Landscape and Identity at Ladybower Reservoir and Rutland Water

Large-scale water control projects have been a major component of environmental engineering and landscape transformation during the twentieth century, creating some of its most characteristic modernist forms. The discourses generated by their design and implementation articulate diverse and often opposing cultural identities. Those surrounding the design and construction of reservoirs at Ladybower (1935-45), in what is now the Peak District National Park, and Rutland Water (1968-76), in England's smallest shire county, give insights into the role of landscape aesthetics and symbolism in the complex negotiations of local and national identity at different moments in the course of twentieth-century modernism in Britain.