''The Making of the English Landscape'' is a 1954 book by the English local historian

William George Hoskins William George Hoskins (22 May 1908 – 11 January 1992) was an English local historian who founded the first university department of English Local History. His great contribution to the study of history was in the field of landscape history ...

. The book is also the introductory volume in a series of the same name which deals with the English Landscape county by county. It is illustrated with 82 monochrome plates, mostly photographs by Hoskins himself, and 17 maps or plans. It has appeared in at least 35 editions and reprints in English and other languages. The book is a

landscape history Landscape history is the study of the way in which humanity has changed the physical appearance of the environment – both present and past. It is sometimes referred to as landscape archaeology. It was first recognised as a separate area of stud ...

of England and a seminal text in that discipline and in

local history Local history is the study of history in a geographically local context, often concentrating on a relatively small local community. It incorporates cultural and social aspects of history. Local history is not merely national history writ small ...

. The brief history of some one thousand years is widely used in local and

environmental history Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs and vice versa. Environmental history first emerged in the United States out of th ...

courses. Hoskins defines the theme of the book in the first chapter, arguing that a landscape historian needs to use

botany Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek w ...

physical geography Physical geography (also known as physiography) is one of the three main branches of geography. Physical geography is the branch of natural science which deals with the processes and patterns in the natural environment such as the atmosphere, ...

and natural history as well as historical knowledge to interpret any given scene fully. The remaining chapters describe how the English landscape was formed from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards, starting c. 450 AD, and looking in detail at the mediaeval landscape, the depopulation following the Black Death, the

Tudor period The Tudor period occurred between 1485 and 1603 in England and Wales and includes the Elizabethan period during the reign of Elizabeth I until 1603. The Tudor period coincides with the dynasty of the House of Tudor in England that began wit ...

through to the splendour of the

Georgian period The Georgian era was a period in British history from 1714 to , named after the Hanoverian Kings George I, George II, George III and George IV. The definition of the Georgian era is often extended to include the relatively short reign of Will ...

, the parliamentary

enclosure Enclosure or Inclosure is a term, used in English landownership, that refers to the appropriation of "waste" or " common land" enclosing it and by doing so depriving commoners of their rights of access and privilege. Agreements to enclose land ...

s that affected much of the English midlands, the

industrial revolution The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...

, the development of road, canal, and railway transport networks, and finally the growth of towns from Norman times onwards. There is little mention of cities. The concluding chapter, however, laments the damage done to the English countryside by "the villainous requirements of the new age" such as military airfields and arterial roads, describes the new England as barbaric, and invites the reader to contemplate the past. The work has been widely admired, but also described as grandly emotive, populist, and openly anti-modernist. Writers have praised the book for helping them understand and interpret the landscape in which they lived.

Book

Overview

The introduction sets out Hoskins' stall with "No book exists to describe the manner in which the various landscapes of this country came to assume the shape and appearance they now have",''The Making of the English Landscape'', 1955. Introduction. mentioning geology ("only one aspect of the subject"), the clearing of woodlands, the reclaiming of moor and marsh, the creation of fields, roads, towns, country houses, mines, canals and railways: "in short, with everything that has altered the natural landscape."

Editions and translations

The first edition was published by

Hodder and Stoughton Hodder & Stoughton is a British publishing house, now an imprint of Hachette. History Early history The firm has its origins in the 1840s, with Matthew Hodder's employment, aged 14, with Messrs Jackson and Walford, the official publishe ...

in 1954. They reprinted the book in 1956, 1957, 1960, 1963, 1965, 1967, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1974, 1977. They issued a new edition in 1988, a revised edition in 1992, and a new edition in 2005, reissued in 2006. They published Korean and Japanese editions in 2008. In 1970,

Penguin Books Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year. In 1977,

Book Club Associates Book Club Associates (BCA) was a mail-order and online book selling company in the United Kingdom. It came to dominate the mail-order book-club business in the U.K. in the 1970s and 1980s through extensive advertising in Sunday newspaper colour su ...

published an edition in England. In 1988, Coronet Books and Guild Publishers published editions in England. In 1992, Teach Yourself Books published a paperback edition in England. In 2005, the

Folio Society The Folio Society is a London-based publisher, founded by Charles Ede in 1947 and incorporated in 1971. Formerly privately owned, it operates as an employee ownership trust since 2021. It produces illustrated hardback editions of classic fic ...

published an edition in England. In 2013, Little Toller books published a paperback edition in England.

