One Man's England: W.G. Hoskins and the English Culture of Landscape

Abstract

This essay considers W.G. Hoskins's work as a key part of the post-war English culture of landscape. To paraphrase his most well-known book, Hoskins made a distinctive English landscape. His work, though, has received remarkably little critical attention in terms of English cultural history. D.W. Meinig, in the only essay to treat Hoskins’ work at any length, focusses on his contribution to the genre of landscape studies and the impact of his work in the 1970s through television (Meinig, 1979). This essay seeks to complement Meinig's generic focus, by considering Hoskins in relation to the wider culture of landscape in England after 1945.