Moral geographies of english landscape

This paper uses the theme of moral geographies to address the cultures of landscape and leisure. Focusing on material from England in the 1930s and 1940s, it argues that questions of leisure in the countryside were presented in terms of citizenship, with intellectual, spiritual and physical cultures of landscape being combined as a means to ‘improve’ the citizen. Always, however, these definitions of citizenship worked in relation to the figure of the ‘anti‐citizen’. The paper traces the presence of such distinctions in the formation of policy during and after the Second World War, and suggests that such matters of cultural politics continue to inform questions of landscape and leisure today.