Speed, scale and topography: driving About Britain

As he advised his readers that central England was best approached on foot, Hoskins worked from the starting point that this landscape was one that operated at an intimate scale. No doubt with at least half an eye on American tourists in Britain during its Festival year, Hoskins informed those visiting ‘from more spacious lands’ that they needed to ‘acquire a new scale of measurement in England’ and ‘look for depth, rather than grandeur of height or breadth of scene’, because ‘in the main the beauty and interest of the English scene – town or country – lies in its quality rather than in its size’.¹⁷ This sense that Britain was an island that played out at a different scale from the vast North American continent was one articulated by others. J.B. Priestley suggested that one of Britain’s ‘charms’

is that it is immensely varied within a small compass. We have here no vast mountain ranges, no illimitable plains, no leagues of forest, and are deprived of the grandeur that may accompany these things. But we have superb variety. A great deal of everything is packed into little space. I suspect that we are always faintly conscious of the fact that this is a smallish island, with the sea always round the corner. We know that everything has to be neatly packed into a small space. Nature, we feel, has carefully adjusted things – mountains, plains, rivers, lakes – to the scale of the island itself.¹⁸

In this world in miniature, Priestley argued that North American topographical features – a 12,000 foot high mountain, 400 mile long plain, or ‘a river as broad as the Mississippi’ – would be monstrously out of place. But it was not simply that landscapes at such a scale would not fit within the British context. They did not fit anywhere. Priestley was dismissive of America, where ‘the whole scale is too big, except for aviators’. America was a country, he claimed, where

There is always too much of everything. There you find yourself in a region that is all mountains, then in another region that is merely part of one colossal plain. You can spend a long, hard day in the Rockies simply travelling up or down one valley. You can wander across prairie country that has the desolating immensity of the ocean. Everything is too big; there is too much of it.¹⁹

In contrast to the continental scale of the United States, which demanded exploration from the air by plane, Britain was a country that played out at a much smaller scale and therefore a day’s travel by car or on foot could – and did – offer up considerable variety. As an example of experiencing this ‘country of happy surprises’ on the ground, Priestley described a journey ‘down into the West Country, among rounded hills and soft pastures’, through ‘the queer bit of Fen country you have found in the neighbourhood of Glastonbury’ before ‘you suddenly arrive at the bleak tablelands of Dartmoor and Exmoor, genuine high moors, as if the North had left a piece of itself down there’.²⁰ Hoskins offered an experience of variety on an even smaller scale. ‘Except on the loneliest moors – and even there quite often,’ he wrote in the introduction to the About Britain guide to the Chilterns to Black Country, ‘there are hardly ten square miles in England where one could not spend a whole day in leisurely exploration, provided only that one knows where to look and goes prepared beforehand.’²¹ To ground this claim, he took his readers to the ‘ruined Gothic tower’ on Mow Cop, which was the birthplace of Primitive Methodism, and then on to the canal tunnel at Kidsgrove before finishing up in the town of Biddulph with its fantastical gardens at Biddulph Grange.²² ‘At this point we are still within four miles of Brindley’s canal-tunnel at Kidsgrove, where we began this modest and rather uninviting tour,’ Hoskins noted.

We have moved within a tiny radius indeed, at no point … as much as four miles from the summit of Mow Cop, which would have dominated the skyline the whole day long; and it would take the interested traveller a whole day to see this piece of country properly.²³

Although it is clear that Hoskins tended to prefer slow encounter on foot at an intimate scale, he was not completely opposed to making use of a car. Indeed, when he directed his reader to explore ‘ten square miles’ he advocated their selective use of a car for more than simply pragmatic reasons. The sights around Mow Cop were set within an industrial and urban landscape that was – he asserted – best navigated at speed. ‘Before we reach Mow Cop,’ Hoskins wrote, ‘we enter the dreary little colliery town of Kidsgrove, destined, if ever a town was, to be passed through rapidly.’²⁴ It was only ‘once one is away from the debris of industry’, that Hoskins pronounced walking to be ‘the best way to enjoy’ rural England.²⁵

