People’s Landscapes: Beyond the Green & Pleasant Land

People's Landscapes

A series of free roundtable events convened by the National Trust Partnership is taking place in Oxford in May and June, 2019, on the theme of ‘People’s Landscapes: Beyond the Green & Pleasant Land.’

The National Trust cares for 248,000 hectares of open space across England, Wales and Northern Ireland; landscapes which hold the voices and heritage of millions of people and track the dramatic social changes that occurred across our nations' past. In the year when Manchester will remember the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo massacre, the National Trust’s 2019 People’s Landscapes programme will draw out the stories of the places where people joined to challenge the social order and where they demonstrated the power of a group of people standing together in a shared place. Throughout this year the National Trust is asking people to look again, to see beyond the green and pleasant land, and to find the radical histories that lie, often hidden, beneath their feet.

Joining this national conversation, the ‘People’s Landscapes: Beyond the Green & Pleasant Land’ events will bring together experts and commentators from a range of institutions, professions and academic disciplines to explore people’s engagement with and impact upon land and landscape in the past, present and future.

Time: 6-8pm (doors open at 5:45pm). Events will followed by a drinks reception.

Venue: All events will take place at St Luke’s Chapel, Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG.

Booking: All events are free and open to all. Booking essential via the links below.

2nd May: Contested Landscapes – Book now

At the first event in the series, panellists will discuss the history of land access and ownership, exploring how this has both physically and politically shaped our land and our access to it.

16th May: Creative Landscapes – Book now

This event will explore the ways in which writers, artists and musicians have both responded to and created conceptions of ‘place’ throughout history, considering the role of taste, nostalgia and imaginary spaces in our understanding of landscape today.

30th May: Living in Landscapes – Book now

Panellists will explore landscape as a space for living, considering the pressures on land from population growth, discussing questions of preservation vs. development, and asking: who should decide how we live in landscape?

13th June: Future Landscapes – Book now

This final event will consider future landscapes in the context of food, farming and conservation, with panellists considering what we may want vs. what we will need from our landscapes in a post-Brexit Britain and beyond.


The series is convened by the University of Oxford’s National Trust Partnership, a flagship collaboration which seeks to facilitate new research, knowledge exchange and public engagement with the charity’s places, properties and historic collections. Based at Oxford University, the partnership works with colleagues across a range of disciplines at both institutions. Find out more here. Contact: ntpartnership@humanities.ox.ac.uk