Illustrations

The book is illustrated with 82 monochrome plates and 17 maps or plans, all uncredited except for some use of

Ordnance Survey Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There was a ...

maps, and so apparently the work of Hoskins himself. These are closely integrated into the text; for example, the text in chapter 1 is accompanied by a pair of diagrams showing how a holloway ('hollow way') could be formed by the digging of a 'double ditch', i.e. a pair of raised earth banks either side of a ditch to mark the boundary of two estates, and supported by a photograph (Plate 13) of a sunken lane in Devon, explained by Hoskins as a boundary, from probably the seventh century, between the Saxon estates of (royal) Silverton and Exeter Abbey. The photograph shows high hedgebanks in bright sunshine, dwarfing the figure of a woman in the middle distance.

The book covers its subject in 10 chapters:

1. The Landscape before the English Settlement

Hoskins uses the first few pages of this chapter as an introduction, beginning with praise for

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication '' Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth's ' ...

's '' A Guide through the District of the Lakes'' (1810), and from which he quotes a passage in which the reader is asked to envisage "an image of the tides visiting and revisiting the friths, the main sea dashing against the bolder shore". Hoskins writes that on a desolate moor one can feel oneself imaginatively back in time to the

Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second prin ...

, but that there are now few such unaltered places left. He argues that the landscape historian "needs to be a botanist, a physical geographer, and a naturalist, as well as an historian" to understand a scene in full: The rest of the chapter covers Pre-Roman, Western (i.e. Celtic) and

Roman Britain Roman Britain was the period in classical antiquity when large parts of the island of Great Britain were under occupation by the Roman Empire. The occupation lasted from AD 43 to AD 410. During that time, the territory conquered wa ...

. He estimates very roughly that 750,000 acres at most were in use as arable or grassland in Roman times, compared to 27 million acres in 1914.

2. The English Settlement

Medieval Ridge and Furrow above Wood Stanway - geograph

Hoskins describes how England was settled with Anglo-Saxon people between c. 450 and 1066 AD, making the country a land of villages. Estate boundaries from this period survive in features such as sunken lanes and banks. The Scandinavian conquest of much of England from the late 9th century added more villages, though many with Scandinavian placename elements such as -by ('village') may simply have been renamed Saxon settlements. Many English villages were given their shape in this period, and almost all are described in some detail in the eleventh century

Domesday Book Domesday Book () – the Middle English spelling of "Doomsday Book" – is a manuscript record of the "Great Survey" of much of England and parts of Wales completed in 1086 by order of King William I, known as William the Conqueror. The manus ...

. Hoskins identifies three major types of village: those around a green or central square, as at

Finchingfield Finchingfield is a village in the Braintree district in north-west Essex, England, a primarily rural area. It is approximately from Thaxted, farther from the larger towns of Saffron Walden and Braintree. Nearby villages include Great Bardfield ...

in Essex; those along a single street, like Henley in Arden in Warwickshire; and those consisting of apparently haphazardly scattered dwellings, like

Middle Barton Middle or The Middle may refer to: * Centre (geometry), the point equally distant from the outer limits. Places * Middle (sheading), a subdivision of the Isle of Man * Middle Bay (disambiguation) * Middle Brook (disambiguation) * Middle Creek ( ...

near Hoskins's home in Oxfordshire.

