Regional Surveys and Local Knowledges: The Geographical Imagination in Britain, 1918-39Author(s): David MatlessSource: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, Vol. 17, No. 4 (1992),pp. 464-480Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute ofBritish Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/622711 .Accessed: 04/08/2011 06:15

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464

Regional surveys and local knowledges: the

geographical imagination in Britain, 1918-39

DAVID MATLESS

Departmental Demonstrator, School of Geography, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3 TB

Revised MS received 2 7 April, 1992

ABSTRACT This essay considers the 'geographical imagination' in inter-war Britain, focusing on the movement for regional survey inspired by Patrick Geddes. After arguing that this movement and period has been inadequately considered in most histories of geography, Geddes' Outlook Tower in Edinburgh is described to introduce the broader themes of 'outlook geography' with which the essay is concerned. The history and aims of regional survey are then explored, and the means used to present the survey are detailed. The particular kind of 'local knowledge' embodied by the survey and the kind of citizenship it was intended to promote are outlined. The essay concludes with some broader considerations of the role of geography as a social practice and the particular geographical imagination suggested by survey.

KEY WORDS: Region, Survey, Britain, Geography, Citizenship, Local knowledge

INTRODUCTION

Clifford Geertz wrote in 1983 that 'the shapes of

knowledge are always ineluctably local, indivisible from their instruments and their encasements' (Geertz, 1983, p. 4); this certainly holds for the shapes of our knowledge as geographers. Geography, as much as any other discipline, has articulated what 'the local' means, and much has been written in recent times on the need to attend, or re-attend, to questions of locality and related difference (Cooke, 1990; Gregory, 1989). There should be more to this en- deavour though than a simple reassertion of attention to ontological difference; rather we must consider what the very notion of the local means, consider its discursive form as well as its supposed ontological content. This essay considers a particular Geographi- cal articulation of the local, one still perhaps accepted as a routine part of geographical knowledge, both within academic geography and without. I refer to the notion of locality and local knowledge produced in the movement for regional survey in Britain between 1918 and 1939.

In most histories of Geography this British inter- war period appears as a geographical Dark Age, part of a dull interlude between the aggressive period of exploration and empire and the conquest of a spatial

science. In this time geographers, it seems, collected information about regions, wrote it up in a boring manner, and infused their new or expanding geogra- phy departments with an empiricist spirit which

lingers still in the dust gathered on the books they bequeathed to the library. These are the books this essay considers, books skipped over in most disciplin- ary histories as mundane, routine, intellectually arid (for an exception see Stoddart, 1986). This essay argues that they were none of these things, but rather formed part of a lively geographical imagination which deserves our critical attention. This is not, as I

hope will become clear, a revivalist piece; it does

though seek to give this part of Geography's history its due.

The geographers featured here took their cue from Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), the Scottish biologist- sociologist - geographer - dramatist - educationalist whose work and influence is receiving increasing attention (Meller, 1990; Campbell, 1989; see also Boardman, 1978; Dickinson, 1976). Geddes, though too much the polymath to ever nail his colours solely to Geography, had a wide and key influence on British Geography in the first half of this century. Geddes had agitated for regional survey and

planning from the 1890s, often in collaboration with

geographers such as Herbertson and Fleure; his

Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr. N.S. 17: 464-480 (1992) ISSN: 0020-2754 Printed in Great Britain

Regional surveys and local knowledges

influence within academic Geography though is perhaps most significant after 1918, when geogra- phers played an increasingly active role in the growing movements for regional survey and town and country planning. It is on this period that this essay focuses, although reference will be made to earlier work where appropriate. The essay covers notions of regional survey, local knowledge and local citizenship. We begin though with an establishment which will serve to introduce all of these themes, Geddes' 'Outlook Tower'.

THE OUTLOOK TOWER: SIGHT, SYNOPSIS, SYNTHESIS

Patrick Geddes regarded regional survey not as a mundane and dull thing but as a tool for a new age:

a new age, a new enthusiasm, a new enlightenment are already dawning ... Regional Survey and its applications - Rural Development, Town Planning, City Design - these are destined to become master-thoughts and practical ambitions for the opening generation (Geddes, 1915, p. 399).1

Geddes' vision of the region and its future was embodied in his Outlook Tower, established in 1892 on Castle Hill in Edinburgh. This centre for study and survey expressed in built form Geddes' whole philosophy. The following account is cobbled from Geddes' description in Cities in Evolution (Geddes, 1915, pp. 321-326) and Philip Boardman's account of Geddes' 1906 guide to the tower (Boardman, 1978, pp. 137-145). The Outlook Tower articulated three of the central themes of Geddes' regional vision; sight, synopsis and synthesis. And it was helped in doing this by the simple fact of its standing on a hill.

The tower had five storeys, constituting what Geddes termed 'an Index-Museum to the World'. The ground floor was allocated to 'the oriental civilisations and to the general study of Man' (Geddes, 1915, p. 325). Proceeding upwards the visitor would encounter floor-by-floor Europe, the English-speaking world, Scotland and Edinburgh. At the top of the tower, in the small hollow dome of the turret, was a camera obscura. From the early nine- teenth century the camera attracted tourists, and Geddes retained it on taking over the tower. For him it was a device to nurture a particular form of sight. David Stoddart rates Geddes' camera as a significant instrument in the history of geography: 'attracting scholars as diverse as Herbertson and Reclus, [it] came to symbolize a form of observation and a definition of

subject matter which has governed field studies since that time' (Stoddart, 1986, p. 144). Stoddart's use of the term 'definition' is appropriate. Geddes valued the camera specifically for its aesthetic definition of the scene. Boardman recalls a group visit to the camera:

We form a circle around ... a white table-top ... The Professor manipulates a lever, and there flashes on the round white surface a moving picture of Edinburgh Castle. People are walking along the Esplanade, trees are blowing in the wind, but even more striking are the sharp contrasts in colour; ... the whole panorama ... passes in review on the table-top ..., magically different ... The most ordinary tenement house is revealed as a composition of lights and shadows (Boardman, 1978, p. 139).

Geddes argued that the camera produced a directness of vision unobtainable outdoors:

Your eyes are first made more sensitive to light by the darkness of the room. Then the mirror picks up only the light-rays reflected directly from the objects without the cross-reflections which confuse our vision in broad daylight. The result is that here you see everything in its true colours with fresh eyes (quoted in Boardman, 1978, p. 140, my emphasis).

The camera obscura finds the truth in the object and conjures an innocence of vision in the fresh-eyed subject, who views a moving image possessed of the clarity of the most naturalistic photography, a clarity greater than any cinematic film would provide in 1906, when the passage just quoted was written. The observer is also endowed with a funny, potentially voyeuristic kind of power over the object, deriving from both the nature of the image and its place in the dome. The people outside are unaware of their performance on the table-top. In 1927 the travel writer H. V. Morton would seize upon this power in describing the camera obscura on Clifton Downs in Bristol as 'the eye of the hill', a 'mysterious Merlin's table' showing strolling people 'so deliciously unconscious that the hill has its eye on them'. Morton wrote that 'The charm of looking into this reflection of life is the illusion it imparts of omnipotence': 'Why has no writer of detective stories used the camera obscura? The eye of the hill lends itself to treatment' (Morton, 1944, pp. 157-60).

