Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 569–595588

makes no appearance. Neither do other cosmopolitan identities—Americanized, immigrant, multi-

cultural—though there is a chapter on non-Christian religious buildings.

Some chapters strain to find geographical significance in subjects where it is not necessarily so

central. Danny Dorling’s on inequality concludes, uncontroversially, that ‘the twentieth century in

Britain saw enormous social progress in absolute terms, but remarkable social rigidity in the basic

structures of society’, without convincing me that a geographical perspective had added much. Ron

Johnston and colleagues survey electoral geography and decide that the size and shape of parliamentary

constituencies didn’t matter a great deal. Perhaps they ought to consider the much trickier question of the

relationship between MPs, party activists and voters, a subject opened up by Jon Lawrence’s Speaking

for the People (Cambridge University Press, 1998), which would return us to the waning significance of

local identities.

It is difficult to make collections of essays from different hands cohere. This volume is above the (low)

average in this respect. But it would have made its case for ‘geographies of British modernity’ more

persuasive, to this historian at least, if it had been more searching in its determination of what is

‘geographical’ in British modernity. Had it been ready and willing to say what is geographical and what

isn’t, it might have been able to show more clearly what historical geographers can do that historians

don’t, in ways that might influence historians’ practice. I can see, however, that marking such limits

might not be so appealing to historical geographers making the case for history to geographers.

Peter Mandler

Gonville and Caius College

Cambridge

UK

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2004.07.013

Ron Johnston and Michael Williamss, A Century of British Geography, Oxford University Press,

Oxford, 2003, xviiC674 pages, £55 hardback.

I’ve now lived outside of Britain for a quarter of the century that is reviewed in the twenty (sometimes

very) substantial essays that constitute this volume, a celebration (mainly) of a hundred years of British

geographical achievements. I am one of the ‘emigres’, to use David Rhind’s term. As a result, a lot of the

material felt familiar. Names that I had not thought about in years flooded back—Woolridge and East,

Dudley Stamp, Domesday geography, Barlow Commission, Town and Country Planning Act. It is like

those times when I am back in Britain and bump into people who I’ve not seen since I left. I am glad to

re-meet, to catch up, but afterwards I sometimes think too much has happened to allow for a satisfying

reconnection. It is the same with this book. There are some excellent essays—in fact, nearly all the

chapters are good, and which is remarkable for a volume of this nature and ambition—but I am also

sometimes left wondering why, say, the Barlow commission, or the Town and Country Planning Act,

once occupied such a prominent place in my thinking.

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 569–595 589

The volume is one of a series of centenary disciplinary celebrations published by the British

Academy to mark its own centenary. As Johnston and Williams note in their Introduction, geography

was a late entrant with Clifford Darby the first Fellow elected only in 1967. Currently, 18 Fellows of

the British Academy are geographers, including the two editors of this book, as well as several of its

contributors.

As showcase for the discipline, the volume works well. The writing is often very good—crisp, fluid,

and lucid. Further, because many of the essays are substantial (fifty pages or more in some cases),

arguments are well developed, and rich empirical detail provided. In fact, where the volume sometimes

falters is in its last section—‘Geography moving forwards’—where the essays are shorter than earlier

ones, and therefore less developed and fleshed out.

The previous five sections are divided into discussions of the discipline’s history, the environment,

place, space, and geographical techniques. Ron Johnston’s ‘The institutionalisation of geography as

an academic discipline’ in the first section is excellent, and I learnt much from this well crafted,

meticulously researched, and knowledgeable chapter. It is about the ninety percent of the discipline

that is not seen, but critical to the ten percent that is: the discipline’s institutional infrastructure, and

which includes schools, university departments, publishers, and learned societies like the British

Academy. When institutional support is there, as it was through the RGS at the turn of the twentieth

century, the discipline thrives, but when muted, as it was during the 1950 and 1960s when the ‘new

universities’ were founded, geography is shut out. While emphasising wider institutional

undergirding, Johnston also argues that important to disciplinary success are galvanising, high

profile individuals. It is not clear, though, how the latter squares with the former. Are such

individuals born to greatness or have greatness thrust upon them by the institutional structure in

which they are embedded?

