The W G Hoskins Lecture 2024
‘Landscape History after Hoskins: Country Walks through Colonial Britain’ presented by Professor Corinne Fowler.
The thirty-third Hoskins lecture
1 June 2024
The Hoskins Lecture keynote presentation was delivered by Professor Corinne Fowler who is Professor of Colonialism and Heritage at the University of Leicester. She is co-investigator of both the Rural Racism Project and the AHRC project ‘Addressing the Histories and Legacies of Empire in Literary House Museums: Dove Cottage and Beyond’, which brings together academics, consultants, stakeholders, and community groups to investigate the colonial links of Romantic-period literary house museums, using Wordsworth Grasmere as an initial focus.
In this talk, Professor Fowler explored how raw materials, slavery-produced goods, and colonial wealth reshaped British landscapes from the remote Scottish isle of Jura to Cornish copper mines. Together with ten walking companions, Corinne’s new book Our Island Stories: Country Walks Through Colonial Britain examines how local history is intertwined with imperial history, investigating the unique colonial dimensions of British agriculture, landownership, enclosure, wool-making, cotton-weaving and coastal trade.
The story of the walks is a focus on: the Scottish Isle of Jura (links with Jamaica); Grasmere in the Lake District (Canton); Whitehaven in Cumbria (Virginia); Wales (the Americas); the Cotswolds (Bengal); Norfolk (the West Indies); Hampshire (Louisiana); Tolpuddle in Dorset (Australia and Barbados); and Cornwall (the Americas).
She looked at the history of cotton, the history of copper and the history of iron, she says. “It’s important to mention that historians of colonialism feel strongly that we shouldn’t talk about the history of empires so much as working-class history. She explores precisely how those histories are intertwined. There’s so much to be done generally about the interconnections between labour history and colonial history. And that’s what she is trying to bring out in these walks through the countryside.
“Each area has a unique set of connections to the British empire – in Cornwall it’s copper, in Wales it’s wool – that is strongly connected to plantation history. These things are not obvious.”
‘Walking Through the Past’ presented by Colin Hyde
A look at guided walking trails from Susanna(h) Watts in 1804 (she published her guidebook ‘A Walk Through Leicester’ anonymously, and referred to herself as ‘he’ in the address at the beginning of the book) to the latest online walking tours of Leicester. Considering how these trails have changed over the years – or not – can tell us about how Leicester has celebrated its heritage over the past 200 years.
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Colin has been with the East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA) at the University of Leicester since 2001 and was seconded to the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage Midlands Hub, also at the University of Leicester, between 2018-2021. Colin has many years’ experience of giving advice, help and training in oral history. He has helped to create oral history related exhibitions, newsletters, books, CDs, videos, and websites.
‘Blue Dogs, Basketry, Board Games and Bells’ presented by Pam Fisher
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Pam completed an MA and a PhD at the Centre for English Local History at the University of Leicester. She is currently the Volunteer Programme Manager for Leicestershire Victoria County History Trust and also County Editor. Pam’s role is to plan the research, recruit, train and support volunteer historians to help, to carry out some research herself and to prepare or edit a text for publication.