3. The Colonization of Mediaeval England

This chapter looks at the mediaeval landscape from the

onwards, with the section 'The Landscape in 1086'. The country had almost every village that exists today; a typical one, Hoskins writes, had a small

watermill A watermill or water mill is a mill that uses hydropower. It is a structure that uses a water wheel or water turbine to drive a mechanical process such as milling (grinding), rolling, or hammering. Such processes are needed in the production of ...

and a church without a spire. In 'The Clearing of the Woodlands', Hoskins argues that before the 15th century England must have looked like one great forest, but most of the woods were cleared for arable or pasture in the 12th and 13th centuries. Under Henry II perhaps a third of the country was royal forest. Hoskins begins the section on 'Marsh, Fen, and Moor' with the words "There are certain sheets of the one-inch Ordnance Survey maps which one can sit down and read like a book for an hour on end, with growing pleasure and imaginative excitement". One such section is of

The Wash The Wash is a rectangular bay and multiple estuary at the north-west corner of East Anglia on the East coast of England, where Norfolk meets Lincolnshire and both border the North Sea. One of Britain's broadest estuaries, it is fed by the riv ...

, rich in mediaeval detail. Marshes such as those in

Lincolnshire Lincolnshire (abbreviated Lincs.) is a Counties of England, county in the East Midlands of England, with a long coastline on the North Sea to the east. It borders Norfolk to the south-east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south-we ...

, Norfolk and the

Pevensey Levels Pevensey Levels is a biological Site of Special Scientific Interest between Bexhill-on-Sea and Hailsham in East Sussex. It is a Nature Conservation Review site, Grade I, a Ramsar site and a Special Area of Conservation. An area of is a nati ...

were reclaimed at this time, whole communities working together, often under the

Danelaw The Danelaw (, also known as the Danelagh; ang, Dena lagu; da, Danelagen) was the part of England in which the laws of the Danes held sway and dominated those of the Anglo-Saxons. The Danelaw contrasts with the West Saxon law and the Mercian ...

South Middleton deserted village - geograph

'Buildings in the landscape' briefly describes abbeys, churches, mills, bridges and castles built to serve the growing population, which just before the Black Death had tripled since Domesday.

4. The Black Death and after

Hoskins describes the abandonment of villages from the bubonic plague of 1348, the Black Death, which killed a third to a half of the population (he states), and the subsequent new colonisation and building as the population eventually recovered. Marginal land such as the Breckland of Norfolk and Suffolk, never thickly populated, was abandoned. Many villages in counties such as Leicestershire were deserted. Villages such as Lower Ditchford in

Gloucestershire Gloucestershire ( abbreviated Glos) is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn and the entire Forest of Dean. The county town is the city of Gl ...

can be seen today only as a ground-plan from the air. Between 1350 and 1500, many new buildings appeared, especially churches with towers like

Fotheringhay Fotheringhay is a village and civil parish in Northamptonshire, England, north-east of Oundle and around west of Peterborough. It is most noted for being the site of Fotheringhay (or Fotheringay) Castle which was razed in 1627. There is not ...

in Northamptonshire. Some fine bridges as at

Wadebridge Wadebridge (; kw, Ponswad) is a town and civil parish in north Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. The town straddles the River Camel upstream from Padstow.Ordnance Survey: Landranger map sheet 200 ''Newquay & Bodmin'' The permanent popul ...

in Cornwall are from this period.

5. Tudor to Georgian England

Hoskins starts this chapter by observing that in 1500 in

Tudor times The Tudor period occurred between 1485 and 1603 in England and Wales and includes the Elizabethan period during the reign of Elizabeth I until 1603. The Tudor period coincides with the dynasty of the House of Tudor in England that began with t ...

there were roughly three sheep for every human being in England, perhaps 8 million sheep to two and a half million people. There were four million acres of hardwood forest, remembered now as

Epping Forest Epping Forest is a area of ancient woodland, and other established habitats, which straddles the border between Greater London and Essex. The main body of the forest stretches from Epping in the north, to Chingford on the edge of the London ...

, the

Forest of Arden Arden is an area located mainly in Warwickshire, England, with parts in Staffordshire and Worcestershire, and is traditionally regarded as extending from the River Avon to the River Tame. It was once heavily wooded, giving rise to the name 'F ...

