Archaeologist Electra Rhodes on her first forays into writing an intersectional biography of the British landscape

Last year I wrote a quarterly column on rural issues. Throughout the year I addressed topics like employment, housing, trespass, media representation, and land ownership, using an intersectional approach, exploring issues from multiple perspectives - class, race, gender, and so on. It’s a methodology I picked up in my previous academic work in the social sciences as well as in the work I currently do on the return of cultural property.

At the time, we were renting a flat in a converted castle in the middle of Worcestershire. Although it was down-on-its-uppers (the kitchen ceiling collapsed just before we moved in, one of the storage heaters shorted the fuses every few weeks, and the cooker was a liability) the beautiful brick building had survived since the end of the sixteenth century, with Jacobean, Carolingian and Victorian additions. It was even on the cover of the county Pevsner.

In early summer I was thinking about a column as I walked the surrounding fields, faintly wondering what had occupied the land before the castle was built. A few landscape features still survived - a fish pond, some woodland, a network of field boundaries, but everything else was gone. A quick Google told me there’d once been a Benedictine convent underfoot, demolished during the dissolution of the monasteries in Henry VIII’s reign, the demesne land subsequently gifted to one of his favourites. I began reading around.

Initially I thought this might become an essay about secularisation in Britain and its impact on the physical landscape. But, and any of you who’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of a particular interest will recognise this, I started to wonder about other events that have had a profound effect on the landscape and which might be indicative of wider social, political or economic trends. The ’project’ gathered momentum, and the folder I cracked open filled with ideas, book lists, notes, and clipped articles. I know there are plenty of people interested in place writing and landscape history, but I wanted to write something that might be read by more than the usual suspects.

Eventually, after sifting through all the material, thirteen events and associated issues emerged that I thought might make an engaging manuscript. I’ve tried to be surprising in my selection of events and issues, and I’m also going for a snappy analytical angle. My hope is that I’ll write about these issues and events in an interdisciplinary, intersectional way and come up with a biography of the British landscape that is both unexpected and innovative.

It’s July now, a year on from that initial walk and we don’t live in that castle any more, instead we’re in a flat in a converted 18th century Manor House, built off the profits of slavery. As in Worcestershire we’re surrounded by parkland and wonderful trees. Right this moment I’m looking out the window, trying to match some 300 year old plans to the existing site, tracing the things lost to sight except as ghostmarks in the grass and brickwork.

It’s a salutary experience, going deeper, doing the groundwork, facing the realities. All the research to date has been interesting but as I prepare to write the biographies of beautiful buildings and landscapes I’ve loved for decades, I keep coming back to the fact that despite their sometimes gracious bearing, like the last two places we’ve lived in, they embody not always so distant brutalities.

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