While urban Britain was best driven, Hoskins suggested that this was done for different reasons in different places. In the case of a ‘dreary little colliery town’ like Kidsgrove, this was because ‘small industrial towns are depressing spectacles: they have all the aridity and ugliness of the large cities without their titanic vitality and scale to redeem them’.²⁶ But while Kidsgrove, and its counterparts, were ‘dreary’ and ‘depressing’ enough to be sped through, large cities like Birmingham and Stoke-on-Trent were best experienced from the car because of their scale, which rendered them visual spectacles to be witnessed from and through the car windscreen. In direct contrast to his rendering of ‘ten square miles’ of rural middle England, ‘the Birmingham-Black Country mass’ was ‘about 270 square miles in area’. Rather than encouraging his readers to either avoid this ‘urban mass’ altogether, or leave their cars and explore it on foot, Hoskins directed motorists to take in the ‘superb general view of this industrial concentration from the main roads slightly to the west of it’. From their elevated viewpoint – which came close to creating their own aerial photograph of industrial urbanism – they were offered a visual spectacle through their car windscreen of

factory-chimneys and cooling-towers, gasometers and pylons, naked roads with trolley-bus wires everywhere, canals and railway-tracks, greyhound racecourses and gigantic cinemas; wide stretches of cindery waste-land, or a thin grass where the hawthorns bloom in May and June – the only touch of the natural world in the whole vast scene; plumes of steam rising all over the landscape, the pulsing sounds of industrial power coming across the dark waste; and the gaunt Victorian church-spires rising above the general level, or completely blackened towers receding into the smoky distance. This is the Black Country, well and truly named.²⁷

Drivers were also encouraged to visit Stoke-on-Trent and its ‘seven miles of concentrated ugliness and dirt’, whose ‘ugliness is so demonic that it is fascinating to look down upon … from the marginal hills’. From here was a view of

hundreds of bottle-shaped kilns, black with their own dirt of generations, massed in groups mostly on or near the hidden canal, with square miles of blackened streets of little brick houses, and chapels, churches, spires and towers, tall chimneys of iron and steel works, steam from innumerable railway lines that thread their way through the incredible tangle of junctions: as a spectacle it should never be missed. Whatever the time of day or night, winter or summer, it is worth seeing. The Potteries at night are a show-piece. But any time or day will do: each season has its own special value in this spectacle.²⁸

‘What impresses one about the whole spectacle is its satanic ugliness, but no less its terrific vitality,’ Hoskins concluded.²⁹ His rendering of these large industrial cities as terrible spectacles of what Matless terms ‘the industrial sublime’ made them into visual experiences best appreciated from behind (the safety of) the windscreen.³⁰

But this offering up of certain landscapes at the scale of visual spectacle was not solely limited to the urban. There was a hint at least that some parts of the rural landscape – what Hoskins dubbed ‘some of the loneliest moors’ – were landscape at a scale that demanded a different speed and means of motion. This comes through in another volume in the About Britain series – the eighth volume, to the East Midlands and the Peak – where Hoskins also wrote the introductory verbal portrait. Pointing to the radically different geology found within this region, Hoskins took his readers on a virtual tour of the bedrock found across this region. As he did, he at least hinted that different areas should be experienced at different speeds of motion. Thus the ‘wide clay vale’ to the east of Lincoln was ‘good solid farmland, satisfying to contemplate, better by leaning over a gate than from a moving car’.³¹ Once into the chalk Wolds, however, it seemed that he – and his readers – picked up the pace in a landscape that he admitted was ‘an acquired taste in scenery’. ‘Those who like the dramatic and colourful in landscapes, and nothing else, will find it dull,’ Hoskins warned, ‘but it is capable of showing some pleasant changes of detail to the observant eye,’ he reassured his readers, specifically this time from the moving motor car. Here Hoskins’ readers would discover a landscape:

Much of it, where the chalk is exposed, resembles the Chiltern country and the southern chalklands generally: those long delicate curves along the skyline, the huge fields with their pale pastel colours, the flattened ‘tumps’ of beech-trees at intervals on the highest ground, otherwise and an almost treeless landscape and one that looks quite empty of human life. One can travel by car for miles and see nobody in the fields, and hardly a single house in the biggest view.³²

Reaching the southern edge of the Wolds, however, his readers needed to leave their cars once again as ‘more trees appear, the views close in and become more intimate, the ground rather more tumbled and the streams more frequent’.³³

