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irganiza-srience.
beyond phy has idscape, han the Banse's lony" of ■rs seem
in the ig from it apart ■! is an ire are :t, who :harted under-lot be
evolution
from The Making of the ExgHzft Landscape (135S)
W.G, Hoskins
Editors' introduction m
While there is a separate section in the Reader focusing on the concept of landscape itself, we include this selection from W.G. Hoskins's famous- The Making of the English Landscape (1955) here in order to recognize the importance of landscape history, a field of study that was not central to cultural geography in Britain yet which deserves a place in the field's history nevertheless, particularly due to its affinity with the work of Carl Sauer and many of his students in the United States (see p. 96). Hoskins's work reminds U3 of Sauer's ideas of "landscape morphology," which suggested a deeply historical approach to the study of landscapes. And like Sauer, Hoskins's work betrayed an attitude that was generally conservative and concerned to describe the landscape changes associated with industrialization and urbanization. But Hoskins was perhaps somewhat more explicit than Sauer in accounting for these changes with an aesthetic eye. He wrote, for example, that "Since the last years of the nineteenth century,",. and especially since the year 1914, every single change in the English landscape has either uglified it or destroyed its meaning, or both."
Yet there are other more important differences between Hoskins and Sauer. Whereas Sauer was concerned to cement landscape morphology as the foundation of a scientifically legitimate academic discipline, Hoskins saw landscape as a text from which to read the past. Trained in history, Hoskins wrote history by observing the landscape. Perhaps the closer American comparison with Hoskins would be J.B. Jackson's vernacular landscape essays (see pp. 53 and 220). But, again, our task here is less to analyze Hoskins's conception of landscape, and more to situate him within the broader social and historical context of late industrial development. In this regard, Hoskins's folk-cultural or vernacular proclivities found echoes in the work of other scholars whose work is included or referenced in this section, particularly H.J, Fleure, Estyn Evans, Patrick Geddes, and Paul Vidal de la Blache. And like these scholars, Hoskins's work was also engaged in a broader political project of nation building. The Making of the English Landscape could be read as a kind of guidebook for the lay geographer-traveler, a key to the clues, imbedded in the landscape, that together narrated the history of England as a nation. Near the beginning of the book, Hoskins wrote, "What I have done is to take the landscape of England as it appears today, and to explain as far as 1 am able how it came to assume its present form, how the details came to be inserted and when. At all points I have tried to relate my explanation to the things that can be seen today by any curious and intelligent traveller going around his native land." Thus, while his work reads as a fascinating history unveiled by rich landscape description, there are passages in the selection below where Hoskins sounds mors like an art critic examining a series of paintings. He describes the landscape, in other words, with the scrutiny of a particular point of view.
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W.G. Hoskins (190S-1992) was, beginning in 1931, Lecturer in Commerce and then Reader in English Local History at University College, Leicester, In 1952 he became Reader in Economic History at Oxford, and in 1965 was appointed Hatton Professor of English History at the University of Leicester. Beyond the academy, he was very active in local history and preservation work, serving on local history committees and county archives. In 1976 Hoskins wrote and presented the BBC television series The LandscapQ of England.
By tar his most well known work is The Making of the English Landscape. It has long been a standard text in local history, and the book's introductory passage outlining a thousand years of English history encapsulated in ihe view of Steeple Barton from Hoskins's Study window has become the definitive introduction to the field of landscape history. Yet Hoskins was a prolific writer and published dozens of books and essays on landscape history, including The Midland Peasant (1957), Locsl History in England (1959), Two Thousand Years in Exeter (i960). His work has remained influential among vernacular and landscape historians, and in the fields of landscape design and architecture. It remains worth pointing out, however, that the bulk of his influence has been felt outside of academic geography. This is perhaps unfortunate, given the obvious intellectual correlations between Hoskins and some of the key figures in cultural geography.