Sherwood Forest Sherwood Forest is a royal forest in Nottinghamshire, England, famous because of its historic association with the legend of Robin Hood. The area has been wooded since the end of the Last Glacial Period (as attested by pollen sampling cor ...

, the

Forest of Dean The Forest of Dean is a geographical, historical and cultural region in the western part of the county of Gloucestershire, England. It forms a roughly triangular plateau bounded by the River Wye to the west and northwest, Herefordshire to ...

Wychwood Wychwood or Wychwood Forest is a biological Site of Special Scientific Interest north of Witney in Oxfordshire. It is also a Nature Conservation Review site, Grade 1, and an area of is a national nature reserve The site contains a long barr ...

and many others. A village might be surrounded by a single enormous thousand acre field, shared amongst all the village's farmers. There were extensive heaths and wild places, largely uninhabited, with "no industrial smoke, nothing faster on the roads than a horse, no incessant noises from the sky". The first enclosures and the flowering of rural England, country houses and parks such as the magnificent Burghley House and

Knole Knole () is a country house and former archbishop's palace owned by the National Trust. It is situated within Knole Park, a park located immediately to the south-east of Sevenoaks in west Kent. The house ranks in the top five of England's lar ...

date from this period up to Georgian times.

6. Parliamentary Enclosure and the Landscape

Canterbury Orchards 1945 OS Map 171 detail

In this chapter Hoskins describes the effects of enclosure on the landscape and on fields, hedgerows and trees, roads and farmhouses. He begins by quoting the rural poet

John Clare John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864) was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and sorrows at its disruption. His work underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th ce ...

: "Inclosure, thou'rt a curse upon the land, and tasteless was the wretch who thy existence plann'd". Parliamentary enclosures accounted for about 4.5 million acres of what had been open fields, not counting the enclosure of

common land Common land is land owned by a person or collectively by a number of persons, over which other persons have certain common rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect wood, or to cut turf for fuel. A person who has a ...

and wild 'waste'. In 1700 roughly half England's arable land was already enclosed; by the end of the enclosure process, almost all of it was. The revolution in the landscape began in about 1750, affecting about 3,000 parishes, especially in the English midlands. Between 1760 and 1800 there were 1,479 enclosure acts, covering 2.5 million acres; another 1.5 million acres were enclosed by 1844, by more than a thousand further acts. Some counties such as Kent, Essex and Devon were little affected, having largely been enclosed much earlier, often directly from forest or moorland. Many miles of new straight hedgerows were laid to mark out the newly enclosed fields of the midlands; in some areas such as

Derbyshire Derbyshire ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands, England. It includes much of the Peak District National Park, the southern end of the Pennine range of hills and part of the National Forest. It borders Greater Manchester to the nor ...

, straight limestone walls were used instead. Many straight new roads were created at the same time. Farmhouses remained in the old villages at first, but new red-brick Victorian ones were often built in the middle of their now enclosed land in due course.

7. The Industrial Revolution and the Landscape

Hoskins begins his chapter on industrialisation with the remark "England was still a peaceful agricultural country at the beginning of the seventeenth century." He describes the early industrial landscape, water power and early mills, steam power and slums. He names transformative inventions such as Kay's flying shuttle of 1733 and Hargreaves's

spinning jenny The spinning jenny is a multi- spindle spinning frame, and was one of the key developments in the industrialization of textile manufacturing during the early Industrial Revolution. It was invented in 1764 or 1765 by James Hargreaves in Sta ...

of 1767, and comments that Matthew Boulton opened his steam engine factory "in the still unravished country" outside Birmingham in 1765. He quotes a poem by

Anna Seward Anna Seward (12 December 1742 ld style: 1 December 1742./ref>Often wrongly given as 1747.25 March 1809) was an English Romantic poet, often called the Swan of Lichfield. She benefited from her father's progressive views on female education. Li ...

lamenting the ravishing of

Coalbrookdale Coalbrookdale is a village in the Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, England, containing a settlement of great significance in the history of iron ore smelting. It lies within the civil parish called the Gorge. This is where iron ore was first s ...

