On the road with Humphry Repton

In 1994–95, during a year's study leave to research the life and work of Humphry Repton, I travelled several thousand miles in pursuit of my subject, to various libraries and record offices in England and the United States for archival evidence, and to scores of country houses throughout Britain, where Repton had been commissioned, to examine documents and observe evidence of Repton's work on the ground.1 Sometimes I was literally in Repton's tracks, setting out, like him, from an inn (occasionally the very same inn) in a country town on a former turnpike to visit one or two nearby estates, driving up to a house on an approach Repton had designed, walking over the grounds on paths he had laid out. Roads and travel soon felt not just links between Repton's landscaping but an integral, definitive feature, and I began to think through Repton's work with movement in mind.