THE EARLY INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE
England was still a peaceful agricultural country at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Though she was passing through what has been called her first industrial revolution, there was as yet little to show for it in the landscape. Quarries and coal-pits were numerous in certain localities, salt-works and glassworks were flourishing, the cloth industry was growing; but so far as the visible signs upon the face of the country were concerned it was all a mere scratching on the surface. Neither Leland nor Camden has much to say about industry in England; and there was nothing that could be specifically called an industrial landscape. Perhaps the multitude of coal-pits near the Tyne were beginning to wear that look, and Camden observed in the 1580s that Sussex 'is full of iron mines, all over it; for the casting of which there are furnaces up and down the country, and abundance of wood is yearly spent; many streams are drawn into one channel, and a great deal of meadow ground is turned into ponds and pools for the driving of mills by the flashes, which, beating with hammers upon the iron, fill the neighbourhood round about it, night and day with continual noise'. The iron industry, centred in the Wealden woods, was steadily changing the face of the landscape in this region from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards, and a good deal remains to be seen by the historically minded traveller.
By the end of the seventeenth century the industrial landscape was much more evident. Yarranton in 1677 thought there were more people within a radius of ten miles of Dudley, and 'more money returned in a year', than in the whole of four Midland farming counties. This was pretty certainly an exaggeration, but it shows unmistakably that the Black Country (though this name had yet to be invented) was in process of creation.
The early industrial landscapes differed essentially from those that developed with steam-power. They showed a thick scattering of settlement, of cottages and small farmhouses dotted about all over the place, and a corresponding splitting up of fields into small crofts and paddocks. It was a 'busy' landscape, full of detail and movement, like one of Breughel's paintings, not a massive conglomeration of factories and slums. The Black Country in its early days was still country, 'a countryside in course of becoming industrialized; more and more a strung-out web of iron-working villages, market-towns next door to collieries, heaths and wastes gradually and very slowly being covered by the cottages of nailers and other persons carrying on industrial occupations in rural surroundings' [W.H.B. Court. The Rise of the Midland Industries, 1600-1833, 1938, p. 22]. The typical figure was that of the craftsman-farmer, combining, say, a smithy with a smallholding, living in his own small balanced economy; hence the minuteness of the detail in the picture. One still finds traces of this kind of landscape on the fringes of
the Blacl of Lower Dudley.
Defoe trial land shortly afi try in tht revolution tion of p0
The rie houses bottom which \ with he being d say, fro seldom land ha> ...Tl and the sioned l business employ''
This partic sources - th of running ■ the hills. W] a little rill o
[fthe ho it, and cr house w: other disi siderable house, ar without v and guidf ing and d; houses w. running ir
The coal-worked in p various reasc w^ter presen the pack-hor; laden. Every bis coal from
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of
the Black Country, as for example in the hamlet of Lower Gonial, in the hills to the north-west of Dudley,
Defoe gives us a splendid picture of an industrial landscape in the time of Queen Anne or shortly after. It is the landscape of the cloth industry in the neighbourhood of Halifax before the revolutionary changes brought about by the invention of power-driven machinery:
The nearer we came to Hallifax, we found the houses thicker, and the villages greater in every bottom; and not only so, but the sides of the hills, which were very steep every way, were spread with houses, and that very thick; for the land being divided into small enclosures, that is to say, from two acres to six or seven acres each, seldom more; every three or four pieces of land had a house belonging to it.
... This division of the land into small pieces, and the scattering of the dwellings, was occasioned by, and done for the convenience of the business which the people were generally employ'd in ,,,
This particular landscape had its origin in two sources - the outcropping of coal, and the presence of running water everywhere, even on the tops of the hills. Wherever Defoe passed a house he found a little rill of running water.
If the house was above the road, it came from it, and cross'd the way to run to another; if the house was below us, it cross'd us from some other distant house above it, and at every considerable house was a manufactory or workhouse, and as they could not do their business without water, the little streams were so parted and guided by gutters and pipes, and by turning and dividing the streams, that none of those houses were without a river, if I may call it so, funning into and through their work-houses.