Rather than Hoskins being resolutely opposed to viewing landscape in motion, he differentiated between landscapes that were to be driven through, and those that were to be walked in. Although there was a broad rural–urban split to his thinking, it is also clear that he saw the possibility of exploring different rural landscapes at different speeds of motion, working with different understandings of scale and topography. Granted Hoskins was, as David Matless points out, more at home in a railway carriage on a branch-line than he was in a speeding motor car, but a striking passage of Hoskins’ view of the landscape through the carriage window shares much with other writers who saw the possibilities offered by the technology of the car windscreen.³⁴ Writing of seeing Rutland from the train, Hoskins noted how

[t]‌he railway has been absorbed into the landscape, and one can enjoy the consequent pleasure of trundling through Rutland in a stopping-train on a fine summer morning: the barley fields shaking in the wind, the slow sedgy streams with their willows shading meditative cattle … the warm brown roofs of the villages half buried in the trees, and the summer light flashing everywhere. True that the railway did not invent much of this beauty, but it gave us new vistas of it.³⁵

His sense of the picturesque possibilities of travel technologies is something that was more widely shared, and also extended to the motor car. For J.B. Priestly, there was the potential for a kind of transformation wrought through motoring at speed that could awaken hidden beauty. Writing in his introduction to The Beauty of Britain, Priestley defended driving through the British landscape, and specifically the potential of driving at speed, against his imagined critics. ‘I shall be told that the newer generations care nothing for the beauty of the countryside, that all they want is to go rushing about on motor-cycles or in fast cars,’ Priestley noted, before reassuring his readers that, ‘Speed is not one of my gods; rather one of my devils.’ However, this particular ‘devil’ – speed – was one that he argued must be given ‘its due’. As he went on to explain,

I believe that a swift motion across a countryside does not necessarily take away all appreciation of its charm. It depends on the nature of the country. With some types of landscape there is a definite gain simply because you are moving so swiftly across the face of the country. There is a certain kind of pleasant but dullish, rolling country, not very attractive to the walker or slow traveller, that becomes alive if you go quickly across it, for it is turned into a kind of sculptured landscape. As your car rushes along the rolling roads, it is as if you were passing a hand over a relief map. Here, obviously, there has been a gain, not a loss, and this is worth remembering. The newer generations, with their passion for speed, are probably far more sensitive than they are thought to be. Probably they are all enjoying aesthetic experiences that so far they have been unable to communicate to the rest of us. We must not be too pessimistic about young people if they prefer driving and gulping to walking and tasting.³⁶

In contrast to Nead’s claims that ‘speed did not suit the picturesque; the tempo of the modern pastoral was more leisurely and required seeing the landscape as a sequence of moving pictures … indistinct impressions that rendered the picturesque redundant’, it would seem that for at least some, speed created a new picturesque – what Brace suggests ‘might even constitute an entirely new aesthetic experience’.³⁷ Priestly saw speed offering the opportunity to either transform landscapes or enable them to be seen anew through the windscreen.

What that experience of driving at speed was like was something that James Hissey – writing in the early decades of the twentieth century – sought to convey. Although dismissive of the mere ‘hurrygraphs’ glimpsed by motorists who ‘rush at full speed from town to town, from hotel to hotel’, Hissey confessed that he could not resist the temptation to speed on one memorable occasion.³⁸ In Untravelled England, he wrote of throwing caution to the wind and speeding through the Cotswolds. ‘One horizon succeeded the other in rapid, bewildering succession,’ Hissey recalled. ‘Our eyes were on the distance – only that could we discern clearly – the wonderful distance that ceaselessly came rushing to us. For a time a strange illusion took place; it was as though the car were standing still, and the country it was that went hurtling past.’ This was presumably the experience of the ‘hurrygraph’ that Hissey was so critical of, and yet he retained fond memories of this journey, informing his readers that, ‘A rush at full speed in a motor car over a lonely road, and through a deserted country, wide and open, is an experience to be ever afterwards remembered.’³⁹

