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.