Outside from the camera obscura, encircling the Outlook Tower eighty feet above the ground, lay the panoramic gallery: 'Edinburgh and its surrounding region lie spread out before us to every point of the compass' (Boardman, 1978, p. 139). While the camera

465

conjured a particular kind of sight, the gallery expressed Geddes' call for 'synoptic' vision. This was for Geddes necessarily concrete as well as abstract; he called upon Aristotle as one who had insisted on the

importance of:

seeing our city with our own eyes ... that our view be truly synoptic, a word which had not then become abstract, but was vividly concrete ... a seeing of the city, and this as a whole... Large views in the abstract... depend upon large views in the concrete (Geddes, 1915, pp. 13-14).

Geddes rated the view from his tower as second to none: 'Not even from the heights of London or of Paris, nor from the historic pinnacles of Athens or

Constantinople, is there so complete a view of the natural and social world to be had as ... from this Castle Hill'. Given the panorama, Geddes considered that 'the first contribution of this Tower towards life is purely visual, for from here everyone can make a start towards seeing completely that portion of the world he can survey' (quoted in Boardman, 1978, p. 139).

The tower also offered a point of synthesis: 'the

many standpoints usually divided among specialists are here brought together' (Geddes, 1915, p. 325). On the gallery the polymathic Geddes would dis- course on the prospect:

Here, on occasion, is set forth the analysis of the outlook in its various aspects- astronomic and topographical, geological and meterological, botanical and zoological, anthropological and archaeologic, historical and economic, and so on. Each science is thus indicated, ... isolated ... from the totality of our experience.

These specific perspectives though could hide as much as they showed if they were not brought into a

higher synthesis: 'this science ... is a vast and wholesale suppression of other ... truths, until its

reintegration ... into the geographic and social whole, the regional and civic unity before us' (Geddes, 1915, p. 323). For Geddes 'the only com-

plete science - the synthesis as the mother of them all - is Geography' (quoted in Defries, 1927, p. 95).

Despite this last plaudit, Geddes was never overly concerned about his scholarly label, and his discourse from the Tower roamed around the sciences as around the scene. Geographers, though, perhaps more than historians, botanists, economists et al., will

recognize the kind of discursive occasion described

by Geddes. Standing on his tower, Geddes was devel-

oping the most basic technique of the geographer

teaching in the field, that of pointing and talking from a highpoint. The distinctly raised nature of this outlook geography will recur through this essay.

THE REGIONAL SURVEY

Vision in the everyday To Geddes, and to those who took up his ideas, regional survey was an exercise of the visionary in the everyday, a means towards 'Eutopia': 'Civics ... has... to do, not with U-topia, but with Eu-topia; not with imagining an impossible no-place where all is well, but with making the most and best of each and

every place' (Geddes, 1904, p. 3). 'Eutopia' endowed the everyday and the mundane with visionary potential; survey was its practical prerequisite.

One can trace this element of vision in the every- day in the work of C. C. Fagg, early historian of the

regional survey movement (Fagg, 1928)2 and co- author of the first textbook on the subject (Fagg and

Hutchings, 1930). Fagg's work also illustrates the

characteristically vast concerns, the controlled eclec- ticism, of those practising Geddesian geography. Take for example his 1923 Presidential Address to the

Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society. Fagg began: 'I do not feel that any apology is needed for

my choice of a subject for this evening's address, although I originally intended presenting to you a

study of our Regional Survey Area based upon the

recently made Surface Utilisation Survey' (Fagg, 1923, p. 137). The reaction of the audience to his new title, 'The Significance of the Freudian Psychology for the Evolution Theory', is not recorded. The paper sought to ally psychoanalysis and Geddesian evolu-

tionary theory, and draw conclusions for town and

country planning therefrom. Fagg was no complete amateur in this field; Stoddart records his long cor-

respondence with Freud, initially concerning 'evi- dence of sexual fetishism in Darwin's geological writings' (Stoddart, 1986, p. 145). Fagg concluded his address by claiming for Freud that: 'by discovering and fearlessly investigating the Oedipus complex he has given us hope that we may someday be able to make a world fit for our children to live in; a family and social environment in which our already abun- dant super-babies may develop into super-men' (Fagg, 1923, p. 164). Freud is claimed in the service of

eugenic town and country planning (not a rare notion at the time); for, as Geddes put it in relation to his 'civics' sociology, 'the idea of Civics and Eugenics in association' (Geddes, 1915, p. 388).

It is important to stress that the visionary element

466 DAVID MA TLESS

Regional surveys and local knowledges

in the work of Fagg, Geddes and others was present in the theory and practice of regional survey itself. Fagg's interest in Freud, for example, should not be

regarded as the pursuit of intellectual relief from a dull day-job of survey and Geography. Fagg and Hutchings' Introduction to Regional Surveying is cer- tainly not devoid of the visionary. Civil parishes, for example, are there likened to 'the cells within a living organism, each complete in itself with its nucleus and yet in vital contact with the neighbouring cells' (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, p. 27; on the organic metaphor see Auster, 1990). The use of the word 'vital' is signifi- cant. The vitalistic evolutionary outlook of Geddes (Campbell and Livingstone, 1983; Matless, 1992), Fagg and colleagues such as H. J. Fleure (Campbell, 1972) pervades this vision of the region. The survey was intended to vitalize its everyday object; Geddes wrote of 'the vital purpose of all our surveys' (Geddes, 1915, p. 365), while C. B. Fawcett asserted that while the everyday region might seem inert to a pupil, the survey would act 'as the breath of inspiration that makes the dry bones live' (Barnard, 1935, p. 7),

The survey would be geared around Geddes' trinity of Place-Work-Folk, adapted from Le Play's Lieu-Travail-Famille. R. E. Dickinson produced a guide to The Le Play Method in Regional Survey for the Geddes-inspired Le Play Society in 19343, setting out the French intellectual heritage of the movement and its procedures and aims. To gear study around the interrelationships of place, work and folk was to adopt a dialectical rather than a determinist view of the relation between people and environment. As A. J. Herbertson, colleague of Geddes in the Outlook Tower in the 1890s had put it: 'It is not merely a passive environment, a theatre of human action of which we must know the stage properties. It is some- thing alive, active, not merely letting man act on it, but vigorously reacting on man' (Herbertson, 1915, p. 153). Within the regional survey specifically geo- graphical study would focus on 'Place', but this would only make sense in its relation to the whole: 'The survey links geography (place), economics (work) and anthropology (folk) ... With specialisation on the environmental aspect, the study becomes social geography; if on aspects of work, it becomes econ- omics; if on folk life and customs, anthropology' (Dickinson, 1934, p. 5). This geographical focus on 'Place' did not denote an exclusive concer with the material realm. Herbertson's comments in 1915 on regional 'consciousness' and 'psychology' presage a general interest in the culture of place within this Geography:

The geographer is no more confined to materialistic considerations than the historian. There is a genius loci as well as a Zeitgeist - a spirit of place as well as of time ... the geographer has to consider both in trying to understand the present regional consciousness (Herbertson, 1915, p. 153).