Michael William’s chapter ‘The creation of humanised landscapes’ was my favourite in the section on

‘Environment.’ Nicely written, it reviews historical geography’s varied attempts to integrate nature and

culture. Slightly oddly, though, it begins with Carl Sauer. But then quickly moves to in effect Sauer’s

British counterpart, Clifford Darby. Indeed, in many ways Darby is the central character in this volume,

appearing, and reappearing in a number of the book’s chapters. Dudley Stamp and Halford Mackinder,

are important, but Darby is the abiding presence.

Darby’s wartime activities are the focus of Hugh Clout’s compelling chapter, ‘Place description,

regional geography and area studies: the chorographic inheritance.’ He concentrates on the Naval

Intelligence Handbooks produced during the Second World War, and in particular the role of Darby who

became the key editor for producing the series at Cambridge (there was also a second centre at Oxford).

The Handbooks were designed to provide regional geographical information to facilitate both military

operations and later longer-term objectives once peace was secured. Clout argues that while the regional

tradition in which these Handbooks were written could result in tedious, desiccated descriptions, it could

produce some wonderful, vivid, and provocative ones too. For this reason, Clout regrets British

geography’s move over the last forty years to ‘abandon the practice of area studies and, in so doing, [to]

reject part of its birthright’ (p. 267).

One of the forces that led to that abandonment and rejection was the rise of social theory. In a deft

juxtaposition, the editors have paired with Clout’s essay an equally compelling chapter by perhaps the

two most well known purveyors of social theory in British geography, Doreen Massey and Nigel Thrift,

‘The passion of place.’ It is one of my favourites. It consists of both a review of how place has been

treated theoretically in the past, as well as offering a set of numbered precepts for thinking about it in the

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 569–595590

future (and based on Thrift’s recent ruminations about non-representational theory). Entirely theoretical,

it manages to live up to what I initially imagined was an ironic title, but is not. It is an essay passionate

about place.

The section on space that follows was a slight let down. Peter Taylor’s chapter, ‘Global, national,

local’ was the most formulaic of all the chapters in the volume. In contrast, Ron Johnston’s ‘Order in

space: geography a discipline in distance’ was much better, offering a substantial review and analysis of

British spatial science. Lacking in his account, however, were the intricate multiple institutional and

personal histories that Johnston was so good at revealing and putting to interpretive use in his earlier

chapter.

In any case, space was well dealt with in the fifth section about ‘Geography in action,’ that included

reviews of cartography, GIS, and spatial modelling techniques. I especially liked ‘Geography displayed:

maps and mapping’ by Roger Kain and Catherine Delano-Smith. Truth be told, I groaned silently before

I began the chapter given that it is sixty pages long, and my most embarrassing experiences as a

geographer are intimately connected with drawing maps. But the essay was lively, beautifully illustrated,

crammed with interesting facts and information, theoretically informed, and most important of all, it did

not require me to put ink to mylar.

A Century of British Geography is a finely produced, and finely written volume. Whether other

Fellows from the British Academy will read it to appreciate the contributions of the last hundred years of

geography is unclear. But they should, and if they do, they will.

Trevor Barnes

Department of Geography

University of British Columbia

Canada

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2004.07.014

John Hassan, The Seaside, Health and the Environment in England and Wales since 1800, Ashgate,

Aldershot, 2003, xiiiC296 pages, £47.50 hardback.

John Hassan’s The Seaside, Health and the Environment in England and Wales Since 1800 is the latest

in a series of texts to pay special attention to the seaside, tourism, and landscapes of leisure in recent

years. Hassan regularly draws upon Walton’s The British Seaside (Manchester University Press, 2000),

Lofgren’s On Holiday (University of California Press, 1999), Matless’s Landscape and Englishness

(Reaktion Books, 1998), and Shaw and William’s The Rise and Fall of British Coastal Resorts (Cassell,

1997) and their varied reflections upon modern humanity’s interest in the coastal environment to

illustrate his argument. Yet he also critiques the literature, stating that the ‘implications posed by mass

tourism for the integrity of the natural amenities and wonders of the coast’ (p. 7) are rarely a central

concern in seaside histories. Hassan also claims that whilst geographers have considered the

environmental impacts of coastal tourism and others have looked at pollution as a cultural construct, few