Reviews

Here are a small selection of reviews received for The New English Landscape:

‘In The New English Landscape, photographer Jason Orton and writer Ken Worpole are determined to excavate the spirit of resistance from history’s forgotten spaces…an antinomian mode of imagining country life equipped to attend to ragged dereliction, ghostly remains and melancholic damp and decay.’

V&A Magazine

‘For well over 40 years Ken Worpole has been one of the most eloquent and forward thinking writers in Britain. The New English Landscape, a collaboration with photographer Jason Orton, is a characteristically fine-grained and suggestive book, beautifully written and designed.’

Icon: International Design, Architecture & Culture

‘Worpole’s connection to the eastern fringes is personal and spiritual, one in which the landscape bears physical testament to the ongoing cycle from creation to ruin to resurrection. Orton’s photographs are almost luminous, despite the brooding skies, and make sacred spaces out of bulldozers slowly creating land out of the sea at London Gateway port, or an overgrown, deserted greenhouse.’

Architecture Today

‘Jason Orton’s photographs provide an almost forensic insight  into a shifting landscape, while Ken Worpole’s texts take you into the strange histories of these emotionally remote places.’

Wallpaper*

‘This book is about traces, the horizontal versus the vertical, about the spirit of place, about belonging to a place, childhood memories, about Englishness, about brown, green and other shades of landscape colour, and about historic landscapes which reflect many different periods, not just the Golden Age. Read The New English Landscape for inspiration, and to think about and reflect on a complex landscape which helps set new parameters for what kinds of landscape are now considered beautiful.’

Landskab Journal (Denmark)

‘Cool, thoughtful, engaging, original…The photographs by renowned landscape photographer Jason Orton capture the essential character of this strange landscape, its ‘sense of place’; they document the present, and offer perspectives on the future.

This is an important book, its lucid and elegant narrative and striking images underscored by intellectual strength. It describes with conviction what landscape is and why it matters, and is a valuable addition to the fast growing literature on landscape and heritage.’

Landscapes (June 2014)

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