Unlocking landscapes

Running from 2020-22, the Unlocking Landscapes network has been bringing people together to reflect on how arts and humanities research can develop valuable insights for landscape policy and practice. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and run in collaboration with Dr Clare Hickman of Newcastle University, the programme has involved a wide range of participants, from academics and practitioners to artists and policy makers. Read more here.

Although we had to postpone many of the face-to-face activities we had planned for 2020 and 2021, we initially invited people to share their experiences of ‘landscape’. Details of the call can be found here and we have showcased some of the excellent submissions below. We have also since developed a dedicated network website where you can find out about more of the network activities: https://www.unlockinglandscapes.uk/about

A place to breathe

Danl Tetley recalls weekend escapes to the Moors and ocean whilst juggling work, study and family life, places where creativity blossomed. Read more ⇨

[Absence] II

Andy Harrod reflects on a recent encounter with a moorland landscape, recalling how layers of memory emerged.
Read more ⇨

Other collections

In addition to our Unlocking Landscapes contributions, we are also keen to share links to some of the fantastic writing collections that we have come across in recent months.

At the start of the Covid-19 lockdown in the UK, the National Trust invited people to share their 'First Day of Spring' through the National Trust Nature Diaries initiative. This was a partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Land Lines research project.

The Land Lines project, also funded by the AHRC, ran from 2017-2019 as a partnership between the Universities of Leeds, St Andrews and Sussex. It aimed to encourage fresh readings of some of the classic British nature writing texts, and has continued to publish a Land Lines Blog since, inviting contributions from anyone who enjoys reading and writing about nature.

Based at the Universities of Exeter and Lancaster, the AHRC-funded ‘Places of Poetry’ project might also be of interest; running from May to October 2019, it invited (and then mapped) poems from all around the country, celebrating the diversity, heritage and personalities of place.

A fantastic initiative, the Willowherb Review, has been running for a couple of years now, providing a digital platform to celebrate nature writing by emerging and established writers of colour. Each of their issues are published online, covering a range of themes, including ‘Liminality’, ‘Habitation’, ‘Embers’, and the ‘People’s Forest’.

A long-standing initiative, Common Ground, was founded in 1983 to unearth the connections that communities have with the landscapes around them, seeking imaginative ways to engage people with their local environments. Amongst their many projects are: ‘Ground Work’ (a collection of writing on new and enduring cultural landscapes in Britain) and Arcadia (a poetic film about our contradictory relationships with land).

At a different scale, we are also enjoying hearing about smaller landscape writing projects, like Red River Poetry; an AHRC-funded project exploring the potential for creative writing to transform people’s relationships to the polluted, post-industrial Red River in West Cornwall.

If you are aware of any other collections that you think we could raise awareness of in this page, do get in touch – it would be great to keep developing this as a useful resource through the network!