, c. 1785, and one by Wordsworth from ''The Excursion''. He is critical of the industrial slums and the smoke and dirt of the

Staffordshire Potteries The Staffordshire Potteries is the industrial area encompassing the six towns Burslem, Fenton, Hanley, Longton, Stoke and Tunstall, which is now the city of Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, England. North Staffordshire became a centre of ...

. He emphasises the rapid growth of industrial towns like Preston, and of new towns like

Middlesbrough Middlesbrough ( ) is a town on the southern bank of the River Tees in North Yorkshire, England. It is near the North York Moors national park. It is the namesake and main town of its local borough council area. Until the early 1800s, the a ...

, which went from a single farm in 1830 to over 50,000 inhabitants in 1880. However he appreciates the mining landscapes of

Cornwall Cornwall (; kw, Kernow ) is a historic county and ceremonial county in South West England. It is recognised as one of the Celtic nations, and is the homeland of the Cornish people. Cornwall is bordered to the north and west by the Atlantic ...

, including the gleaming white

china clay Kaolinite ( ) is a clay mineral, with the chemical composition Al2 Si2 O5( OH)4. It is an important industrial mineral. It is a layered silicate mineral, with one tetrahedral sheet of silica () linked through oxygen atoms to one octahedra ...

pits of St Austell and the abandoned tin mines of

St Cleer St Cleer ( kw, Ryskarasek) is a civil parish and village in east Cornwall, England, United Kingdom. The village is situated on the southeast flank of Bodmin Moor approximately two miles (3 km) north of Liskeard. The population of the par ...

, commenting that "there is a point, as Arthur Young saw, when industrial ugliness becomes sublime".

8. Roads, Canals, and Railways

Hoskins describes roads and trackways from the Iron Age (like the

Jurassic Way The Jurassic Way is a designated and signed long-distance footpath that connects the Oxfordshire town of Banbury with the Lincolnshire town of Stamford in England. It largely follows an ancient ridgeway traversing Britain; most of its route i ...

across the midlands, near his Oxfordshire home) and Roman times (like

Akeman Street Akeman Street is a Roman road in southern England between the modern counties of Hertfordshire and Gloucestershire. It is approximately long and runs roughly east–west. Akeman Street linked Watling Street just north of Verulamium (near mode ...

in the same area). He notes that the Fosse Way runs for miles in Gloucestershire away from any village, as the Anglo-Saxons built villages away from large roads for safety. Still in his home area, he records that "the wide green track now called Dornford Lane" was built in the 10th century for supplies to be carted from the Anglo-Saxon kings' own estate at Barton. He goes on to describe the building of the canal network between roughly 1760 and 1825, noting that just one town was created by the canals, Stourport. Soon afterwards, a much more widespread transport network transformed the English landscape: the

railways Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport that transfers passengers and goods on wheeled vehicles running on rails, which are incorporated in tracks. In contrast to road transport, where the vehicles run on a pre ...

. Hoskins devotes over a page to each of two quotations from

Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens (; 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. He created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian e ...

's ''

Dombey and Son ''Dombey and Son'' is a novel by English author Charles Dickens. It follows the fortunes of a shipping firm owner, who is frustrated at the lack of a son to follow him in his footsteps; he initially rejects his daughter's love before eventual ...

'', describing the construction in 1836 of a railway in Camden Town. He mentions, too, that Wordsworth campaigned against the railway from Kendal to

Windermere Windermere (sometimes tautologically called Windermere Lake to distinguish it from the nearby town of Windermere) is the largest natural lake in England. More than 11 miles (18 km) in length, and almost 1 mile (1.5 km) at its wides ...

, bringing trains into the heart of the Lake District, and that conservatives like Wordsworth "lost all along the line".

