page_title: The Making of the English Landscape
section_title: Modern
hierarchical_section_title: The Making of the English Landscape / Reception / Modern
caption_attribution_description: English: A34 looking North. Taken from the footbridge over the A34, Milton Lane between Steventon and Milton
context_page_description: The Making of the English Landscape is a 1955 book by the English local historian William George Hoskins. 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 of England and a seminal text in that discipline and in local history. The brief history of some one thousand years is widely used in local and environmental history courses.
  Hoskins defines the theme of the book in the first chapter, arguing that a landscape historian needs to use botany, physical geography 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.
context_section_description: Penelope Lively, writing in The Guardian, describes the book as
  a marvellous, robust, opinionated account of the landscape as narrative, whether rural or urban, the visible record of what has gone before, once you know how to read it – or once he has told you how. You were to put on your walking boots and understand the country in which you lived. Plenty did, or tried to; I did.
  William Boyd, also in The Guardian, described the book as "an absolute trailblazer, a revolution." He notes that W. H. Auden "revered" the book, and that reading Hoskins had enabled him to 'read' a landscape as a "historical palimpsest":
  The familiar English countryside, in whatever regional variation, became a form of historical palimpsest – its evolving history there to be decoded and discerned for those who could look at it through the innovative lens that Hoskins provided. It was as if the landscape was all of a sudden an archaeological dig – hills and dales, woods and copses, fields and rivers, villages and roads ceased to be simple features of a view. Instead the whole history of English humankind and husbandry was on display, from the Holocene age to the latest horrors of agribusiness. And the book in which that history was written was the very land itself.
  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, 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."
caption: The A34 in Oxfordshire: "the arterial by-pass, treeless and stinking of diesel oil, murderous with lorries"[3]
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