Writing during the aftermath of World War II, W.G. Hoskins lamented the despoilation of England's landscape by wartime airfields and the decline of country estates in his Making of the English Landscape (1955). Saturated with pastoral poetry and eighteenth-century travellers’ accounts, Hoskins’ nostalgic preoccupation was not with ‘the foul and joyless towns’ he identified as the source of contemporary barbarism, but with the evolution of the landscape from the Norman conquest. Geoffrey Tyack's The Making of Our Urban Landscape (2021) quietly rejects Hoskins’ hatred of the ‘the acid fingers of the 20th century’. Tyack unapologetically emphasizes that developments over the past two centuries ‘did most to shape the urban landscapes we experience in our daily lives’ (p. vi). Appropriately for a work addressing urban landscapes, Tyack explicitly incorporates the contribution of infrastructural developments to changing cityscapes, and highlights incidents where the current appearance of ancient monuments speaks more of that very twentieth-century taste for the picturesque that Hoskins embodied, rather than any architectural ‘authenticity’.
There are strong parallels in this homage to Hoskins, but Tyack's tone is neither polemical nor patriotically nostalgic. Rather, he warmly introduces Britain – not exclusively England – to new generations of urban historians in an accessible manner. He immediately signals both his debt to Hoskins and his inclusive agenda through the personal pronoun in his title that expresses a desire to expand urban and landscape history to include studies of the environment more broadly, inflected by his extensive knowledge of architectural traditions. Like Hoskins’ much-reprinted work, Tyack's volume is inexpensively but lavishly illustrated with monochrome plates, maps and plans: at £25 it is good value. Tyack organizes his substantial material – like Hoskins – as a straightforward chronological survey. Divided into short chapters, he traces the evolution of the relationship between the land and human architectural intervention upon it, augmented with recent archaeological discoveries, and urban geography. Like the late Mark Girouard's The English Town (1990), it blends art and culture with economics and urban planning; it updates and synthesizes classics as Spiro Kostof's The City Shaped (1999), and the fine-grained archival research of Peter Borsay's The English Urban Renaissance (1989). Indeed, synthesis is one of Tyack's fortes. These venerable antecedents speak of ambition, and Tyack's book is both broad in compass and minutely observed. His urban narrative starts with the Romans, and while considering major cities like London, Edinburgh, Oxford and York, attention is equally paid to smaller towns and communities with examples extending from Aberdeen to Cornwall. Hoskins’ assertion ‘mediaeval man was no lover of symmetry’ is quietly superseded through a discussion of medieval planned towns. There are occasional gems such as Elgin's parish church steeple as homage to the Athenian Choragic Monument to Lysicrates (p. 149) and a Lavenham shop, heavily restored in the twentieth century underlining that nostalgia for an imagined past (p. 57). This is balanced by mischievous delineations of seventeenth-century Lake District Hawkshead as ‘a place of excellent manufacture’ (p. 93); eighteenth-century Cheltenham as a place of resort for ‘East India plunderers, West India floggers, English tax-gorgers, together with gluttons, drunkards, and debauchees of all descriptions’ in the opinion of William Cobbett (p. 157); and a photograph of Halifax's spectacular Piece Hall resembling nothing less than Madrid's Plaza Mayor. Indeed, Tyack's focus does not exclude the quotidian and utilitarian: much attention is paid to modest schemes and the houses of poorer people without confining them to that derogatory category, ‘vernacular’. This is architectural history untroubled by arcane debates surrounding authorship and architectural style, having more in common with Elizabeth McKellar's The Birth of Modern London (1999). So, for instance, Tyack's description of seventeenth-century houses on Laurence Pountney Hill in the City of London avoids earlier ascriptions of them to a perceived tasteless ‘artisan mannerism’.
The book's easily navigable format includes text boxes highlighting case-studies as potential discussion points for general readers and students alike. There is a useful glossary of historical and architectural terms, and an excellent further reading list encompassing classics such as John Summerson's Georgian London (1955) and Otto Saumarez Smith's excellent Boom Cities (2020). The editorial decision to replace footnotes with endnotes aids the narrative flow of Tyack's lucid prose, articulating his quiet authority borne of great scholarship lightly worn. The reader is engaged by surprising trivia such as the etymology of Baldock deriving from the Knights’ Templars corruption of ‘Baghdad’ (p. 25). Parallels are drawn between nineteenth-century industrial Britain and twenty-first-century Bangladesh and China (p. 175). Refreshingly, Tyack includes places of worship of non-conformists, Roman Catholics, Jews and Muslims; and he discusses Spitalfields – settled by Huguenots in the late seventeenth century, and Bangladeshis from the mid-twentieth century. Future editions could extend to other minority interventions as perhaps the late twentieth-century redevelopment by the LGBTQ+ communities of spaces as Manchester's Canal Street.
The simplicity of Tyack's approach is both its strength and weakness. It pitches itself against, rather than directly engages with the historiography. Many works posit periods of intensive rebuilding activity, but Tyack's argument – that most urban development is piecemeal, pragmatic and mutable – is not foregrounded but embedded in the narrative. So, for instance, his account of the 1540–660 rebuilding re-centres Colin Platt's The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England (1994) by emphasizing continuous development, repurposing and change, responding to economic forces, political events, fashion, taste and the gradual infilling of burgage plots. Yet this quiet assertion of the tradition of architectural reuse highlights one missed opportunity. Tyack is writing amid global climate change; engagement with recent work such as Barnabas Calder's Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency (2021) – that urges the reuse and retention of existing buildings to generate net zero carbon architecture – would have sharpened Tyack's timely relevance to pressing concerns of architects and historians of the built environment.
None of this should detract from the important contribution of the book, however. Tyack constantly refers to what exists on the ground, making it a supplementary guide to historic towns and cities. As the post-pandemic interest in localities develops, and ‘staycationing’ becomes increasingly popular, this will appeal to the general reader whose interest in local history will be greatly enriched. Additionally, it reflects Tyack's long experience of teaching and disseminating architectural history: he has done a considerable service for teachers of architectural history related to place, and this should be an important addition to students’ bibliographies across several disciplines. In terms of impact, therefore, it is admirable and makes urban and landscape history joyously accessible. But finally, Tyack's modest introduction overlooks its real academic merit as an updating of, homage and riposte to Hoskins’ seminal work; this should take its place as an introduction to landscape studies for the twenty-first century.
