Sweeping view of land

The English Landscape In The Twentieth Century by Trevor Rowley (Hambledon Continuum, £25) - Trevor Rowley is an expert on the Shropshire landscape - the subject of a book of his in the early 1970s - but this latest work takes a more sweeping view across the English countryside.

Nevertheless, Shropshire crops up throughout the book, and Telford gets several pages in the chapter on new towns.

Its town park has, according to Rowley, with a fair measure of success combined the traditional municipal playground and landscaped garden with large areas of informal country park.

While apart from the cores of the traditional settlements Telford’s landscape incorporates relatively little of what went before, the emphasis on open space and a vigorous tree planting campaign to create a “Forest City” at least incorporates the ethos of the Shropshire landscape within which Telford lies, he says.

He describes Shrewsbury’s 1960s market hall as a “dysfunctional concrete shell” which replaced a perfectly respectable Victorian building.

A steady stream of the county town’s unique, historic half-timbered buildings were casualties to the urge for change for change’s sake, he says, although he comments that the new 1960s Shirehall is generally regarded as a successful example of modern architecture.

Rowley, who lives in Oxfordshire, shines the spotlight on various factors which have shaped the landscape, including the rise of the car, the war, the development of airfields, and the post-war period which saw the demise of many country mansions.

Surprisingly, considering that the countryside is a colourful place, all the pictures in the book are published in black and white, presumably to keep down the cost.

Rating ***
Review by Toby Neal