Cold War

In the early 1950s, the historian Professor William Hoskins, in his pioneering work The making of the English Landscape, lamented what he saw as the devastation of the countryside by scientists, the military and politicians. He saw his world as dominated by 'the obscene shape of the atom-bomber, laying a trail like a filthy slug upon Constable's and Gainsborough's sky. England of the Nissen hut, the 'pre-fab', and the 'electric fence, of the high barbed wire around some unmentionable devilment'. A generation later, this book reveals what lay behind the fence and how these sites are now, in dereliction, a new aspect of the complex landscape history of Britain.