9. The Landscape of Towns

The last chapter of the body of the book – if Chapter 10 is considered more or less an epilogue – covers towns seen as part of the English landscape. Hoskins justifies this on the grounds that understanding

town A town is a human settlement. Towns are generally larger than villages and smaller than cities, though the criteria to distinguish between them vary considerably in different parts of the world. Origin and use The word "town" shares an ori ...

s brings pleasure. He describes in turn planned towns, the open-field town, and the

market town A market town is a settlement most common in Europe that obtained by custom or royal charter, in the Middle Ages, a market right, which allowed it to host a regular market; this distinguished it from a village or city. In Britain, small rural ...

. Towns were planned as early as Norman times, Abbot Baldwin planning Bury St Edmunds between 1066 and 1086; Stratford-on-Avon was laid out in 1196. Another burst of town planning came with the

spa town A spa town is a resort town based on a mineral spa (a developed mineral spring). Patrons visit spas to "take the waters" for their purported health benefits. Thomas Guidott set up a medical practice in the English town of Bath in 1668. He ...

s in the late 18th century, and of new industrial towns like Middlesbrough and

Barrow-in-Furness Barrow-in-Furness is a port town in Cumbria, England. Historic counties of England, Historically in Lancashire, it was incorporated as a municipal borough in 1867 and merged with Dalton-in-Furness Urban District in 1974 to form the Borough of B ...

in the mid 19th century. Open-field towns like

Nottingham Nottingham ( , locally ) is a city and unitary authority area in Nottinghamshire, East Midlands, England. It is located north-west of London, south-east of Sheffield and north-east of Birmingham. Nottingham has links to the legend of Robi ...

, Leicester, and Stamford grew naturally in their own open fields, but were trapped by pasture rights from growing in the 19th century, giving Nottingham slums, and Leicester a problem that it just managed to solve, growing across its fields: while Stamford stopped growing entirely, becoming fossilised as what Hoskins calls a museum piece of a beautiful 17th and 18th century town. Finally, the

s like Marlborough grew up around their often large and handsome market places, which are however of any number of shapes.

10. The Landscape Today

Hoskins concludes with a brief chapter, with one image, Plate 82, "The completed English landscape" showing a tall tree in a wide open field, a strip of hedges and villages just visible in the distance. The chapter laments the damage caused to parts of the English landscape, mentioning bulldozers and tractors, nuclear bombers and by-passes, and ends by celebrating again the wealth of detail within a few hundred yards of Hoskins' study window at Steeple Barton in Oxfordshire.

Reception

Contemporary

The geographer E. G. R. Taylor, reviewing the book for the Royal Geographical Society in 1955, wrote that Hoskins made the case for getting a strong pair of boots to learn landscape history clearly enough. Taylor compared the book to Dudley Stamp's ''Man and the Land'', published a few months earlier in 1955, saying that Hoskins seemed to have missed it, but that given the differences in their approaches, they could be read side by side. She noted also that Hoskins did not talk about London though he covered town landscapes, and appeared unaware of

urban geography Urban geography is the subdiscipline of geography that derives from a study of cities and urban processes. Urban geographers and urbanists examine various aspects of urban life and the built environment. Scholars, activists, and the public have ...

. Her review ended by remarking that Hoskins "views the industrial revolution with mounting horror, and the industrialists themselves are bitterly chastised as 'completely and grotesquely insensitive. No scruples weakened their lust for money; they made their money and left their muck.'" She noted however that Hoskins had happily moved to "a quiet spot in Oxfordshire where he can forget the 'barbaric England of the scientists, the military men and the politicians' and look out of his study window on to the past", where, she wrote, he "draws for us a last tender and evocative picture of the 'gentle unravished English landscape.'" Dr. Hoskins, she wrote, forgetting all the horrors, "reaches back through the centuries one by one and rediscovers Eden".

Modern

Penelope Lively Dame Penelope Margaret Lively (née Low; born 17 March 1933) is a British writer of fiction for both children and adults. Lively has won both the Booker Prize (''Moon Tiger'', 1987) and the Carnegie Medal for British children's books ('' Th ...

