Gardening Legislators: Gardening, Ordinariness and History - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 61

land movement. But rather than admitting that the sheds they have seen might be
'make do', ramshackle, not especially aesthetically interesting, plain ordinary, or
perhaps even shabby and run-down - they are theorised, in a bid to view the working-
class as potential revolutionary fodder, as art or symbols of political resistance.
Crouch and Ward (1999), unlike liberal humanist writers, are at least prepared to
allow the existence of mundane aspects of working-class culture into their analysis,
but once faced with the mundane, they are unable to find anything interesting and
intriguing about ordinary aspects of gardening culture.
Explorations of the land and landscape can be found in the work of cultural
geographer and historian David Matless. Landscape and Englishness (1998) explores
versions of English landscape from 1918 to 1950 using a vast array of materials -
from British press cartoons, advertising, literature, ordinance survey maps and social
commentary - to German motorway construction maps and Danish health regimes.
Matless is interested in the tensions which exist between landscape and culture:
he examines the social and aesthetic values ascribed to the English landscape; the
'right' and 'wrong' reasons to look at, make visits to, engage with or utilise aspects
of the English countryside; and at the 'character' of both place and the social conduct
of the people who choose to inhabit it. For Matless, landscape is a site of competing
claims and values: if it is a site of value in terms of conservation, residence and
commerce, it is also a site of acrimony against authorities, developers and unsightly
buildings. In this way, he traces the competing agencies who make discriminating
cultural judgements about what and who has the right to belong in the landscape.
Matless traces the emergence of the preservationist landscape movement in
Britain in the early part of the twentieth century. Planning documents, newspaper
cartoons, letters and diaries are just some of the materials Matless uses to show
that a notion of landscape and Englishness came from a 'crisis of landscape and
politics' in the 1920s (1998, 14). Matless argues that a modernist sense of order
and design informed the 1920s vision of country, city and suburb. He develops
these themes around landscape and citizenship, arguing that particular manners
of conduct in the countryside were established as the 'right' basis of citizenship
- while others, focused, for example, around litter and unruly behaviour - indicated
what he calls, 'anti-citizenship, an immoral geography of leisure' (ibid.). Country
leisure was embraced by the largely middle-class preservationist movement, yet as
Matless shows, the leisure activities of some were regarded as forms of cultural
infringement. Landscape citizenship defined its meaning against the notion of the
'anti-citizen'. Usually from the 'vulgar' working-class, Matless argues that the anti-
citizen is often labelled 'Cockney', portrayed as a, 'cultural grotesque, signifying
a commercial rather than industrial working-class whose leisure is centred around
consumption and display' (1998, 68). And there were specific kinds of activities
associated with the cultural trespass of working-class anti-citizens: the deposit of
litter, noise pollution, disturbing local flora and unruly bathing and dancing. This
kind of inappropriate conduct was often linked to a lack of aesthetic discernment;
the working-class were conceived as people who did not know how to look at or see
the countryside. As one preservationist remarked, 'man has to go through a vigorous
training before he can see the country at all' (Matless 1998, 67).