The coal-pits near the tops of the hills were Worked in preference to those lower down, for various reasons. The coal was easier to come at, Water presented less of a drainage problem, and ^e pack-horses could go up light and come down j&den. Every clothier kept a horse or two, to carry
L his
c°al from the pit, to fetch home his wool and
his provisions from the market, to take his yarn to the weavers, his doth to the fulling-mill and finally to the cloth market to be sold. He also kept two or three cows for the sustenance of the family, and so required two, three, or four pieces of enclosed land around his house.
Having thus fire and water at every dwelling, there is no need to enquire why they dwell thus
dispers'd upon the highest hills____Among the
manufacturers houses are likewise scattered an infinite number of cottages or small dwellings, in which dwell the workmen which are employed, the women and children of whom are always busy carding, spinning, & c. so that no hands being unemploy'd, all can gain their bread, even from the youngest to the ancient; hardly any thing above four years old, but its hands are sufficient to itself..., After we had mounted the third hill, we found the country one continued village, tho' mountainous every way, as before; hardly a house standing out of a speaking distance from another, and,,. we could see that almost at every house there was a tenter, and almost on every tenter a piece of cloth, or kersie, or shalloon, for they are three articles of that country's labour; from which the sun glancing, and, as I may say, shining (the white reflecting its rays) to us, I thought it was the most agreeable sight that I ever saw, for the hills, as I say, rising and falling so thick, and the valleys opening sometimes one way, sometimes another, so that sometimes we could see two or tliree miles this way, sometimes as far another; sometimes like the streets near St Giles's, called the Seven Dials; we could see through the glades almost every way round us, yet look which way we would, high to the tops, and low to the bottoms, it was all the same; innumerable houses and tenters, and a white piece upon every tenter. [...]
WATER-POWER AND THE EARLY MILLS
Early inventions in most industries - except in those requiring large amounts of fixed capital, like the iron industry - benefited the small man, or at least kept him in business. Kay's flying shuttle (1733) and Hargreaves's spinning jenny (1767)
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multiplied the output of domestic workers in the textile industry without compelling them to enter mills or factories. Not until the application of water-power to machinery, and a consequent great increase in the size of machines, do we begin to see the large factory as an element in the landscape. Before that time the largest unit of production was what Defoe calls in Yorkshire the 'work-house'. But the great revolution was on its way.
The first true factory built in England was the silk mill built for John and Thomas Lombe at Derby in 1718-22. It was five or six storeys high, employed three hundred men. and was driven by the water-power of the river Derwent It was, as Mantoux says, in every respect a modern factory, with automatic tools, continuous and unlimited production, and specialized functions for the operatives. Within fifty years there were several silk factories employing four hundred to eight hundred persons, but the silk industry was of secondary importance and did not initiate the factory system. It was when power reached the cotton, woollen, and iron industries that the face of the country really began to change on a large scale, and that was not until the 1770s.
Matthew Boulton opened his great Soho factory, in the still unravished country outside Birmingham, in 1765, and shortly afterwards began the manufacture of steam engines. Wedgwood's new large factory at Etruria in the Potteries was opened in 1769. Richard Arkwright, the greatest of the new industrial capitalists, erected his first spinning mill, worked by horses, at Nottingham in 1763, but his second factory, built on a much larger scale at Cromford on the Derwent in 1771, was driven by water power. In the 1760s, too, the Darbys enlarged their ironworks at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire to the largest works of any kind in the kingdom. With these four large-scale factories, the creation of the modern industrial landscape may be said to have begun.
