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. The event will be followed by a drinks reception.

People’s Landscapes: A series of free roundtable events convened by the University of Oxford and the National Trust.

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.