This paper is an inquiry into these debates around; Englishness, rural nostalgia and the ant-development narrative surrounding landscapes of cultural significance and natural beauty.

The research’s primarily aim is to examine how the pre-occupations found in 18th and 19th century romantic English landscape painting foreground our understanding of the contemporary countryside. The inquiry is underpinned through challenging the traditional reading of landscape and artistic practice through the paradigm of Gainsborough’s and Constable’s paintings; cultural conventions which have informed legislation for the past 100 years and which continue to pervade current positions on landscape preservation and cultural management.

As a new geopolitical landscape emerges, the paper extends this inquiry through scrutinizing the tensions around the country’s areas of Green and Grey Belts, as the need for new housing dominates the political agenda. These marginal spaces are the territory of a sub-genre of nature writing whose prose mediates the disciplines of ecological scrutiny and aesthetic awareness. Adjoining the synchronous practices of historical painting and contemporary literature, ‘The Bucolic Ordinary’, asks us to consider what constitutes Englishness, nature, beauty and landscape in the 21st century.