91Èȱ¬

Historian Helen Castor explores the role of the Midlands in the story of England.

Where do you think of when you hear the words ‘quintessential English countryside’?

Probably somewhere in the sublime North or the beautiful South. Rarely – despite the odd exclamation over the splendours of Warwickshire or Shropshire - does anyone speak up for the magnificence of the Midlands generally.

But historian Helen Castor claims it is the Midlands, rather than Kent, deserves the title The Garden of England.

For many, the Midlands consists of little more than service stations on the M1 or nodes on the rail network. But the middle band of the country has actually given birth to many of the myths associated with England’s green and pleasant land.

Why don’t more people know this?

Helen argues the answer is bound up with the Industrial Revolution, and Midlanders’ commitment to innovation. In order to serve as the nation’s testing ground for new technologies, Midlanders have consistently sacrificed their surroundings.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions reconfigured the Midland landscape and brought passionate responses from the region’s greatest writers, including the great Northants ‘peasant poet’, John Clare, outraged by the enclosure movement, and the Notts radical D H Lawrence, who scorned the ruination of his native woods and fields by the coal mines.

The Midland landscape has continued to cast a spell on the nation’s greatest writers and composers all the same. Edward Elgar took his musical cue from the West Midlands, while in the imagination of JRR Tolkien the same landscapes gave rise to the notion of Hobbits and Middle-earth.

Producers: Robert Shore and Ashley Byrne.

A Made in Manchester production for 91Èȱ¬ Radio 4, first broadcast in May 2016.

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