ABSTRACT
The cultural landscape idea is deeply embedded within the discipline of geography and had its centre at Chicago under Carl Sauer, though there was a major concern in Germany also, under the title of Kulturlandschaft. For Sauer ‘The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, nature is the medium, the cultural landscape is
the result’ (Sauer, 1925). It was largely this stream that I imbibed as I tramped throughout much of north-east England under the tutelage of Gunther Conzen, who was involved with the morphology of towns, applying the ideas of the cultural landscape to the market towns of England. So the concept that landscape could be urban was one I absorbed largely without question, although this has proved to be one of the problems of the landscape concept elsewhere. The basic point was that the plan of the town – or more specifically its layout, as these places usually grew without the use of surveyors’ plans – was a vital document in understanding how the town (or indeed the village or the rural landscape) came to be. This is a retrospective process, a reading back, examining what exists to reconstruct the past and a history. Of course historians had frequently been able to find the documents granting the right to build a castle and then point to the castle mound still in existence, but now historical geographers, historians and archaeologists were using the mound as evidence itself, or more likely arguing from principles that the place must once have appeared in a particular way because of the evidence in the landscape today, without reference to any documentary evidence. Street layouts and plot sizes and shapes were particularly important elements in this ‘document’, just as the path and hedge network were in deciphering the rural cultural landscape. So we spent many fieldwork days looking up little gunnels in Rothbury, Alnwick (about which Conzen wrote a well-known paper, 1969), Helmsley and others, seeing how such typical market towns, although they might be unplanned in any strict sense involving maps and plans, were nonetheless following a common idea of what constitutes a sensible urban morphology. You learned to ‘read’ the historical development of the town from the evidence of your eyes, though you were always encouraged also to consult the documents.
