Garden design evolved hugely during the Georgian period - as symbols of wealth and stature, the landed aristocracy had been using gardens for decades. Yet during the eighteenth century, society began to homogenise, and the urban elite also started demanding landscapes that would reflect their positions. The gardens of the aristocracy and the gentry were different in appearance, use and meaning, despite broad similarities in form. Underlying this was the importance of place, of the landscape itself and its raw material. Contemporaries often referred to the need to consult the 'genius of the place' when creating a new designed landscape, as the place where the garden was located was critical in determining its appearance. Genius loci - soil type, topography, water supply - all influenced landscape design in this period. The approach taken in this book blends landscape and garden history to make new insights into landscape and design in the eighteenth century. Spooner's own research presents little-known sites alongside those which are more well known, and explores the complexity of the story of landscape design in the Georgian period which is usually oversimplified and reduced to the story of a few 'great men'.

Garden design evolved hugely during the Georgian period - as symbols of wealth and stature, the landed aristocracy had been using gardens for decades. Yet during the eighteenth century, society began to homogenise, and the urban elite also started demanding landscapes that would reflect their positions. The gardens of the aristocracy and the gentry were different in appearance, use and meaning, despite broad similarities in form. Underlying this was the importance of place, of the landscape itself and its raw material. Contemporaries often referred to the need to consult the 'genius of the place' when creating a new designed landscape, as the place where the garden was located was critical in determining its appearance. Genius loci - soil type, topography, water supply - all influenced landscape design in this period. The approach taken in this book blends landscape and garden history to make new insights into landscape and design in the eighteenth century. Spooner's own research presents little-known sites alongside those which are more well known, and explores the complexity of the story of landscape design in the Georgian period which is usually oversimplified and reduced to the story of a few 'great men'.

Norfolk is a county sadly rich in "lost" country houses; this account and gazetteer offer a comprehensive account of them. Winner of the general non-fiction category in the East Anglian Book Awards 2016. The country houses lost from the landscape since the late nineteenth century exercise a peculiar grip on the English imagination, seeming to symbolise the passing of a world of taste and elegance, of stability and deference: a world destroyed by modernity. This important new book argues that most previous studies of the subject have been characterised by nostalgia and vagueness, and by a tendency to exaggerate the scale of the destruction and simplify its causes. It presents a balanced, systematic analysis of country house losses in Norfolk, discussing the scale and chronology of destruction. The authors argue that the loss of great houses was not an entirely new development of the twentieth century, they explain the varied reasons why houses were abandoned and destroyed, and they explore the archaeological traces which these places, their gardens and parks, have left in the modern landscape. Their arguments are illuminated by a full and lavishly-illustrated gazetteer. This book, the results of many years of fieldwork and documentary research, will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of the country house, in the development of the post-medieval landscape, and in the archaeology and history of the county of Norfolk. Tom Williamson is Professor of Landscape History at the University of East Anglia; Ivan Ringwood is an independent historical researcher; Sarah Spooner is Lecturer in Landscape History at the University of East Anglia.