Preface

Summary

This collection of essays began as a direct consequence of the work that I undertook on behalf of the Institute of British Geographers to prepare a history of its first fifty years. It was suggested to me that, while I was delving into the development of the subject in 1933, the year in which the Institute was founded, and the years immediately before then, I might also attempt an assessment of the position of geography in Britain between the wars. The idea appealed to me for I had been taught in Oxford by J. N. L. Baker who had always impressed upon me and my fellow students the importance of an appreciation of the history of geography. I subscribed wholly to the view that he had expressed in a lecture on ‘Geography and its history’ given to Section E (Geography) of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1955 (Baker 1955:198):

The history of geography is long and honourable. No geographer need apologise for it or be ashamed of it … it is only when the geography of our day is seen against the background of its history that its present position can be appreciated and its future prospects assessed.