The new mills, factories and works tended to be in more or less remote places, partly because of the need to be near a falling stream for the supply of power, and later to escape too close an inspection and regulation of their uninhibited activities. One finds these early mills therefore, often windowless and deserted today, in the upper reaches of the moorland valleys on either side of the Pennines, Coalbrookdale, then a romantically beautiful valley, was chosen by the Darbys for their ironworks
because here a rapid stream entered the broad navigable waterway of the Severn. Water was needed in the iron industry both for power and for the transport of heavy materials. It was not long before the ravishing of this scene attracted the lament of the poets, Anna Seward, The Swan of Lichfield', mourned over "Coalbrook Dale' in a poem written about 1785:
Scene of superfluous grace, and wasted bloom,
O, violated Colebmokl in an hour,
To beamy unpropitious and to song,
The Genius of thy shades, by Plutus brib d,
Amid thy grassy lanes, thy wildwood glens.
Thy knolls and bubbling wells, thy rocks, and streams,
Slumbers! - while tribes fuliginous invade
The soft, romantic, consecrated scenes...
Some ten years earlier, Arthur Young had already noted the discord between the natural beauty of the landscape and what man had done to it, but he saw, too - and painters also were on the verge of seeing it - that an unrestrained industrial landscape has a considerable element of sublimity about it. 'That variety of horrors art has spread at the bottom [of Coalbrookdale]; the noise of the forges, mills, etc., with all their vast machinery, the flames bursting from the furnaces with the burning of the coal and the smoak of the lime kilns, are altogether sublime.'
The scale of the new industries brought about a number of visual changes, some of them unexpected. The large sums of fixed capital sunk in the factory buildings and the machinery, and the fact that water-power, unlike human labour, needed no rest, demanded that the new buildings be used by night as well as by day. Shifts of labour were therefore organized, and these tall fortress-like structures were lit from top to bottom at night, and presented something new and dramatic to those who had the leisure to stay outside and contemplate it with detachment. So we get Joseph Wright of Derby as early as 1780 painting Arkwrighfs cotton mill by night - tiers of tiny yellow lights in the immemorial country darkness of the Derwent valley, the isolated forerunner of those tremendous galaxies of light that one now sees from the Pennine Moors after sundown.
In the eighth book of The Excursion, Wordsworth sees the other side of this romantic scene:
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When soothing darkness spreads
O'er Ml and vale, and the punctual stars.
While all things else are gathering to their homes,
Advance, and in the firmament of heaven
Glitter - but undisturbing, undisturbed;
As if their silent company were charged
With peaceful admonitions for the heart
Of all-beholding Man, earth's thoughtful lord;
Then, in full many a region, once like this
The assured domain of calm simplicity
And pensive quiet an unnatural light
Prepared for never-resting labour's eyes
Breaks from a many-windowed fabric huge;
And at the appointed hour a bell is heard,
Of harsher import than the curfew-knoll
That spake the Norman Conqueror's stern behest -
A local summons to unceasing loil!
Disgorged are now the Ministers of day;
And, as they issue from the illumined pile,
A fresh band meets them, at the crowded door -
And in the courts - and where the rumbling stream,
That turns the multitude of dizzy wheels.
Glares, like a troubled spirit, in its bed,
Among the rock below. Men, maidens, youths.
Mother and little children, boys and girls,
Enter, and each ike wonted task resumes
Within his temple, where is offered up
To Gain, the master idol of the realm,
Perpetual sacrifice,
In the textile districts the new industrial landscape lay in the valley bottoms, which had been comparatively ignored in Defoe's day, when the thickest settlement was on the hillside. Now, down in the bottoms, arose the new many-storeyed mills, some of them handsome buildings not too unlike the plain country houses of the time. Around them grew up short streets of cottages for the workpeople, run up so quickly that they look as though they were planted flat on the surface, without any foundations; but still there was no congestion. The water-power age produced hamlets, at the most small villages, gathered around a new mill. Around Ashton-under-Lyne, for example, where it was reckoned there were nearly a hundred cotton mills within a ten-mile radius - all on the river Tame or its tributaries - we find hamlets in the 1790s with the significant names of Boston, Charlestown and Botany Bay,
[...]