An interest in the non-material extended to the survey's ambitious aims. Survey was carried out with a view to planning, but not simply in the fields of land use, industrial development et al. The survey, wrote Dickinson, 'seeks to understand the community and its habitat and their inter-relations, in order to ... point the way to the more rational material and fuller spiritual expression of mankind' (Dickinson, 1934, p. 7). Likewise H. J. Fleure claimed a spiritual goal for the study of Place-Work-Folk: 'A regional Survey will ... endeavour to link up all the facts gathered to make them a guide ... not so much towards a quantitative financial goal as towards the enrichment of human experience and the consequent enhancement of its spiritual expression' (Fleure, 1919b, p. 33).

While the specifically geographical perspective would form only one part of the whole survey, geo- graphical study was considered to be in itself holistic. Geddes, as has already been noted, conjured up the figure of the geographer as synthesizer. Likewise P. W. Bryan, in his 1933 text on 'cultural landscape', wrote of 'that wholeness, that unity which is of the essence of geographical study and outlook' (Bryan, 1933, p. 128). Some comment is due here on the rhetoric of this Geography. Geddes' writing is charac- terized by rich, often almost impenetrable rhetorical flights. One could never though accuse Bryan, nor many other geographers of the time, of an excessi- vely inventive use of language. That is not to say though that their discourse is unrhetorical. One can pick out from many of the texts on regional survey and planning a particular rhetoric which seeks to combine flair and steadiness, vision and solidity. The grandeur of Bryan's statement on holistic geography, for example, might have provided some solace for the reader who before reaching it would have gone through four pages detailing a 'system of classifi- cations for both the natural and cultural subdivisions of the East Midlands':

Beginning with Cultural and Natural Elements, they are combined to form Cultural and Natural Units. From them are formed Cultural and Natural Features which are further grouped into Cultural and Natural Districts. A combination of Cultural and Natural Districts gives us the Cultural and Natural Regions (Bryan, 1933, pp.124-128)

467

A similar rhetoric of dour listing followed by the

promise of wonder, the one seemingly essentially preceding the other, is present in Patrick Abercrombie's 1933 Town and Country Planning; Abercrombie, the leading town and country planner of the period (Dix, 1981) and much influenced by Geddes (Manno, 1980), listed under 12 headings the 42 elements which he said might form just part of the

regional survey. A detailing of place, work and folk in these categories would reveal, he declared, 'the Greater Geography' (Abercrombie, 1933, pp. 133-136).

The regional survey was to encompass not merely all elements of the contemporary but the past and

possible future of the place. Abercrombie wrote of how 'history should be regarded as merely a phase ... to which the present and the future are in- dissolubly joined' (Abercrombie, 1933, p. 198). The survey was to search out the dynamics of the place: 'The roots of the future are in the past and the life of the region as we see it ... presents a mosaic of survivals and developments from the past together with incipient tendencies foreshadowing the future'

(Fagg and Hutchings, 1930 p. 107). Survey, then, would establish both continuities and patterns of

change. The key to communicating, and thereby guiding these lay in the presentation of the survey material. The regional survey movement is notable for its attention to different ways of presenting a

place, and it is to this communication of the 'Greater

Geography' that we now turn.

The keys to the region In their introductory handbook Fagg and Hutchings outlined the many means of presenting the regional survey. Photographs, old and new, ground and aerial, were recommended, and readers were referred to Gower, Jast and Topley's The Camera as Historian which had advocated historic camera work to foster 'the civic spirit' and a 'healthy corporate conscious- ness' (Gower, Jast and Topley, 1916, p. 4). Old

engravings, picture postcards and lantern slides

might also be used, the latter being hand-tinted to give 'the most brilliant results'; the authors recommended crimson lake, Italian pink, and alizarin

yellow as being 'absolutely transparent'. (Fagg and

Hutchings, 1930, p. 127). One could also make an 'Orientation Chart'.

Initially prepared on paper and then engraved on metal or in some other way protected against the elements, the chart could be mounted on a pedestal at a vantage point, and people could ponder their

place regarding the rest of the world: 'there is some-

thing peculiarly stimulating to the imagination in the

contemplation of one of these charts' (Fagg and

Hutchings, 1930, pp. 31-33). H. C. Barnard, citing Geddes' idea that one should begin with 'quite liter- ally a survey of the region - an "outlook" over the land of promise', recommended a visit to such a spot as the first step in a school regional survey (Barnard, 1948, p. 170). Victor Branford, Geddes' most loyal collaborator, also stressed the literal outlook in a 1924 essay on Hastings. Talking of how the abstract was revealed in the concrete, and of synoptic views, Branford described going up a hill above the town:

'Reaching the flat-topped summit, we look around and see the rolling ups and downs of the land and the gleaming expanse of sea. This panorama is

Geography' (Branford, 1924, p. 34). This outlook Geography, one of pointing and

talking on high places, taps into and informs a much broader culture of landscape in Britain in the inter-war

years. A Fagg and Hutchings Orientation Chart would not be out of place, for example, on any of the surveying covers of the Batsford topographical publications of the time, or on one of Ellis Martin's

map covers for the Ordnance Survey (Fig. 1) (Browne, 1991; Matless, 1990a; on mapping, topography and literature see Cunningham, 1988). If we begin to consider Geography within a broader culture of

landscape, these covers, overlooking valleys, show-

ing people pointing from a map, stand as key images of twentieth century British Geography. Geogra- phers involved in regional survey were certainly aware of this broader culture of landscape, and

through their educational work and involvement with youth and rambling groups played an important role in forming and guiding this culture (Matless, 1990b). To consider Geography as a social practice operating beyond the academy shows the British

Geography of the 1920s and 30s to have been more

powerful, more interesting, and perhaps more un-

settling than has hitherto been suspected. I return to this point at the conclusion of this essay.

There were still more means of presenting the

regional survey besides photographs, slides and charts upon hills. One could scale down one's situ- ation by constructing a relief model of the region. Fagg and Hutchings suggested carving from wood, moulding in plastic or building up in layers of card and linoleum (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, pp. 87-92), and displayed a prospective result, a layered relief model of almost abstract moderist pattern recreat-

ing the Mole Gap in Surrey (Fig. 2). Surveyors might

468 DAVID MA TLESS

Regional surveys and local knowledges

FIGURE 1. Outlook Geography: map cover by Ellis Martin for the Ordnance Survey, 1920s

also go diagrammatic, making transect charts show-

ing both geological and surface features, built up layer upon layer from rock through soil, vegetation and agriculture to industry and settlement (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, p. 115). A particular genre of

making place through overlays emerges from the

regional survey. Elements of place are identified, considered separately, and brought back together in the desired combination in an orderly manner, either on a chart or through layers of tracing paper. A 1928 Board of Education Pamphlet by C. V. Butler and Charlotte Simpson on an 'Oxfordshire Experiment' in Village Survey Making included a series of tracings by local schoolchildren. Lower Heyford was mapped by buildings and communications, water supply and contours, crops and farms, field names, and manorial history. The base depiction of geology was provided by Harold Mortimore, aged 12 (Fig. 3). Butler commented: 'By superimposition the connection, or the lack of connection, between groups of factors ... can be readily grasped'. I return to these questions of local knowledge and education below.

