Martin Stott

Martin Stott

Martin Stott

Sustainability campaigner, photographer, local champion, Oxford

I have worked on sustainable development and regeneration issues in my career in local government, having graduated from Oxford in geography and LSE in town and country planning. I am now a writer and photographer documenting the granular and quotidian characteristics of small spaces and the people who live in them – particularly in east Oxford, where I have lived for the past 40 years. My book The Cowley Road Cookbook: culinary tales and recipes from Oxford’s most eclectic street (Signal Books, 2015) documents the social and cultural history of one street through food, from the twelfth century to the present day. I blog as ‘Lord Muck’ in a fairly light-hearted manner on gardening, growing, cooking, composting and other aspects of our interaction with the natural world.

I have explored William Morris’s experience of, response to, and continuing impact on Iceland in ‘What came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire: Morris and Iceland’ in The Routledge Companion to William Morris (ed. Florence Boos; Routledge, 2021).

I have been working since mid-2018 on a project to record every household on the street I have lived on for the past 33 years, in the Divinity Road Photo Project.  The street is very long, very diverse and very transient, and has been identified as the street with the widest range of household incomes in England. The COVID-19 pandemic has reframed and refocussed the project in a context where our understanding of neighbourhoods has become ever more important.

“Divinity Road has been identified as the street with the widest range of household incomes in England”

Explore Martin’s Work

www.martin-stott.com

Portrait of man at bay window
Martin Stott, Mallard Haye with his Arum Lilies, from The Divinity Road Photo Project, 2018

The Divinity Road Photo Project

The Routledge Companion to William Morris

Cookbook cover

The Cowley Road Cookbook: culinary tales and recipes from Oxford’s most eclectic street (Signal Books, 2015)

Andrew Hodgson

Andrew Hodgson

Andrew Hodgson

Lecturer in Romanticism at the University of Birmingham

My research focuses on poets and poetry, largely from the Romantic period onwards. I have written a book, Lyric Individualism (Palgrave, 2020), about four lyric poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – each of whom finds subtle and affecting ways of conveying a sense of place and the significance of home in their writing. My next project is a new edition of the correspondence of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Shelley’s letters breathe an imaginative apprehension of the natural spirit and cultural inheritance of the places across Europe from which they were written.

Will Bowers


Will Bowers

Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought, Queen Mary University of London

My work on place has two interrelated strands: the study of literary coteries and how aspects of these coteries’ settings are enacted in their writing; and critical engagement with writing about Italy (its landscapes, cityscapes, and cultural heritage) from Milton to Barrett Browning. I have recently published an essay—‘Vallombrosa Visited, 1638–1851’, Modern Philology 118 (2021), 364-389—that attempts to distill about ten years of thinking on how writers approach places they’ve previously encountered on the page. 

Other relevant publications include: the edited collection Re-evaluating the Literary Coterie (Palgrave: 2016), a monograph The Italian Idea (CUP, 2020), an essay on verse and the weather (‘Byron’s Rhyming Clime’, Essays in Criticism 69, (2019), 157–177), and another on Romantic tourism (‘Italian Travel, English Tourism, and Byron’s Poetry of Exile’, Litteraria Pragensia 23:46 (2013), 86–102).

I am (slowly) working on a book on the Holland House circle, a Romantic literary salon which hosted and patronised British and European authors, and on editing the letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley for a new edition of his correspondence. Shelley’s letters are particularly suited to Arts of Place: both as a record and description of travel through England and Europe, and as a meditation on a poetic maturity in exile, one spent trying to establish imaginative roots and to find the comforts of home.

James Metcalf


James Metcalf

Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature, King’s College London

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/people/james-metcalf

Often called the ‘graveyard school’, but more specifically focussed on the churchyard, the poets I work on begin their poems with a strong attachment to place. As the centre of British rural life for centuries, the material place of the country churchyard kept the ancestral dead at the foundation of a local, living community. It was also a prominent symbolic space in the cultural imaginary, defining the inherited, intergenerational relationship between the living and the dead. During the eighteenth century, the country churchyard’s significance was continually reaffirmed in poems that were attentive to both its physical landscape and its emblematic position at the intersection of nature, history, death, and the sacred.

My book project, provisionally entitled Written in the Country Churchyard: Place and Poetics, 1720–1820, refocuses critical debate on poems by Thomas Parnell, Edward Young, Robert Blair, and Thomas Gray, but also an expanded range of texts including poems by Elizabeth Carter, William Cowper, Charlotte Smith, William Wordsworth, and John Clare. I use the country churchyard topos inhabited by these poems to examine how this place was not a formulaic backdrop for melancholy mood-pieces, but a central site for their contemplative poetics. My project also includes a special issue of the European Journal of Life Writing (2020) with an essay on the dramatic revisions to ‘graveyard school’ formulations of the dead, place, and community in Charlotte Smith’s ‘Sonnet XLIV. Written in a Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex’ (1789) and a forthcoming chapter on Elizabeth Carter’s ‘Ode to Melancholy’ (1739), interrogating the role of the churchyard in Carter’s negotiation of ideas of active sociability and contemplative solitude.

This work is constellated around eighteenth-century preoccupations with the body and its relationship to the phenomenal environment, drawing on themes including landscape and the earth, the body and labour, and self-reflexive attention to the procedures of poetic making that cross the boundaries of physical and cognitive dwelling in a simultaneously real and imagined place. These ideas continue to animate my research, including a new project on eighteenth-century poetry and the objects unearthed, collected, and interpreted in contexts of geology, natural history, and antiquarianism. I am exploring how materials such as fossils, bones, fragments of rock strata, and made artefacts were ‘unearthly’ in a layered sense: extracted from the earth, they also stimulated both estrangement and excitement in their unknown origin, composition, and relation to the history of the earth. At the centre of geohistorical inquiry, these unearthly objects were also a source of imaginative vitality for poets in this period. I am reading their work to investigate how these materials test the limits of literary representation and compel new forms of thinking and writing about the nonhuman—an issue made urgent and compelling in our Anthropocene epoch.