA. 
‘Throughout the book there are numerous examples of poor design and 
landscape disasters but I assumed the reader would be mature enough to 
recognise that by describing such problems I was not endorsing them. There 
are already a number of polemical works on the evils of the modern 
landscape and for the most part I don't take issue with them, but in my 
book I set out to try to record and interpret what happened between 1900 
and 2000 as dispassionately as possible ─ surely the century of most 
profound change in the landscape ever. These changes were of enormous 
importance to the way we live now, and while my book could never be 
definitive it is intended as an overview of a so far under-investigated 
area of landscape history. It includes sections on “The Age of the 
Car”, “Taking Off”, “New Towns and Garden Cities”, “Suburbia and 
Metroland”, “The Impact of War”, “The Seaside” and “Sports and 
Recreations”, as well as an analysis of what happened in the village and 
countryside.

‘In Salon 140 you rightly point out that there is a long tradition of 
attacking the contemporary landscape, notably in the 1930s when the first 
excesses of ribbon development and other developments brought about by the 
motor car were first becoming apparent. Sir Simon has written a number of 
such pieces himself in recent years and he may have taken offence at my 
(neutral) comparison of one of his articles crying woe written in 2002 
(“Rescuing England … its urban and rural landscapes … is the greatest 
challenge facing politics today”) with that of one by William Morris 
written in 1881 (“we have begun too late and our foes are too many … ‘tis 
a lost cause: in fact the destruction is not far from being complete 
already”). That, however, does not justify him in misrepresenting me as a 
champion of Mr Prescott's planning blunders!’