Although Nead describes this journey as ‘more akin to the phantom ride’ and therefore in a sense removed from its topographical context, I would place it as an experience very much rooted in a more widely shared understanding of landscape.⁴⁰ Hissey’s memorable journey ‘through a deserted country, wide and open’ – or what he described elsewhere as ‘the wild, sweeping wolds’ – points to the way that he drew upon, and replicated, more widely shared distinctions between the upland Cotswolds and the valleys.⁴¹ The former were landscapes that could be navigated at speed.⁴² As Hissey’s language of ‘wild’ Wolds and Hoskins’ rendering of ‘loneliest moors’ suggests, upland landscapes were imagined at a scale and character that invited different speeds and means of motion. When Christopher Trent differentiated between ‘most of England’ that was ‘like a garden laid out on a vast scale’ and the ‘relatively small parts of the north and west’ that ‘remain as nature designed them’, he suggested that both should be accessed by different kinds of roads driven at different kinds of speed. In the case of ‘garden’ England in the south and east,

the influence of man on nature over many hundreds of years and the consequent density of the rural population by comparison with many other countries, has resulted in many thousands of byways being available for motorists with adequate surfaces and modest gradients. Byways link farmhouse with farmhouse and village with village (and there are nearly 20,000 villages in England). They are the perfect medium for exploring the English countryside.

While generally critical that ‘the vast majority of motorists know only the high roads’, Trent did admit that some of these roads, ‘especially in the west country, are beautiful and throw a vivid light on the nature of the countryside’.⁴³

Rather than seeing a monolithic application of ‘moral geographies’ of speed to British landscapes in the mid-twentieth century, there is a need to nuance our thinking and recognise that contemporaries worked with – and constructed – micro-geographies of scale and topography that informed their decisions about how, and at what speed, to access rural and urban space. Even someone like Hoskins, who clearly expressed his preference for slowly walking the landscape, saw some urban and rural landscapes as best experienced from behind the car windscreen. In particular notions of scale were critical here. Those areas in the Lincolnshire Wolds that were to be driven through – at some speed – were areas, as Hoskins was himself well aware and so was quick to point out to his readers, which had been transformed at the time of the eighteenth-century enclosures into large fields, some of which were now almost on an American scale, reaching ‘an immense size, sometimes sweeping out of sight over a distant horizon, big enough to impress even an American farmer’.⁴⁴

But it was not simply that Hoskins acknowledged scale. The guidebooks he wrote a ‘verbal portrait’ for were influential in creating a new sense of scale. Alongside Hoskins’ verbal portrait, these guides mapped out day journeys ‘by car or coach’ of anything between 84 (Stafford–Stoke–Buxton–Uttoxeter–Stafford) and 119 miles (Oxford–Aylesbury–Bedford–Warwick).⁴⁵ Hoskins himself had undertaken three of the routes offered up in the About Britain guides in July 1950 as he checked those proposed on the ground and sketched out the captions to accompany the strip maps that enabled motorists to experience Britain at scale.⁴⁶ But more significantly, these guides also included aerial photographs that sought to stretch the ‘distant horizon’ for the reader and so offer up visualisations – and imaginings – of the landscape at a different scale.

The insertion of aerial photographs into these texts was something that the CEO of the Festival Tours, Colonel Penrose Angwin, had suggested early on in the planning of these ‘new’ kind of guides. ‘Some oblique air-photographs are likely to be particularly desirable,’ he argued, in helping to convey the ‘characteristics and functions of the Area’ at the regional scale.⁴⁷ The use of aerial photographs in the guides meshed with their wider use across the Festival of Britain in creating what Harriet Atkinson describes as a ‘double vision’ – ‘both vertical and horizontal’ – that ‘offered readers, or visitors, the opportunity simultaneously to experience Britain from a single point on the ground and also from an authoritative, elevated point above it, as powerful and all seeing’.⁴⁸ The inclusion of aerial photographs was a dramatic intervention into topographical literature. Comparing Hoskins’ 1939 Batsford guide to Midland England with his 1951 About Britain guides to the Chilterns to Black Country and East Midlands and the Peak, the visual shift is striking. Rather than seeing the landscape at the scale of the individual building or field as the earlier guide did, aerial photography opened up the landscape not simply from a radically different viewpoint, but also at a markedly different scale – a scale to be flown over, and driven through.⁴⁹