The Derwent valley, which exemplifies along its bottom so much industrial history of the water-power age, attracted large mills from the beginning by reason of its fast-flowing river; but not everyone admired the result as Wright of Derby did. Uvedale Price in his Essays on the Picturesque (1S10) observed;
When I consider the striking natural beauties of such a river as that at Matlock, and the effect of the seven-storey buildings that have been raised there, and on DtheT beautiful streams, for cotton manufactories, I am inclined to think that nothing can equal them for the purpose of disbeautifying an enchanting piece of scenery; and that economy had produced, what the greatest ingenuity, if a prize were given for ugliness, could not surpass.
Mills arose in the remote valleys below the moors, and hamlets and villages quickly clustered around them. But established towns too were advancing over the surrounding fields. Trees and hedges were torn up, red-brick or grit-stone streets, short and straight, multiplied every year, even before the age of steam: Sheffield, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, all were on the move. According to Langford, "The traveller who visits [Birmingham] once in six months supposes himself well acquainted with her, but he may chance to find a street of houses in the autumn, where he saw his horse at grass in the spring.' The population of- the town doubled in the last forty years of the eighteenth century (35,000 people in 1760; 73,000 in 1801), but it was as yet far from being the dark and horrible landscape that it eventually became. Even in the early years of the nineteenth century the middle-class streets had 'prospects' of the country and the older working-class houses at least still had gardens. The dirt and overcrowding came with the steam age in the nineteenth century,
Sheffield, on the other hand, was 'very populous and large' in Queen Anne's time when Defoe traversed it, and its houses were already 'dark and black' from the smoke of the forges. Two generations later the population had trebled and the pall of industrial smoke had become permanent. As Anna Seward saw it;
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Grim Wolverhampton lights hersmcuidering.fi™. And Sheffield, smokednvolvd; dim where she stands Circled by lofty mountains, which condense Her dark and spiral wreaths to drizzling reins Frequent and sullied, . .
In Lancashire and the Potteries the worst had still to come. Chorley was, when Aikin wrote (1795), 'a small, neat market town' with its river [lowing through, a pleasant valley, turning 'several mills, engines and machines'. It possessed the first water-driven factory to be erected in Lancashire (1777). Preston was 'a handsome well-built town, with broad regular streets, and many good houses. The earl of Derby has a large modem mansion in it. The place is rendered gay by assemblies and other places of amusement, suited to the genteel style of the inhabitants.1 Aikin notes that the cotton industry had just come to the town. In the south of the county what was to be the most appalling town of all - St Helens - was just beginning to defile its surroundings. The British Plate Glass Manufactory had been erected at Ravenhead, near the village in 1773, and other glassworks followed. And about the year 1780 'a most extensive copper*work' was erected to smelt and refine the ore from Paris mountain in Anglesey. The atmosphere was being poisoned, every green thing blighted, and every stream fouled with chemical fumes and waste. Here, and in the Potteries and the Black Countiy especially, the landscape of Hell was foreshadowed.
STEAM-POWER AND SLUMS
[-..]
We are not concerned here with the general effects upon industry and the English economy of the use of steam-power, but with its visible effects upon the landscape, and these are now obvious enough. Steam-power meant a new and intense concentration of large-scale industry and of the labour-force to man it. It meant that manufacturers no longer needed to seek their power where there was fast-running water, especially in the higher reaches of lonely dales, but found it near the canals which brought coal to them cheaply, or directly upon the coalfields themselves. So emerged what Wordsworth called 'social Industry'. No longer need they go out into the wilderness and
create a village or a hamlet to house their labour. Manufacturers ran up their mills, factories and works on the edge of existing towns, and their workers were housed in streets of terrace-houses built rapidly on the vacant ground all around the factory.