The archetypal regional survey transect was Geddes' 'valley section'. Fagg and Hutchings

'? : ....... f*

: ' i9 - ,

- ,

FIGURE 2. A layered relief model of the Mole Gap, Surrey Source: Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, p. 90

reproduced it in their handbook (Fig. 4), and it appears in similar if less elaborate form in most publications on regional survey. Fagg and Hutchings termed the valley section 'a generalised representation of the most typical form of land mass to be found in all

parts of the world' (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, pp. 136-137). Others considered it 'the key-diagram, the constructive formula of the Regional Survey' (Dickinson, 1934, p. 5), or 'the elemental diagram of

regional survey' (Branford and Geddes, 1917, p. 81). Such descriptions indicate that the valley section was not simply mimetic. The diagram was archetypal, containing Geddes' seven 'Nature Occupations' or 'rustic types', human psychological types which it was argued had emerged from particular occupations rooted in different parts of the valley. Wherever you went, Geddes argued, you might detect this sevenfold pattern, this socio-economic human

psychology. Similarly H. C. Barnard suggested that while one could not expect to always see the

diagram sitting there in the ground, the section did capture an 'essential truth': 'The details, of course, differ widely in the different cases, but the

underlying principles remain the same. Everywhere

469

DAVID MATLESS

\1 , : /A/ A^AI_\

- C ; .Of 0 z 0 X t~, CEOLOGICAL

FIGURE 3. The geology of Lower Heyford, Oxfordshire, by Harold Mortimore, aged 12, ink on tracing paper Source: Butler and Simpson, 1928

DEITIES ETC.

IDEALS

SCIENCES

TYPES

ANTI- SOCIAL TYPES :-

Pan Thor i Odin Cyclops Dryads Actanon I The Good Shepherd

Spirits AncestorCult Mahomet I I

ldealisation of Success in liFe Death;Glory in Idealisation Life

the Past Sport. Faith in the Future Valhalla

Geology Forestry Natural Economics Mineralogy Engineering History Zoology Metallurgy Mechanics Astrology Chemistry Astronomy

MINER

Gold Seekers Gannblers

WOODMAN HUNTER

Exploiters Exterminator of Natural Man Hunter Resources j WarLord

SHEPHERD

Nomad Turk

Buddha

Rest Nirvana

POOR PEASANT

Bandit Buonaparte CCorsican)

Demeter (Ceres)

Dior The Pror

Agriculture Botany Medicine

Finance Banking

RICH PEASANT

Market; Rigger Trust Magnate

Pallas Athene

ysus lised Land

Arboriculture Horticulture

GARDENER

/ Lotus Eater

Abj ect

Poseidon Peter

Astronomy Navigation

FISHERMAN

Pirabe Buccaneer'

FIGURE 4. 'The valley section with rustic types' Source: Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, p. 138

alike we have highlands, plains and water. It is on that

stage that the drama of humanity is played, be it historical, economic, or social' (Barnard, 1948,

pp. 161-163). It is important to recognize that Geddes' scheme

was held to apply in an urban industrial society. A

passing glance at the diagram might suggest a rural

imagination shying from the city, but in keeping with the broader focus of his work on cities Geddes insisted that the valley section worked for the indus- trial as well as the agricultural society. The pattern of

types might not be so topographically laid out, but

470

Regional surveys and local knowledges

the 'constructive formula' still held good. In the most modern city the types were still there, in 'their urban disguises' (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, p. 140). Thus the woodman became the engineer and the rich

peasant the modem banker. As Fagg and Hutchings' diagram indicates, the

valley section provided not just a typical social

geography but a typical 'anti-social' geography. The

types each had their sinister obverse; gambling, profi- teering, decadent consumption, robbery, resource

exploitation, nomadism and banditry (the latter two

being allotted a particular ethnicity) are constructed as

forming an archetypal immoral geography. Geddes'

psychology presented the social and anti-social as two sides of the same coin; the task was to encourage the one to the discouragement of the other. To take one example, the hunter was considered to have a militaristic flipside. Thus Branford and Geddes argued that militarism, however repugnant, could not be eliminated as it expressed an essential part of human

psychology. The task was to repress it by providing what William James had termed 'moral equivalents of war'. Geddes and Branford commended boy scout-

ing, with its encouragement of nature study satisfy- ing the hunting psyche (Branford and Geddes, 1917, pp xii-xiii, 105-108).4

Fagg and Hutchings' presentation of the valley section holds too a model of science, myth and

religion. Each rustic type was held to be the source and embodiment of various branches of knowledge, and each type too made for myths; the miner, the

Cyclops, the poor peasant Buddha, etc. Geddes regarded myth, from whatever part of the world, not as superstition and irrationality but as a living embodiment of archetypal knowledge to be re- covered and employed for the future. Myth for Geddes was in no way anti-modern or anti- scientific.5 The valley section, in its bringing together of society, geography, morality, psychology and theology in a spatial and temporal archetype, cap- tured an onflowing stream of human consciousness, to be harnessed for its power by regional survey. Fagg and Hutchings illustrated the potential of the section from Fagg's own Croydon survey, tracing the River Wandle downstream from Reigate to Mitcham, and finding all the types and occupations on the way (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, pp. 141-143).

There were then a wide variety of presentational devices for the regional surveyor. The prime docu- ment though was the map. This for Bryan would 'express, vividly the essence of the relationship between man and his environment in the region

studied' (Bryan, 1933, p. 83). Bryan made a distinc- tion between the cartographical and the geographi- cal: 'The essential difference between a map-maker and a geographer is largely that of the difference between the photographer and the artist'. Bryan, from a naturalistic viewpoint on photography and a romantic viewpoint on painting, wrote of how the

geographer, like the artist 'frequently has to tell a minor lie' to help tell 'a major truth' (Bryan, 1933, p. 84). Bryan and others foresaw regional surveys bursting with maps. Fagg and Hutchings considered that 'The number of maps that may be prepared is almost unlimited' (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, p. 93), and listed a 'small selection' extending over six and a half pages, with 160 categories of map under thirteen

headings: 'there will be found to be no limit to the new ideas for making maps and every additional one will be found to throw new light upon many of the others in the collection' (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, pp. 116-123). Fagg and Hutchings held out the

promise, given patience, of revelation for the diligent surveyor:

We should not ... strain after interpretation. If we patiently carry on our field observation and produce our maps and other records or expressions of our work the relationships of cause and effect between the varied phenomena of the region will gradually unfold them- selves to our vision and something of the meaning of the regional drama will dawn upon us (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, p. 133).

