Abstract

landscapes, Vol. 15 No. 1, June, 2014, 82–94 The New English Landscape.By JASON ORTON and KEN WORPOLE 2013. Field Station, 88 pages, 22 colour plates. ISBN 9780992666903, £15 pbk. Available from http:// thenewenglishlandscape.wordpress.com/. This is a neat book: neat in the sense of cool, thoughtful, engaging, original; but neat also in design and execution. With only 18,000 words and 22 colour photographs it is a short book, but it packs a punch, delivering a critical engagement with the changing landscape, and changing perceptions of landscape since the Second World War. Its scope, however, is not the ‘English landscape’ as such, but is rather more focused, on the southern half of East Anglia, and especially Essex and in particular its coastal region where land meets sea, where one might reasonably expect to encounter an ‘other world’. One is not disappointed. This region is not far from London, but might as well be a thousand miles, if not a thousand years, distant. The photographs within this volume, by renowned landscape photographer Jason Orton, capture the essential character of this strange landscape, its ‘sense of place’, and express with clarity and eloquence what renders it distinct, while the images combined with the