Options for shaping the new landscape

摘要

Arcadia Revisited is based on a conference at the Royal Geo- graphical Society (AJ 25.7.96) but in appearance - an elegant design with many well-chosen illustrations and almost too much white space - it is far from the low-key collection of transcripts that fact might imply. With the 530ha Norbury Park in Surrey as its focus (whose present character is largely eighteenth-century in origin), the conference sought to redress the 'absence of an acceptable contemporary landscape aesthetic' to guide the park's future - and, in so doing, to touch on more general issues of land management in the UK. Its participants, whose re-worked papers are presented here, were from diverse disciplines: 'a band of not greatly connected mercenaries, pragmatists, prophets, even salesmen and saleswomen', as Richard Hoggart puts it in his introduction.