In maps and their legends lay the keys to the regions. Fagg and Hutchings' use of dramatic metaphor

picks up on a theme developed by Branford and Geddes in 1917 in The Coming Polity. The final chapter on 'Regional Eutopias' begins: 'The drama of the world is ever in progress. When we say that this drama "takes place," we are speaking from the regional out- look'. The notion of drama 'taking place' again locates the abstract in the concrete. This drama though, say Branford and Geddes, is not always 'dramatic' in the conventional sense. This is no histrionic geography. The regional drama is in general simply the play of everyday peaceful activity. It is mundane, but at the same time it is marvellous: 'Such is the stream of events, each and all charged with its elements of drama, and continuously visible through this change- ful, yet orderly, kaleidoscope of the regional and civic outlook' (Branford and Geddes, 1917, pp. 243-246). Survey becomes an orderly kaleidoscope. The regional outlook wonders at the patterns of a com- plex, charged, and changing world, but it is not

471

confused. Its eye is at one end of the kaleidoscope, the world in all its categories is at the other, and the surveyor understands, governing the scope.

PEOPLE AND THEIR PLACE

The new age of citizenship Geddes and others concerned with regional survey held that people and environment were dialetically interdependent. The survey was promoted as beneficial to both; as a basis upon which to 'improve' the environment through planning, and as a potential encouragement to citizenship. This double dividend of survey would bring improvement upon improve- ment, breaking what Geddes regarded as a mutual

degeneration of people and their place. Geddes diagnosed a problem with the citizen:

Whether one goes back to the simplest or to the greatest towns, there is little to be learned of civics by asking their inhabitants ... They have forgotten most the history of their own city ... Even the few thinking young men and women in each social caste - with exceptions of course ...-are not yet citizens, either in thought or deed (Geddes, 1915, p. 18).

Geddes' idea of the citizen emphasized awareness and

participation: 'For him, surely of all men, evolution is most plainly, swiftly in progress ... within this labrynthine civicomplex there are no mere spectators' (Geddes, 1915, pp. 4-5).6 Despite his elements of

pessimism, Geddes foresaw an imminent awakening of the citizen, with surveys as catalyst: 'As this ever fresh and fascinating interest in our immediate

surroundings gains upon the too common apathy, the citizen upon his daily walk and in his long familiar streets may gradually or suddenly awaken to a veritable revelation' (Geddes, 1915, p. 398). Geddes detected 'a new age of citizenship ... arising in

well-nigh every country' (Geddes, 1923, p. 93). Geddes not only looked around the world for

citizenship but into the past. Ancient Rome, he wrote, had embodied a conception of 'the City as a

great being, a personality of higher order than the individual'. This conception, whose revival Geddes detected as at hand, was 'at once so simply organic and so essentially religious' (Geddes, 1923, p. 94). This suggestion of citizenship as having a religious substance echoes through others' writings on

regional survey. H. J. Fleure for example argued for a spiritual element in Geography's contribution to citizenship: 'if geography can be treated as a broadly

humanist subject ... it can become a potent spiritual influence ... thus contributing most effectively to good citizenship' (Fleure, 1915, p. 89). The religious dimension of citizenship related to more though than there being a spiritual element within a broader whole. Citizenship was articulated around a religious model of the individual belonging to a higher collecti- vity. Place - whether region, city, town or village - becomes a kind of church, in both the architectural and organizational senses of the term.7 Concrete and abstract senses of belonging merge, the fabric of place and an idea of place unite.

Local knowledge Citizenship then was seen to be latent and in need of awakening, and the primary means to this was education, especially through survey. The university as well as the school was presented as a place of

possibilities. P. W. Bryan considered that in New York Columbia University would: 'in due time ...

penetrate and dominate with its spirit the whole city, thus neutralising the corrupt political atmosphere and business graft which is all too prevalent in the "down town" districts of the city' (Bryan, 1933, p. 326). Similarly Geddes' described the proposed Zionist 'Hebrew University of Jerusalem', in whose

planning he was involved, as a coming 'great electric battery of the spirit' (quoted in Boardman, 1978, p. 317; on Geddes' work in Palestine see Meller, 1990, pp. 263-282).

Education for citizenship through survey had its

primary focus in the school. Local observation and

study would generate good local, national, and world

citizenship. F. J. Adkins presented survey as the key to a voluntaristic citizenship and politics:

Civic sense and initiative, trained thus on a basis of local knowledge, grows by conglomeration into a national sense and initiative. Devolution, or mastery over local conditions, is a necessary preliminary to effective political democracy.

If each before his door would sweep, The village would be clean. (Adkins, 1934, p. 7).

This voluntaristic politics, along with the religious model of community, is often set up explicitly against both the competitive ethic of laissez-faire and what was presented as the 'abstract' and 'conflict' based

politics of socialism (S. Branford, 1923, 1924). The

regional survey movement argued instead for a 'co-

operative' local politics. This emphasis on the local

though was in no sense separatist. This decentraliz- ation, this 'devolution', still holds to a national centre.

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Regional surveys and local knowledges

Similar sentiments to those of Adkins were expressed by C. B. Fawcett, himself much concerned with issues of regional political devolution:8 'Local observations and records, and the systematic regional survey which can be based upon them, are an essential part of the foundations of that wider knowledge of his own country and of the world which is necessary to the mental equipment of a good citizen' (Barnard, 1935, pp. 8; see also Fawcett, 1913).

Fawcett's statement raises questions of the nature and status of 'local knowledge', questions which lie at the heart of the conception of local citizenship being promoted. Here three small publications are

significant; Observation, Discovery and Exploration. These three are the kind of geographical ephemera often overlooked in histories of Geography. In this case though, as no doubt elsewhere, giving attention to what might be regarded as the byways of the discipline is essential in appreciating the purposes and procedures of Geography as a social practice. Observation (Fig. 5), subtitled in folk-work-place style 'A Collection of Observations on People, Activities and Places', was published between 1924 and 1927, initially by the Sociological Society and later by Basil Blackwell. The journal was primarily aimed at children; much of its content has a distinctly middle class air. Travel pieces often feature exotic locations far beyond the means of most people, and the class position of author and presumably reader is most obvious in a Spring 1927 piece by Constance Cotterell describing 'A London Charwoman'. This study of 'character' turns out to have as its object one of Cotterell's servants. Such pieces tend to dominate later issues of Observation; earlier numbers though included contributions from Victor Branford, C. C. Fagg, Charlotte Simpson, G. E. Hutchings and E. W. Gilbert. In the first issue Fagg asked his readers to become regional surveyors. Describing a downland scene in detail he concluded:

If so much of human interest is hidden away in this single view ... what can we think of the vast meaning that is hidden behind the thousand pages of the text-book of Geography ... the Regional Survey student ... knows that by finding out all that he possibly can about his own town and its environs he will gain the surest insight into the life and turmoil of the great world beyond, and that only in the light of his understanding of the people and the things about him will every line in every book glow with its full significance (Fagg, 1924, p. 30).

The exhortation to look local was taken to a still narrower focus by Margaret Tatton in an essay on

'Environment, Or Room Making'. Tatton advised the reader to let their personality' "ooze out", as it were, and find expression in the shaping and handling of the common things around you' (Tatton, 1927, p. 152). The human-environment dialectical drama was to take place even indoors.

