Landscape associates people and place … landscape is not a mere visible surface, static composition, or passive backdrop to human theatre … Landscape connotes a sense of the purposefully shaped, the sensual and aesthetic, the embeddedness in culture … Landscape has meaning. 1 People have always attached meaning to the world around them, and these meanings have changed over time. In European societies from the later eighteenth century, the surface of the earth was increasingly seen not only in material terms, as an economic resource to be exploited, but also as 'landscape', as an object of aesthetic and moral value. Landscape was understood to incorporate human engagement with the physical environment over time. Although areas of 'wilderness' still existed, landscape was generally seen not as 'natural', but as something created in dialogue with men and women. In the words of John Stilgoe , Once in a while landscape is new, fresh, almost virginal. South Georgia, the Falkland Islands, Kerguelen, the Crozets, Macquarie, Elephant, Pitcairn, and other islands … proved bereft of humans when Europeans discovered them. Unknown to humankind, not just Europeans, they existed only as wilderness when found … But typically landscape is mature, often hoary, sometimes ancient, part prehistoric. Wilderness appears timeless. 2

Historical pageants were important sites of popular engagement with the past in twentieth-century Britain. They took place in many places and sometimes on a large scale, in settings ranging from small villages to industrial cities. They were staged by schools, churches, professional organisations, women's groups and political parties, among others. This article draws on contemporary studies of heritage and performance to explore the blend of history, myth and fiction that characterised pageants, and the ways in which they both shaped and reflected the self-image of local communities. Pageants were important channels of popular education as well as entertainment and, although they are sometimes seen as backward-looking and conservative spectacles, this article argues that pageants could be an effective means of enlisting the past in the service of the present and future.

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In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, anxieties developed about the impact of advertisements on the English landscape. Large posters and hoardings in rural areas were increasingly seen as having a damaging effect on the scenic beauties of the country, and a campaign to have their use restricted was started up in the 1890s. This article focuses on that campaign, and on the activities and ideology of the organisation (the National Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising — SCAPA) which spearheaded it. In doing so, it seeks to engage with the wider historiographical debate about the nature of ‘Englishness’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through an examination of the agenda of SCAPA and other preservationist bodies (such as the National Trust), it suggests that it is misleading to conclude that English culture in this period was pervaded by backward-looking ‘rural-nostalgic’ obsessions. However, it also emphasises that English national identity was nonetheless to an important extent related to ideas about land and landscape. It does not do to write off phenomena like opposition to the ‘disfigurement’ of picturesque English scenery as insignificant, the concern only of a very marginal section of elite culture.

Paul Rich has written that “nationalism in English society has not been a subject that has especially interested historians until comparatively recently.” This judgment could equally be applied to what Gerald Newman has described as that “mere primitive feeling of loyalty,” the less complex and far more ancient phenomenon of patriotism, which, for the purposes of the present article, will simply be taken to mean “love of country.” In the last few decades, the attention given to patriotism by British historians has grown rapidly. However, historians of party politics, particularly those interested in the late nineteenth century, have proved something of an exception to this rule. Although few would dispute Lord Blake's view that “‘patriotism’ … has usually been a valuable weapon in the Conservative armoury,” even work done on the tory party has avoided serious discussion of the subject. Most writers, particularly those of textbook studies, have found it difficult to move beyond rather general allusions to the Conservatives' transformation intotheparty of patriotism in the 1870s, with “Disraeli's speeches of 1872–3” and his “performance at Berlin in 1878” establishing once and for all “the image of the Conservative party as the champion of national honour.” This argument, of course, owes much to Hugh Cunningham's importantHistory Workshoparticle of 1981, which put forward the view that patriotism—originally an antistate and libertarian “creed of opposition”—had by the late nineteenth century passed from the hands of the radicals into the possession of the political Right.