page_title: W. G. Hoskins
section_title: The Making of the English Landscape
hierarchical_section_title: W. G. Hoskins / The Making of the English Landscape
caption_attribution_description: English: Complicated medieval ridge and furrow patterns on the hillside to the west of Lower Coscombe Farm above the small village of Wood Stanway, near to Didbrook, Gloucestershire, Great Britain.
context_page_description: William George Hoskins CBE FBA 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. Hoskins demonstrated the profound impact of human activity on the evolution of the English landscape in a pioneering book: The Making of the English Landscape. His work has had lasting influence in the fields of local and landscape history and historical and environmental conservation.
context_section_description: In 1955, Hoskins published the book that was to make his name. The Making of the English Landscape is a landscape history of England and a seminal text in that discipline and in local history. The brief history of some one thousand years has become a standard text in local and environmental history courses. Hoskins sets out his stall in the introduction 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 brief concluding chapter contains only 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.
  The book has been well received by critics. Penelope Lively describes the book as "a marvellous, robust, opinionated account of the landscape as narrative". William Boyd describes it as "an absolute trailblazer, a revolution." Boyd notes that W. H. Auden "revered" the book, and that reading Hoskins had enabled him to "read" a landscape as a "historical palimpsest". Local historian Graeme White calls the book "brilliantly-crafted".
caption: In The Making of the English Landscape, Hoskins explains features like the distinctive ridge and furrow pattern in open field system farming, seen here at Wood Stanway, Gloucestershire.
exif: {}