, writing in ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'', describes the book as William Boyd, also in ''The Guardian'', described the book as "an absolute trailblazer, a revolution." He notes that

W. H. Auden Wystan Hugh Auden (; 21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973) was a British-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in ...

"revered" the book, and that reading Hoskins had enabled him to 'read' a landscape as a "historical

palimpsest In textual studies, a palimpsest () is a manuscript page, either from a scroll or a book, from which the text has been scraped or washed off so that the page can be reused for another document. Parchment was made of lamb, calf, or kid skin an ...

": Local historian Graeme White, in ''The Medieval English Landscape, 1400–1540'', calls Hoskins' book "brilliantly-crafted" and observes that "Although this famously railed against the 'England of the arterial by-pass, treeless and stinking of diesel oil' – along with much else belonging to the mid-twentieth century – the fact that national car ownership more than doubled during the 1950s made this a subject whose time had come." Paul Johnson, writing in ''

The Spectator ''The Spectator'' is a weekly British magazine on politics, culture, and current affairs. It was first published in July 1828, making it the oldest surviving weekly magazine in the world. It is owned by Frederick Barclay, who also owns ''The ...

'', said that the book "was for me an eye-opener, as it was for many people. It told us of the extent to which our landscape had been made by man, not God, and taught us to look much more observantly at it."

An assessment

Matthew H. Johnson, writing a chapter on English culture and landscape in the edited book ''The Public Value of the Humanities'', identifies "six key points" established by Hoskins: :1. The landscape is of great antiquity ("everything is much older than we think") :2. Landscapes often changed suddenly, as in the 18th century enclosures. :3. Hoskins, following

O. G. S. Crawford Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford (28 October 1886 – 28 November 1957) was a British archaeologist who specialised in the archaeology of prehistoric Britain and Sudan. A keen proponent of aerial archaeology, he spent most of his career as th ...

's 1953 ''Archaeology in the Field'', stressed we had to read the landscape using research to reveal its cultural value. :4. Hoskins thus told a "grand and emotive story about that landscape." Johnson compares this to J.R.R. Tolkien's account in ''

The Lord of the Rings ''The Lord of the Rings'' is an epic high-fantasy novel by English author and scholar J. R. R. Tolkien. Set in Middle-earth, intended to be Earth at some time in the distant past, the story began as a sequel to Tolkien's 1937 children's b ...

'' when the

hobbit Hobbits are a fictional race of people in the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien. About half average human height, Tolkien presented hobbits as a variety of humanity, or close relatives thereof. Occasionally known as halflings in Tolkien's writings, ...

s return to a "despoiled and industrialized landscape of

the Shire The Shire is a region of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth, described in ''The Lord of the Rings'' and other works. The Shire is an inland area settled exclusively by hobbits, the Shire-folk, largely sheltered from the goings-on in th ...

". :5. The narrative is

populist Populism refers to a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against " the elite". It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment. The term develop ...

, to be disseminated "to anyone who would listen." The result was that it became part of English post-war culture. :6. It was "openly anti-

modernist Modernism is both a philosophy, philosophical and arts movement that arose from broad transformations in Western world, Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The movement reflected a desire for the creation of new fo ...

". In evidence, Johnson cites Hoskins's "most famous passage" from the concluding chapter: :

Television

In 1972 the BBC broadcast an episode of the television programme '' Horizon'' on ''The Making of the English Landscape'' produced by Peter Jones, and featuring Hoskins as presenter. Although the programme was inspired by the original book, Hoskins wrote an 84-page illustrated BBC book, ''English Landscapes'', to accompany the programme. Later in the 1970s, Jones went on to produce a series of 12 TV programmes for BBC2, ''

Landscapes of England ''Landscapes of England: An Exploration with W.G. Hoskins'' is a BBC television documentary series broadcast on BBC Two in 1976 and 1978. Written and presented by Professor W.G. Hoskins, the series was a televisual accompaniment to his seminal ...

'', in which additional areas of the country were studied, leading to a further title, ''One Man's England'' to accompany the series.