Landscapes of Discontent: Petrified Unrest in the Fens of Eastern England

In the cartographic analyses that appeared following the 2016 referendum regarding whether the United Kingdom (UK) should remain a member of the European Union (EU), an image of an old landscape flashed up. The Fen region in the East of England – once a large swathe of wetland and now a dry arable landscape divided by three county lines – appeared as a landscape disproportionately in favour of leaving the EU. This thesis attempts to read this congealed spatial form as what the German critic Walter Benjamin might call a ‘gesture’ of a history of the rural that has been covered over. There has as yet been no geographic analysis of rural landscape that utilises a Benjaminian reading. I propose that this is due, at least in part, to the lack of a Benjaminian conceptual vocabulary of the rural. The recognition of this oversight – as well as its historicity and consequences – and the attempt to address it through a close reading of the specific limit case of the Fen landscape defines the central contribution of this thesis. This is achieved through a mixed methods approach that constellates historical and archival research with ethnography, photography, interviews and creative writing in an attempt to read and re-read the Fen landscape. Through this process I notice the myriad disruptions and disjunctures present in the apparently solid arrangement of this place in order to engage with the contingent elements of the Fen landscape – the alterity that resides in its current monocultural form rather than behind or underneath it. The form of this thesis aims to mediate the phenomenological experiences of the Fen landscape described by my participants into a textual document. Through this process I construct a rudimentary conceptual dictionary of this rural site, reducing apparently commonsense readings of this landscape to rubble and ruin and providing a momentary glimpse of possibilities beyond hegemony. The implications of this thesis are twofold. First, I indicate an urgent need for theoretical heterogeneity in the methodological and philosophical underpinnings of rural landscape scholarship. This implication is also significant for Benjamin scholars in its identification of a distinct research agenda for cultural materialism away from the urban street: on the stage of the farmer’s field.