ABSTRACT
As described in Chapter 2, one architectural response to English anxieties about the urban has been a retreat into picturesque aesthetics. Realistic fears about the safety of city space, and unease about the position of the city in English culture have led to the rethinking the city in distinctly non-urban terms. Townscape proposed a re-reading of the city in terms of nature, Poundbury the reinvention of the pre-industrial city, as if the revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had not happened. Both instances of the picturesque sought to deny the facts that had produced urbanity in the first place.
