Cultural Geography

partly because of Marxism’s tendency to reduce

all culture to class consciousness (Cosgrove,

1998; Mitchell, 1996). But the history of western

landscape that I have sketched commonly saw

aesthetic design and appeals to ‘nature’ deployed

to veil dramatic social inequality. In eighteenth-

century England, for example, the association

between expunging common rights over land and

natural resources and physically expropriating

communities on the one hand, and creating the

pleasing vistas of landscape parks on the other was

widely acknowledged at the time and has been

intensively studied since (Barrell, 1980; Daniels

and Seymour, 1990; Rosenthal et al., 1997).

‘Model’ villages such as Nuneham Courtney,

Great Tew, Brocklesby or Elsinor were erected

along turnpiked roads at the edge of landscaped

parks to accommodate labourers relocated from

homesteads inconveniently visible across his

lordship’s landskip, a process paralleled in the

formal arrangement of great house and slave

dwellings on plantations in the American South

(Stewart, 1995). Village design often reflected

the picturesque visual tastes of landlords more

than the practical needs of tenants. The visible

signs of social exclusion – in the form of fences,

ornaments and plantings – were not infrequently

the objects of attack and destruction by angry,

dispossessed villagers. And the popularity among

late-eighteenth-century English landowners of

harmonious landscape scenes in which labour

dissolves into the far distance has been inter-

preted to reflect the anxieties of landowners in the

face of French Jacobinism.

Class and landscape moulded also the design

of nineteenth-century urban and municipal parks

and gardens. On both sides of the Atlantic, packing

large numbers of poorly paid and inadequately

housed factory workers into cities whose spatial

structures were inadequate to service basic needs

produced crises of sanitation, health and crime.

These were apparent in mid-century typhoid and

cholera epidemics, which directly threatened

bourgeois lives and sensibilities. The middle-

class response was to move to the suburban

edges of the towns and to surround individual

‘villas’ with miniature landscapes based on

pattern-book designs and using plants drawn

from across a colonized globe, that were the

progenitors of the modern suburban garden or

yard (Preston, 1999). In public space, the layout

of new cemeteries on the urban fringe and of

municipal parks and gardens brought together

picturesque design principals and the regulatory

effects of ‘rational recreation’. These enforced

genteel strolling along serpentine paths and pas-

sive observation of form and colour in arboreta,

flower beds and ornamental ironwork. Such

essentially ‘seen’ landscapes were styled as con-

tributions to both the physical health and the

moral education of the industrial working class.

But regulated landscape did not always fit the

recreational demands of such groups. In Boston,

New York and Chicago for example, baseball

diamonds were favoured over flower beds

among the immigrant industrial workers (Young,

1995).

Landscape’s capacity to hide and soften

visually the realities of exploitation and to

‘naturalize’ what is a socially produced spatial

order continues today. California’s agricultural

landscape, long figured through utopian images of

LANDSCAPE AND THE EUROPEAN SENSE OF SIGHT 259

Figure 12.6 Alex MacLean, ‘California Agricultural Landscape’(Rizzoli International Publications Inc.)

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