English Landscapes is a forty page essay, illustrated with 76 pages of black and white halftones and maps and 8 colour plates. It attempts to "decode" the historical layers present in English rural landscapes, revealing the traces of their settlements, abandonments, enclosures, industrialisation, and so forth, and covering everything from churches, hedgerows, fences, and roads to broads and mud-flats. Hoskins approaches his subject with a human geographer's eye, viewing buildings and villages in their social and geographical contexts rather than in architectural and artistic isolation. He does quote poetry and wax lyrical on a few topics, but not so often as to be annoying.

I greatly enjoyed English Landscapes and wish it had been longer, so I plan to check out Hoskins' much more substantial The Making of the English Landscape.

January 1997

External links:

- buy from Amazon.co.uk

Related reviews:

- books about Britain + British history
- more geography