#issue 09

"Hellgrammite Cloud" by Gary Metras

Suburban cycling and walking need to be understood as more than just quotidian forms of transport driven by economic considerations, but as lifestyle choices, crucial vectors of a whole system of idealisation and identification that took on new meanings in relation to a suburban experience that by necessity remained ideologically reassuringly stable, but also geographically fluid. In the aftermath of the First World War, leisure and healthy bodies took on a heightened cultural potency in an era defined by morbidity and the need for spiritual and physical regeneration. Cultural geographer David Matless outlines how the enjoyment of the British countryside was ‘choreographed’ by a range of conflicting institutional and social bodies that sought to re-shape ideals of modern citizenship, aesthetically, culturally and legislatively. A powerful and influential new Outdoor Movement in Britain articulated a progressive vision of rural traditions in quasi-religious terms that, couched in the language of inter-war nationalism, plotted a new relationship between self and environment. A discourse of ‘preservationism’ sought to protect the countryside from the corrupting influences of commercial leisure and modern ‘advance’ embodied in the hordes of uneducated town-dwellers that threatened to invade as both tourists and more permanent residents.