KEN WORPOLE

Ken Worpole is a writer and social historian with a particular interest in landscape aesthetics and identity. In recent years, his work has focused on understanding the relationship between landscape and history in Essex in the twentieth century. He blogs at The New English Landscape. His submission for PLACE 2020 developed after a recent campaign to raise money to buy Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage at Dungeness and preserve it as a museum, along with the renewed interest in Jarman's book, Modern Nature, which led him to thinking again about Ian Hamilton Finlay and Jarman as the two artists, or artist-gardeners as they might have preferred to be called, who made a radical impact on landscape aesthetics over the past thirty years. Their work provocatively raises questions about the values attached to different kinds of landscapes, especially those said to symbolise powerful tropes such as 'Englishness' or 'Empire'. Both use inscription as part of their aesthetic armoury, and in this time of a major disruption in public health, along with the contesting of inscription in public spaces attached to Britain's colonial past, the time has come for a discussion of the relationship between public landscapes and public memory. Photographs by Larraine and Ken Worpole.