Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 1 (2019), p. 140

Malcolm Dick and Elaine Mitchell’s edited collection aims to contribute towards what Tom Williamson has called the ‘new garden history’ by offering social, political, economic and industrial context to gardens and green spaces in the West Midlands. The collection was born out of a conference entitled ‘Landscape and Green Spaces: Garden History in the West Midlands’, the Annual Conference of the Centre for West Midlands History, held in the March of 2014 at the University of Birmingham. Through nine chapters, plus an introduction and foreword penned by Timothy Mowl, the period since 1700 is explored. In doing so, the chapters examine not only the connections between green spaces and the developing industrial landscape, but also the multiplicity of sources and methodologies utilized by garden historians.

The nine contributors cover the period well and investigate many different themes that converge upon these spaces: the relationship between the urban and the rural, issues of gender, class and religion, as well as the implications of public history and heritage. The case studies offered demonstrate the distinctiveness of space and place, situating the West Midlands within wider British contexts but also emphasizing specific moments within an area of the country that changed dramatically during this period. David Whitehead’s chapter on the origins of picturesque landscaping in Stuart and Georgian Herefordshire looks to what made this county a unique place through a discussion of the interplay between art, poetry and landscape, building a comprehensive and interdisciplinary case study. Here Whitehead explains the opposition to the ordered landscaping championed by Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, which centred upon a desire to maintain the local character of Herefordshire. On a smaller scale, John Hemingway’s chapter on William Shenstone’s garden at The Leasowes in Halesowen shows the creative management and desires of one specific character rather than a wider movement. We learn of the experience Shenstone desired to create for visitors to the garden which in turn unveils wider details about landscape management, sources of knowledge for gentlemen gardeners in the eighteenth century and how these green spaces invoked as much artistic and architectural fervour as the great houses often at the centre of the landscapes.

The sheer range of sources used within the nine chapters quickly attest to a point made by Timothy Mowl in his foreword, that ‘budding garden historians … must become polymaths’ (p. xv). Elaine Mitchell’s contribution on the provincial pleasure garden, focusing on Duddeston, re-evaluates perceptions of industrializing towns by presenting the urban garden as a space of polite sociability. This is executed using extensive source material that highlights specific visitor experiences as well as convincingly evaluating J. Pedley’s painting of Birmingham’s Vauxhall as an accurate visual record. The importance of compiling a full picture through wide-ranging source material is especially clear in Joe Hawkins’ chapter: in it, he offers a practical application of historical sources to restore Worcestershire’s Hagley Park for the twenty-first century visitor. Not only does Hawkins desire to understand the physical landscape, but more importantly, to recapture the experience of the individual in this historic leisure space. This chapter, which is an appropriate final contribution to the book, underlines the usefulness of this ‘new garden history’ to West Midlands heritage in understanding landscape change and human interaction with it over time.

The relationship between the urban and the rural is a theme characterizing many of the contributions to the book. Whilst Clare Hickman’s examination of therapeutic landscapes in the early twentieth century combines green spaces with health history, presenting such spaces as a retreat from the harsh effects of the urban, Harriet Devlin’s work on the industrial landscape of Coalbrookdale looks to the religious and philanthropic effects on a space where the spoils of industry and the countryside came to be enjoyed simultaneously. Similarly, in Katy Layton-Jones’ chapter, we are presented with a convincing argument for the understanding of urban public parks as spaces which were heavily intertwined with the surrounding industry. Layton-Jones looks to the inclusion of new industrial materials and machinery within these parks, with items as simple as wrought iron gates acting to create a new harmony between the seemingly incongruous rural and urban. As time went on, though increasingly wealthy industrialists desired to retreat from the crowdedness of growing urban areas, the city began to be incorporated into areas for retreat as with urban parks. Maureen Perrie demonstrates this within her chapter on the landscaping of south Birmingham and the estates of Richard Cadbury and Joseph Chamberlain: the views to urban townscapes were not hidden by extensive landscaping of the estates, but instead included, further developing the relationship between the rural and urban. These chapters offer many interesting insights into this relationship, one which would certainly benefit from comparison with other areas of the British Isles to see if this was a country-wide phenomenon.

Whilst the collection is wide in scope and admirable in the range of material covered, it is also made clear at several points, most notably in the introduction, that it aims to be a stimulus to further research activity, as the field is still in its infancy. This is particularly referenced in Dianne Barre’s fascinating contribution on the female involvement in garden history and enterprising activity. Barre uses the Derby Mercury to uncover several fascinating stories of women between 1780 and 1830, but also highlights the deficiencies of the sources which tend to obscure female involvement. Barre uses her chapter to outline future research questions on the issue of gender and garden history. Overall, Dick and Mitchell’s edited collection manages to be comprehensive whilst keeping to a locale, contextualizing garden spaces in multiple ways for a range of uses, in a way that will surely invite new research that will further develop the sub-discipline in exciting new ways.