Peaceful,Pleasant and Private: The British Domestic Garden as an Ordinary Landscape |
| |
Authors: | Mark Bhatti Andrew Church Amanda Claremont |
| |
Affiliation: | 1. School of Applied Social Science, University of Brighton, UK.;2. School of Environment and Technology, University of Brighton, UK. |
| |
Abstract: | This paper uses narrative accounts of private gardens in Britain from the Mass-Observation Archive (MO) to explore ideas of landscape, privacy and attachment that emerge from daily practices and routines in these ordinary domestic spaces. We argue for the domestic garden as a vernacular or ordinary landscape that displays tensions between the private and the public nature of home within ambivalent emotional responses. Extended personal narratives offer privileged access to a site of intense engagement and carefully guarded privacy, yet with varying levels of attachment. The garden is a space well described in Britain in its public form but less well known as a private, everyday landscape. In this way a cultural landscape study becomes a contemporary critical geography of an ordinary space. |
| |
Keywords: | gardens narrative privacy Mass-Observation Archive ordinary landscapes |
|
|