Industry spread over the lower-lying parts of the towns, leaving the hills for the residences of the well-to-do, but this was not a conscious piece of 'zoning'. Large-scale industries in pit-railway days needed canal-side sites both for bringing in their coal and other raw materials and for taking away their heavy products. Thus they chose the flatter and lower ground where the canals lay. Moreover, it was the low-lying areas that were vacant when the industrialists appeared on the scene, for earlier generations had wisely avoided building on them wherever they could. The sites were there waiting. And again, it was easier and cheaper to build on a flat site than on a hillside. As a consequence most of the new streets of working-class houses were also built on land that presented difficult drainage problems (not that anyone except the victims gave much thought to this), and the sanitary conditions soon became appalling. The slums were born. The word slum, first used in the 1820s, has its origin in the old provincial word slump, meaning 'wet mire'. The word slam in Low German, Danish and Swedish, means 'mire': and that roughly described the dreadful state of the streets and courtyards on these undrained sites. It need hardly be said that the industrialist of the Steam Age did not build his own house near the works, as the country factory owners had done. He went to dwell on the 'residential heights" and walked down to the mill each day.
But there is more meaning in the word slum than simply a foul street or yard: it denotes also a certain quality of housing. In the early nineteenth century the quality of working-class houses, as structures, deteriorated rapidly. The industrialists of the water-power age, out in the open country, had put up houses for their workpeople - as at Cromford, Mellor and Styal, where many of them may still be seen - which were, in Professor Ashton's words, 'not wanting in amenity and comfort' [The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830, 1948. p. 160] and even possessed a certain quality of design and proportion. These decent working-class houses were put up in the 1770s and 1780s, where land was cheap and when building materials were plentiful, wages in the
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building trades relatively low, and money relatively cheap.
With the outbreak of twenty years' war in 1793, the price of materials and wages in the building trades both began to rise steadily. Interest rates, too, increased and remained high for a generation. Since at least two-thirds of the rent of a house consists of interest charges, the rise in interest rates alone was sufficient to bring about a drastic reduction in the size and quality of working-class houses in order to preserve an 'economic rent'. Further, land inside the older towns was acquiring a scarcity value, above all in the towns that were surrounded by open fields, so that they could not grow outwards, and a steady rise in the price of land for building was added to the rise in the price of borrowed money. Possibly, too, the building trade was invaded by a new class of speculator who made conditions even worse than they need have been by extracting high profits out of the unprecedented demand for cheap houses. No one has studied this particular class of parasite, how he worked, or what fortunes he made. One often wonders in what opulence his descendants live today forgetful, or perhaps ignorant, of the origin of their wealth. Their forebears would make a fruitful study.
Bad materials and fewer of them, and bad workmanship, reduced the costs of building. Houses run up in the courts of Birmingham in the 1820s and 1830s cost £60 each to build. Birmingham specialteed in close, dark and filthy courtyards: there were over two thousand of these in the town in the 1830s, and many of their houses were built back to back in order to get the maximum number on to each expensive acre. The local medical men did not object, but rather commended them for their cheapness. At first some of them had a deceptive brightness, but their abominable quality soon revealed itself and decay rapidly set in. Decent people moved out if they could, and the bom-squalid moved in: the swamp of the slums spread a few years behind the speculative builder everywhere.
Open spaces inside the older towns vanished fapidly. The last remnant of Birmingham Heath was enclosed in 1799, and was built over forthwith ■with eight new streets. Precisely the same thing was happening around the Lancashire towns also, where the ancient commons were enclosed and grabbed by the private speculator for building, as
at Oldham, Only Preston managed to save its commons from the vultures, and to transform some of them eventually into public parks.
Not only the commons but the large gardens of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie disappeared under bricks and mortar. The house of Baskerville, the eminent Birmingham printer, was sold in 1768 and the seven acres of land that surrounded it were advertised as 'a very desirable spot to build upon'. In these older towns, too, the large houses of the middle class were divided into tenements to house the swarming population, and factories and warehouses went up on their gardens and orchards. Slowly the other features of the industrial towns were added: Anglican churches, Nonconformist chapels, schools and public houses. Public paTks came in the 1840s, and public libraries a few years later; later still perhaps the grandiose Town Hall, by no means always to be despised as architecture.
