Skip to search boxSkip to navigationSkip to main content

Peaceful, pleasant and private: the British domestic garden as an ordinary landscape

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

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.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 40-52

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

Landscape Research (Volume 39, Issue 1)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 19/03/2013

Publication status

Published - 19/03/2013

ISSN

0142-6397

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/625151
  • Scopus: 84896807341

Access to documents

Publication metrics