Observation was complemented by another Socio- logical Society publication, Discovery, first issued in the early 1920s as a 20 x 12 inch broadsheet for exhibition in schools, colleges and museums. Discovery was advertised as showing 'How to Make a Doomsday (sic) Book of your District - Get to Know your Part of the Earth'. I have been unable to trace a copy of the original broadsheet; the later 'Amplified Edition' though begins in classic outlook Geography style:

BIRD'S EYE VIEW - Climb to the top of a hill, tower, or high building to get a bird's eye view of your district. Pick out and note natural features ... Can you see signs of men's occupations ... ? Pick out any signs of custom, tradition and folk life... Come down from the height and begin work (Discovery, 1948, p. 1).

A similar school observational Geography was promoted by Exploration, edited by Mabel Barker for the Le Play Society and published in booklet form in 1939. Laid out in sections from geology through vegetation to history and modern conditions, the booklet recommended the use of overlays to bring out 'the relationship of one factor to another'. The front cover exhorted: 'Get to know your own Place and Work and Folk'. Three Geddes' mottoes advised how: '"Every Village, Town or City is not merely a Place in Space, but a Drama in Time", "All Time has gone over all Places" and "Every Place is the centre of the World" - Patrick Geddes'. Inside, following a valley section and nature occupations diagram, the first steps were outlined: 'Walk all over your region till you know it well enough to draw a sketch map from memory'. As the cover suggested: 'BEGIN WHERE YOU ARE' (Exploration, 1939).

Neither Observation nor Discovery nor Exploration were engaged in promoting local knowledge per se. Rather they sought to outline the series of pro- cedures, questions and techniques which should be followed in order to acquire a satisfactory knowledge of a locality. This was a local knowledge to be taught and learned, not tapped as a source of authority or authenticity. Exploration provided 15 headings under which information could be collected, one of which was 'Folk-lore and legend'. This part of local culture, the kind of knowledge which would often at the time

473

DAVID MATLESS

FIGURE 5. Covers of Observation. Left: Autumn 924-Autumn 1925, a layered picture in gold and blue by H. S. Williamson; right: Spring 1926-Autumn 1927, a classic outlook Geography image in orange and grey, artist unknown

have been regarded as the authentically local, formed just one more object of study, one part of a new local

knowledge, ordered and instructive, which would enable local people to appreciate and assess their

place with the eye of a surveyor. An educated detach- ment, beginning with a spot of overlooking outlook

Geography, was necessary to revive local attach- ment, whether in the adult or the child. Abercrombie

put it bluntly: 'The plain practical man might say that he knew his town from pillar to post, he knew his history and he knew its present extent, every inch of it.... But actually he knows no more about it than his

tongue does about the state of his teeth' (Abercrom- bie, 1933, p. 129). Hence the need for the new local

knowledge. Through such publications, and through the

national work of organizations like the Le Play Society and the Geographical Association and indi- viduals like Charlotte Simpson who ran training courses in the Cotswolds (Beaver 1962; Sheail, 1981, Simpson, 1930, 1934, 1951), regional survey was

promoted in schools, the children acting not only as

potential citizens but as a useful pool of labour for the intensive survey process. C. V. Butler suggested a double dividend from the Oxfordshire survey

'experiment' of both 'constructive local patriotism' and valuable data: 'A Domesday Survey ... fresh from the soil and taken from within, with a detail which not even a government department can rival' (Butler and Simpson, 1928, p. 13).

The promotion of local survey was intended to create a sense of belonging. Often this sense of

belonging, of habitation, takes on an ecological dimension. On the opening page of their regional surveying handbook, Fagg and Hutchings declared that the modern survey was but the conscious fulfilment of a primitive instinct:

There is a sense in which regional survey is not merely old, but primeval ... the subject of regional survey is modern but ... the function of regional surveying is as old as animal life; for every young organism must ... investigate its environment as a part of the technique of living; and this investigation of environment, whether it be by caterpillar or child, is the very essence of regional survey (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, p. 1).

Survey comes to fill an ecological need, as an instruction in 'the technique of living'. A number of writers stressed the ecological nature of survey, drawing parallels with plant ecology and presenting

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Regional surveys and local knowledges

Geography as an essentially ecological subject: 'regional survey might very aptly be described as the study of human ecology ... Just as Tansley chose for the title of his early lectures on plant ecology "The plant and its environment" so "men and their environments" is the substance of human ecology or regional survey' (Fagg, 1928, pp. 77-9),9 Barard similarly declared: 'We must go back to our concep- tion of geography as human ecology' (Barnard, 1948, p. 221). The theme of Geography as human ecology would later of course be developed most fully by the author of The Le Play Method in Regional Survey, R. E. Dickinson (see Dickinson, 1947, 1970).

As already suggested, regional survey was aimed at promoting a sense of national and world as well as local citizenship. The argument here was based on notions of orientation and microcosm. Knowledge of the local could orientate the citizen in the world. Fagg and Hutchings described their 'Orientation Charts' as a means of imaginative situation:

If we can stand upon an eminence and say 'Athens is straight over there' or 'Cape Town is precisely in that direction' these places with all their associations immediately become more real to us. We gain a vivid impression of the fact that they do exist on this same earth and have a geographical relationship to the inti- mate details of our own town or village as depicted in the centre of the chart (Fagg and Hutchings, 1930, p. 33).

Besides indicating geographical co-existence the knowledge gained in such survey was seen to encourage sympathy for difference. The front cover of Exploration declared: 'If you lear to know your own place well, and in so doing lear to love it more, it will help you to understand and appreciate other places, and to sympathise with their problems'. It was repeatedly emphasized that local survey should not lead to any sense of superiority. Thus H. C. Barnard, while arguing for a patriotic aim in survey ('There is no better way of learning to love England than by getting to know her' (Barnard, 1948, p. 248)), directed this love of country, central to 'the true meaning of citizenship', against chauvinism, criticiz- ing earlier geography for 'imperialist meglomania which was frankly propagandist, and therefore not truly educational'. The 'function of geography' was 'to cultivate a sane and dispassionate outlook on such matters' (Barnard, 1948, p. 219). Barnard's English geographical love baulked at too much passion; regional survey would help keep a lid on such things.

The local was not simply though one area on a wider map, but an epitome of the world: 'The

intensive study of the school region is like a study of the world in little; and if the teacher can help his pupils to appreciate ... their relationships and responsi- bilities in that microcosm, they may be set in the way of realising ... a far wider citizenship' (Barnard, 1948, p. 210). Victor Branford, declaring his panoramic Geography in Observation, told his readers what the view from Hastings' 500 foot 'North Seat' meant:

We see Hastings and its Region as our own particular bit of the world; our precious and intimate sample of its fathomless realities. Hastings in the World, the World in Hastings-that might stand for the motto of our Regional, or Civic, Survey ... our aim ... is to see and know and feel the World in detail, without losing sight of the whole, and without losing grip of its meaning for Man (Branford, 1924, p. 34)

This notion of locality as microcosm was crucial in enabling a geographical vision of unity in diversity, with all places unique yet bound together in the categories followed by the survey. To be a local citizen, with local knowledge, was in this scheme not to assert a local independence and a fragmentation of the spatial order, but to be at once a local, national and world citizen, a participating part of a scheme both close at hand and out of reach.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion I would like to develop two points from what has gone before. The first concerns Geography as a social practice, the second the geographical imagination.