Entirely new towns grew out of hamlets in the industrial north and Midlands. The germ of Middlesbrough was a single farmhouse near the banks of the unsullied Tees in 1830: by 1880 it was a town of more than fifty thousand people. Barrow-in-Furness, too, sprang from a single house, grew into a fishing village of about three hundred people by the 1840s, and by 1878 was a town of forty thousand. South Shields, St Helens and Birkenhead all shot up quickly during the first half of the nineteenth century. 'Meanwhile,' said Wordsworth in The Excursion (1814):
Meanwhile, at social Industry's command,
How quick, how vast an increase! From the germ
Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced
Here a huge town, continuous and compact.
Hiding the face of earth for leagues - and there.
Where not a habitation stood before.
Abodes of men irregularly massed
Like trees in forests. - spread through spacious tracts.
O'er which the smoke of unremitting fires
Hangs permanent, and plentiful as wreaths
Of vapour glittering in the morning sun.
And. wheresoe'er the traveller turns his steps.
He sees the barren wilderness erased,
Or disappearing...
Nor was the industrial landscape represented solely in the great towns, for between them
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stretched miles of torn and poisoned countryside - the mountains of waste from mining and other industries; the sheets of sullen water, known as 'flashes', which had their origin in subsidence of She surface as a result of mining below; the disused pit-shafts; the derelict and stagnant canals. The train-joumey between Leeds and Sheffield shows one this nineteenth-century landscape to perfection. In the Lancashire township of Ince there are today twenty-three pit-shafts covering 199 acres, one large industrial slag-heap covering six acres, nearly 250 acres of land under water or marsh due to mining subsidence, another 150 acres liable to flooding, and thirty-six disused pit-shafts. This is the landscape of coal-mining. As for the Black Country, one can hardly begin to describe it. Dickens has an horrific description of it in The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), when it had reached the rock bottom of filth and ugliness, and of human degradation. The early industrialists were not 'insensitive to the appeal of the country: the beauty of Cromfbrd and Millers Dale suffered little by the enterprise of Arkwright, and stretches of the Goyt and the Bollin owe something to Oldknow and the Gregs' [Ashton, Industrial Revolution, p, 157]. But the later industrialists, the heirs of the steam age, were completely and grotesquely insensitive. No scruples weakened their lust for money; they made their money and left behind their muck.
The industrial landscape is not confined to the north of England and the west Midlands. In Cornwall for instance one finds two distinct landscapes of industry, one dead, the other still active. Over central Cornwall, particularly to the north-west
of St Austell, are the spoil-heaps of the china-clay industry, an almost lunar landscape that one sees gleaming on the horizon from almost any hill-top in the county. And there is the equally striking landscape of the vanished tin-mining industry: the windowless engine-houses, the monolithic chimney stacks against the skyline, the ruined cottages of an old mining hamlet, and the stony spoil-heaps - a purely nineteenth-century landscape, and perhaps because of its setting, the most appealing of all the industrial landscapes of England, in no way ugly but indeed possessing a profound melancholy beauty. ■ Just across the Devonshire border is the old mining landscape of Blanchdown, west of Tavistock, where, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the Devon Great Consols was the richest copper mine in the world; now its miles of spoil, heaps have created a silent and desolate beauty of their own, and foxes and snakes haunt the broken buildings and the glades between.
There is a point, as Arthur Young saw, when industrial ugliness becomes sublime. And indeed the new landscape produced some fine dramatic compositions such as the railway viaduct over the smoking town of Stockport; or the sight of Bradford at night from the moorland hills to the north; or the smoky silhouette of Nottingham on a winter evening as seen from the south-bound train on the Eastern Region line; or the city of Sheffield in full blast on a murky morning; even (one thinks sometimes) the sight of long gas-lit streets of red brick working-class houses in a Victorian town with not a tree or a bush in sight: only the lamps shining on pavements blanched by the autumn evening wind.
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