CONFERENCE REPORTS 187

Nord was reviewed in the light of legislation affecting many of the place fortes of northern France in the later nineteenth century. As for other towns, the provision of public parks and public involvement in their planning and use was partly a provincial emulation of Parisian trends and, as was noted for Douai, the opportunities to control effectively urban development were played out against a backcloth of contrasting public opinion and involvement. Public involvement played perhaps the most important role in the assessment by Simon Patrick (University College London) of sanitary and social change in the Lough Erne drainage basin from 1851 to 1971. Increasing eutrophication and particularly increased phosphorus content or P output was shown to be the result of fertilizers used in forestry and agriculture, detergents used in industrial processes, and metabolic wastes. Attention was focused upon the last of these and future research pointed to the importance of sewage systems and urban and industrial growth in under- standing the levels of P in Lough Erne. Although reduced in size, the symposium was none the less a success. However diverse these researches may be, and to whatever degree they follow or diverge from established paths within historical geography, any such work is to be encouraged as the research community as a whole adjusts to the various financial disasters imposed upon it.

The College of St Paul and St Mary, Cheltenham

CHARLES W.J. WITHERS

Landscape Research Group on Literature and Landscape

The Landscape Research Group is an inter-disciplinary organization made up largely of geographers, planners and architects, as well as scholars in the humanities. The group publishes a journal, Landscape Research, which is something of a cross between an applied, technical journal, and a more general publication with a humanistic slant such as Landscape. It carries articles on subjects ranging from quantitative techniques for environmental analysis to discussions of landscape taste and the arts. The group is based in Britain, but its members come from all over the world, particularly North America and continental Europe. The group has sponsored a number of symposia and seminars on topics as varied as “Ecological principles of urban landscape renewal”, and “The aesthetics of landscape”. The proceedings of the latter have been published under the editorship of Jay Appleton and they give a good impression of the scope of these meet- ings. The group’s most recent conference, which was co-sponsored by Durham Uni- versity’s Department of English, was on the subject of “Literature and landscape”. It provided an example of the way in which inter-disciplinary contact, in the context of the study of landscape, can prove challenging to the historical geographer, both with regard to the discipline’s traditional academic interests and with regard to the implications of these interests in an “applied” context.

The planning and design of landscape, it became apparent at the conference, requires historical geographical understanding, but it is a form of understanding which may be unfamiliar to many. Kim Taplin, an environmental activist, thus made clear that the case for preserving rural English footpaths required not only an evaluation of their present recreational value, but also an understanding of their past role both as conduits of contact and as places of contact in themselves. This was illustrated by examples taken from literature. The footpath seems to provide a thread of continuity running through both the landscape and the English rural identity. This is a theme which has been little explored in our studies, which tend to be directed toward more tangible things

188 CONFERENCE REPORTS

-field systems, house types and economic production. Such material concerns, however, can provide an equal challenge to the architect’s more purelyaesthetic approach. Stephen Daniels, a geographer, exemplified this with his controversial analysis of the social and economic basis for the taste in landscape represented by the early nineteenth-century work of the landscape designer, Humphry Repton. Few at the conference seemed to be aware of the links between Repton’s landscape ideal, which foreshadowed modern suburban landscaping, and his concern to diffuse and mask the social conflict of his day.

The conference made it clear that literary and geographical approaches both can, and ought to, supplement one another. Bob Lawson -Peebles’ literary analysis of the journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition in terms of the language of environmental inter- pretation then available, raised issues concerning the journals’ objectivity and the objectives of the expedition. Charles Anderson’s discussion of the environmental ideals of Emerson, Whitman and Thoreau, by contrast, raised questions by its very lack of geographical content. Is it possible to generalize about American taste in landscape without considering American regional differentiation? Likewise, one can ask whether Jay Appleton’s generalizations concerning a basic human need for the wild and the tame- as exemplified by his textual analysis of the writings of Richard Payne Knight, an exponent of picturesque taste-would not be thrown into doubt if treated in the context of the specific historical conditions of the time under study. We were thus presented, at these sessions, with numerous examples of the way in which the converging interests- both academic and applied-of a number of disciplines can produce a conference which is quite pertinent to the concerns of the historical geographer.

Royal Danish School of Educational Studies, Copenhagen

KENNETH OLWIG