Geography as social practice As has already been noted, the regional survey movement was part of a much broader culture of landscape in inter-war Britain. Some further consider- ation of two of the key elements of that culture - scouting and rambling - will show how Geography in this instance (as in any other) needs to be conceived as a social practice if its history is to be appreciated.

Writings on regional survey regularly commend the virtues of this 'technique of living' to leaders of Scout and Guide groups as well as teachers (see for example Geddes, 1930). These youth movements, especially the Scout movement with its emphasis on the improvement of boys through outdoor pursuits, were seen as ideal vehicles for the educational aims of survey. The Scout movement picked up on survey as part of its general stress on 'citizenship'. Included in

475

DAVID MATLESS

THE EXPLORER'S CHART TRAINING 1* MAP AND ) EXPEDITIONS

COMPASS WORK THROUGH WIDE GAMES REPORTING I TREKS & HIKES

FIRST CLASS JOURNEY Developing an interest

nn

THE COUNTRYSIDE HIGHWAYS MAN & HIS WOR THINGS THEPAST

Land Forms. Trackways. Agriculture. Piehistoric. flints, Geology. Roman Roads. Village Surveying. barrows, etc. Nature Lore. R Turnpikes. Industry. Roman Remains. Preservation of Bea4ty. Modern Transport. Folk Lore. Castles

etc. WaterNays. Rural Crafts. Churches.

Footpaths. Bridges. | etc. etc. etc.

ACTIVE OUTDOOR PURSUITS

I HEALTH & HAPPINESS

AND

A WIDE VISION

FIGURE 6. The scout as geographer-citizen: Francis Gidney's 'Explorer's Chart' Source: Gilcraft, 1942, p. 113

Francis Gidney's highly influential 'Gilcraft' series of scouting handbooks was a 1930 volume on Exploring. Gidney emphasised the role of outdoor work in the formation of 'character' and 'citizenship', and sought, through procedures such as mapping and village surveying, to develop in boys an interest in history, nature and beauty 'not only so that they may enjoy a fuller life ... but also so that they may become informed citizens' (Gilcraft, 1942, p. 56). Much of Exploring reads as a handbook for elementary geogra- phical fieldwork; Gidney recommended, with regard to 'reporting', the Le Play Society's Exploration as a valuable guide (Gilcraft, 1942, p. 64). Gidney's 'Explorer's Chart (Fig.6) suggests the means to make a

geographer-citizen. The regional survey movement and its outlook

geography can also be linked to the broader upsurge in rambling in the twenties and thirties (Matless, 1990a; 1990b; Lowerson, 1980). One example from rambling literature will suffice to illustrate the connec- tion. In 1939 Tom Stephenson, a leading rambling campaigner, edited the influential Countryside Companion. For walkers Stephenson gave instructions on 'Making the Most of the Map' (Stephenson (ed), 1946, pp. 33-46), illustrating his arguments with diagrams of relief and orientation straight out of a

geography textbook. For motorists Stephenson pro- posed touring with a geographer's eye: 'On a tour

one gains a broad view of the ground covered. It is possible to build up a mental map of the route followed, to see the country in proper perspective, and leam the main features of the land, and what we might call their geographical relativity (Stephenson, 1946, p. 29, my emphasis). Just as Ellis Martin's Ordnance Survey map covers might be seen as key images of twentieth century British Geography, so Stephenson's com-

panion to the countryside might be regarded, if a broad notion of Geography as a social practice is

adopted, as one of the more influential Geography textbooks of the past hundred years.

Geographical imagination Both Stephenson and Gidney could be said to be

cultivating the kind of geographical imagination promoted by the regional survey movement. The term 'geographical imagination' was indeed em-

ployed by H. C. Barnard in his textbook on geogra- phical teaching. His use of the term is symptomatic of a more general conscious reflection on the part of these geographers regarding the ways in which they figured the world.

In a chapter entitled 'The Content of School

Geography: (3) Geographical Imagination' (Barnard, 1948, pp. 53-77), Barnard addressed how children

might be helped in imagining geography: 'It is not

enough to learn geographical facts ... geography

476

Regional surveys and local knowledges

... ought always to be alive, full of human interest, romantic ... '. Geography, said Barard, lost much educative value if it failed to 'impart a sense of wonder and intellectual adventure' (Barnard, 1948, pp.53-4). To help fire this sense Barnard commended films, slides, press cuttings, geographical museums, journeys and scouting. He began his chapter by considering pictures, and quoting Robert Louis Stevenson: 'No man lives in the external truths

among salts and acids, but in the warm phantasma- goric chamber of his brain with the painted windows and the storied wall'. Pupils needed, said Barnard, to be taught to 'think in pictures' (Barnard, 1948, p. 55), though this would not replace verbal description: 'The desert scene does not convey an idea of the heat, the silence ... The picture of a cotton mill does not

suggest the noisy activity, the monotony and arduousness of the work' (Barnard, 1948, p. 59).

Barard's emphasis on picturing echoes Martin

Heidegger's 1938 essay on the modem age as 'The age of the world picture', quoted by Timothy Mitchell in Colonising Egypt (Heidegger, 1977; Mitchell, 1988). By 'world picture' Heidegger meant not 'a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture' (Heidegger, 1977, p. 129); Mitchell, developing Heidegger's argument, con- siders how in Europe in the nineteenth century the world became 'conceived and grasped as though it were an exhibition' (Mitchell, 1988, p. 13). Mitchell

emphasizes how this particular geographical imagina- tion was necessarily bound to the colonial age and to the emergence of a world economy.l0 Mitchell concentrates on Egypt-as-exhibition; one can though I think argue that the same kind of geographical imagination was at work in the regional survey movement, whether its Geography was considering 'abroad' or 'home'. The regional survey produces locality as 'home-picture', as an annotated exhibition of where you are in the world. Exhibition is perhaps an apt medium for conveying the intended orderly kaleidoscopic effect of the survey's process and result. The regional survey as orderly kaleidoscope produces home-as-exhibition for the citizen.

The notion of the world as picture and exhibition is present especially in Barnard's discussion of stamp albums: 'stamps afford a really valuable stimulus to the pupil in cultivating geographical imagination and amplifying geographical knowledge'. The stamp album serves as a miniature geographical world- exhibition for the child: 'Africa, for example, affords abundant opportunities of this sort. The various French colonies have each their characteristic scenes

and figures. The Belgian Congo gives us illustrations of native life and industries'. Whether this geographic philately proceeded on a regional or a thematic basis, for Barnard 'the possibilities are almost unlimited; but they can all do something to widen knowledge and to stimulate imagination' (Barnard, 1948, pp. 74-75). The stamp album becomes a kind of orientation chart

pictured with essences, each place characterized and

categorized, great distances spanned in the imagina- tion yet always sustained by their layout on an

accompanying map, the exotic brought home with its difference essentially preserved. To flick through the

stamp album would produce in the child a grasping wonder at the world of which he or she was a British citizen.

