The Making of a Cultural Landscape

This collection offers a detailed account of the role that tourism has played in shaping the heritage, culture and identity of the Lake District and, more broadly, Cumbria over the past 260 years. Varied in its contents and interdisciplinary in its approach, the book provides valuable commentaries not only on the social, environmental and economic history of the Lake District, but also on the conservation, marketing, and land-management strategies that continue to affect the region in the present day. While thus being a resource that will no doubt aid future research, it is also a document of the present moment and was deliberately published at a time when authorities within the Lake District National Park were resubmitting their bid to achieve UNESCO World Heritage Site status. The book, edited by John K. Walton and Jason Wood, comprises twelve chapters contributed by a host of historians, critics and heritage experts, and is subdivided into three interrelated sections. The first of these sections opens with two chapters, contributed by Susan Denyer and John K. Walton, which serve, in lieu of an introduction, to set the stage for the rest of the book. As Denyer and Walton stress, the recent World Heritage Site proposal provides an exceptional context for critical reflection on the cultural geography of the Lake District and, accordingly, on the compound influence of nature and human intervention in shaping the region’s ecology. Key here, as both authors indicate, is how the UNESCO bid underscores the Lake District’s status as a cultural landscape: an area of ‘outstanding universal value’ distinguished by an exemplary history of human interaction with the natural environment

Archaeology · Context (archaeology · Cultural heritage · Cultural landscape · Environmental ethics · Geography · Lake district · Sociology · Tourism · American Environmental and Regional History · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History