LAUSR

This special issue consists of six essays that collectively expand ways of accounting for the landscapes of England’s first national park, the Peak District. In following the recent upsurge in more critical, experimental landscape studies, the papers here move further away from the post-structural and purely phenomenological discussions of landscape that have dominated research since the 1990s, drawing on recent work about materiality, sensation and affect, and non-human agencies. Officially designated in 1951, the Peak District National Park covers nearly 1500 square kilometres of Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire, and is typically divided into the White Peak, Dark Peak and South West Peak. The White Peak’s limestone valleys, hills and dales are used for dairy farming and are intersected by woodland and streams. The southern stretch of the Dark Peak, primarily constituted by the Pennine hills, with several flooded valleys containing reservoirs, is replete with stone outcrops, upland heath and bogs. The South West Peak is made up of moorland and pasture. These divergences immediately indicate the variegated nature of the landscape. Crucially, the Peak District is surrounded by the large cities of Manchester, Sheffield, Nottingham, Stoke-on-Trent and Derby, attracting many residents from these urban centres in search of increasingly diverse forms of leisure. English National Parks were established, as underlined in the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, to fulfil twin imperatives: to preserve the ‘natural beauty’ of particularly esteemed rural landscapes and to provide opportunities for outdoor recreation. These ideals persist, but have been supplemented by contemporary policies to protect areas of environmental diversity, foster sustainable economic development, strengthen local communities and advance tourism (Crouch, Marson, Shirt, Tresidder, & Wiltshier, 2009). Given this symbolic and political importance, national parks are freighted with peculiarly intense debates that context the values, aesthetics and uses of landscape. As the most visited British national park, the Peak District is especially subject to a host of conflicts oriented around environmental values, industrial and economic interests, local concerns, recreational provision, tourist ventures and multiple leisure pursuits. Accordingly, the management of this landscape must take into account a multitude of tastes, values and desires. Some critics of the administration of national parks argue that in preserving a mooted originary ‘authenticity’ and following particular aesthetic conventions, landscapes become frozen, regulated to conform to styles from particular historical periods, their dynamic evolution curtailed (Suckall, Fraser, Cooper, & Quinn, 2009). Alternative values do, of course, persist, as Herrington (2016) details in discussing how landscapes are judged as beautiful by farmers because they manifest an orderliness and tidiness that connotes productivity. As far as the Peak District is concerned, the continuous contestations that focus on complex landscape values are exemplified in a paper that discusses the post-war construction of Ladybower Reservoir (Cosgrove, Roscoe, & Rycroft, 1996). Conceived in the inter-war years, the construction of the reservoir was celebrated as a progressive, technologically advanced, modernist engineering