I will end by drawing your attention to another

stamp album, described by the Polish writer Bruno Schulz in 1937 in a story called 'Spring'. Schulz's story considers things other than the questions of

geography I am concerned with here; I am selecting one element out of a broader tale of dream, psy- chology, love, power, myth and more. Senses of wonder and power in a geographical imagination are however central to 'Spring'. Schulz is perhaps more attuned than Barnard though to the nuances, poten- tials and vanities of this imagination. He is also remembering being part, unlike Barnard, of another's empire. Selections from 'Spring' can stand as a

postcript to this essay. It is the Easter holidays in small-town Poland:

... spring was holding itself ready: deserted and roomy it was simply awaiting a revelation. Who could fore- see that this would emerge - ready, fully armed, and dazzling - from Rudolph's stamp album?

In it were strange abbreviations and formulae, recipes for civilizations, ... the essence of climates and pro- vinces. These were bank drafts on empires and republics, on archipelagoes and continents. Emperors and usurpers, conquerors and dictators could not possess anything greater. I suddenly anticipated the sweetness of domi- nation over lands and peoples, the thorn of that frustration that can only be healed by power. With Alexander of Macedonia, I wanted to conquer the whole world and not a square inch of ground less.

... At that time, the world was totally encompassed by Franz Joseph I. On all the horizons there loomed this omnipresent and inevitable profile, shutting the world off, like a prison. And just when we had given up hope and bitterly resigned ourselves inwardly to the uni- formity of the world ... then suddenly oh God ... you opened before me that stamp album.... What a dazzling relativism, what a Copernican deed, what flux of all categories and concepts!

477

... It was an enormous manifestation of countries, a universal May Day, a march-past of the world. The world was demonstrating with thousands of hands raised as for an oath ... that it was not behind Franz

Joseph but behind somebody infinitely greater. In spite of the large numbers taking part in the

march-past, everything was orderly, the enormous

parade unfolded itself in silence and according to plan. (Schulz, 1980, pp. 32-37).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Stephen Daniels for comments on earlier drafts of this material. Earlier versions were

presented at the IBG annual conference in Sheffield in

January 1991 and the CORAL 'Regions in History' conference in Loughborough in September 1991. Thanks to all who commented in discussion on those

occasions, to three anonymous referees, and to Martin Barfoot for photographic work.

NOTES

1. Geddes here emphasizes the applications of survey. Survey was always carried out with the intention of

making a plan: 'survey ... has as its necessary comp- lement a plan or scheme for the future' (Farquharson, 1929, p. 3). The topic of Geddes' planning is beyond this essay (see Meller, 1990; Wilson, 1991, chapter 7). Regional survey also fed into movements for regiona- lism (see Garside and Hebbert (eds), 1989; Dickinson, 1947, chapter 11).

2. Fagg's history was published in the South Eastern Naturalist, a journal of the South-Eastern Union of Scientific Societies, a key focus for survey activities in the 1920s. Honorary Presidents included Victor Branford (1923), Farquharson (1926), Geddes (1927), Fagg (1928 and 1929), and Fleure (1930) (Meller, 1990,

p. 307; Fagg, 1928, pp. 92-94). 3. The Le Play Society was founded in 1930 after an

amicable split in the Sociological Society. Those most concerned with fieldwork formed the Le Play Society with Geddes as the first President. Others continued as the Institute of Sociology. Besides publishing several texts on survey methodology, the Society conducted

study tours to parts of Europe, typically peasant regions where the place-work-folk formula was most

easily manifested. The tours were led by a series of notable geographers, including Fleure, Evans, Edwards, Dickinson and Stamp. Reports on the tours were

published. The society is a notable but neglected body in the history of geography, important particularly in establishing conventions of fieldwork. Geddes had himself promoted survey through travel at the Outlook Tower, particularly in the Summer Meetings

held there in the 1890s (Meller, 1990, pp. 92-97); one chapter of the first edition of Cities in Evolution is entitled 'Travel and its Lessons for Citizenship', while another considers 'A Town-Planning Tour in Germany'. On the Le Play Society's activity see Beaver, 1962; Matless, 1990b; Russell; 1960; Stoddart, 1986.

4. Branford and Geddes write during the First World War. Paul Fussell (1975) has argued that the experience of that war prompted a revival of a nostalgic English pastoral idea of landscape and home both during and after hostilities. Geddes' and others' promotion of the local 'home' geography considered in the second part of this essay though had a different aim. Rather than

asserting home and locality as a nostalgically secure hideaway from moder horror Geddes and others were

looking to the local as a progressive site of order, a firm and solid footing for a broader knowledge of the world and for a planned future.

5. Geddes' approach to myth has many parallels with that of Jung, though I have found no reference to him

drawing on Jung's ideas. 6. Some comment is due here on the gendering of 'the

citizen'. In the quotations used here Geddes employs both male and female terminology, but, as Jill Conway (1972) and Elizabeth Wilson (1991) have noted, Geddes held that men and women possessed very dif- ferent attributes as citizens. Geddes and the biologist J. Arthur Thomson developed a well-publicized theory of sexual difference grounded in evolutionary biology which in classically stereotypical terms held men to be active, women to be passive and nurturing etc. (Geddes and Thomson, 1889; Thomson and Geddes, 1931). It is

important to stress here that Geddes was an advocate of the 'emancipation' of women (and indeed of men) in terms of enabling the development of 'female virtues' in the service of town planning. As Jill Conway com- ments: 'while clinging to the romantic stereotype of women as passive and emotive, Geddes tended to raise in his evolutionary thought important questions about the emergence of women from Victorian domesticity' (Conway, 1972, p. 153). Geddes embraced the kind of

'progressive' radicalism, often linked to a form of

eugenics, associated with such writers as Havelock Ellis.

7. The spiritual and at times mystical element in this

survey and planning was especially strong in the work of Victor Branford. Elements of mysticism were not uncommon in early twentieth century British geogra- phy; the work of Vaughan Cornish, a friend of Geddes, is notable in this regard (Matless, 1991).

8. Fawcett's argument for political devolution within the United Kingdom, The Provinces of England (Fawcett, 1919), was first published in Geddes and Branford's

'Making of the Future' series. 9. The ecologist Arthur Tansley had, like Fagg, an interest

in psychoanalysis, resigning a Cambridge lectureship to study under Freud in Vienna (Stoddart, 1986,

478 DAVID MA TLESS

Regional surveys and local knowledges

p. 145). Fagg notes Tansley's psychological work in his essay on Freud (Fagg, 1923, pp. 138, 155-156), but in his history of regional survey considers only his plant ecology.

10. Themes of comprehending the world in pictorial terms, and indeed the procedures and conventions of outlook geography in general, are common in the imperial discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mary Louise Pratt identifies the 'monarch- of-all-I-survey' figure of the 'seeing-man', imaginati- vely and often literally possessing the scene while detachedly professing innocence of domination (Pratt, 1992, especially Chapters One and Nine).

REFERENCES

ABERCROMBIE, P. (1933) Town and country planning (Thornton Butterworth, London)

ADKINS, F. J. (1934) The approach to citizenship through history and through regional surveys (Le Play Society, London)

AUSTER, M. (1990) '"Not Without Art, but yet to Nature true". A re-evaluation of organic thought in urban plan- ning and geography', Austral. Geogr. Stud. 28: 178-86

BARNARD, H. C. (1935) Observational geography and regional survey (Le Play Society, London)

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