This document provides information about the "Inspirational Landscapes" module taught by Dr. Peter Knight at Keele University. The module encourages students to look at landscapes through different perspectives, including those of artists, writers, and explorers. It is a project-based course where students can incorporate their own interests into projects that relate to key geography themes and literature. Past student projects have examined topics like the influence of landscapes on music, photography projects exploring places of literary significance, and analyzing how landscapes are portrayed in films. The goal is for students to view landscapes through "new eyes" and represent them creatively.

1. INSPIRATIONAL LANDSCAPES
CHANGING PLACES
7.4.18
ALAN PARKINSON
GEOGRAPHER
KING’S ELY JUNIOR

3. MEGASAKI CITY

4. MEGASAKI CITY: ISLE OF DOGS

5. WEBSITE : A ‘WORK IN PROGRESS’
https://aparkinson51.wixsite.com/inspirationalplaces

6. RGS-IBG
INNOVATIVE GEOGRAPHY
TEACHING GRANT
ANNUAL
£500 (ISH)

7. PREVIOUS PROJECTS
FUNDED BY THIS GRANT
2001 – GeoBlogs
2005 – Google Earth Users Guide
2006 – Geography of Happiness
(with others)
2015 - LondonMapper
And this project

8. RGS-IBG SUBJECT
OVERVIEWS

9. APPLICATION
A’ level teachers are currently teaching new exam specifications for the first
time. The addition of ‘new’ areas including Global Governance has caused
some concern. One area frequently included in requests for support on online
forums and Facebook support groups is the Changing Places topic. I worked on
a chapter in the CUP ‘A’ level textbook on this topic, and enjoyed revisiting
themes first introduced in the OCR Pilot GCSE course.
For some years, Dr. Peter Knight teaches a unit called ‘Inspirational
Landscapes’ as a third year undergraduate module (level 6) as part of the BA
and BSc Hons Geography degree pathways at Keele University. This introduces
students to creative ways of interpreting, and (re)presenting place, with parallels
to ideas on the new specifications. It is mentioned in this ‘Geographical’ article:
http://geographical.co.uk/uk/uk/item/941-geographys-unique-appeal

10. 1. Inspiring Landscapes – Keele University
It was Proust who said ‘the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes, but in having new eyes’. The idea of new eyes is central to
this cross-curricular module at Keele University. Bringing different
disciplines of art together, Inspirational Landscapes encourages students to
look at the world through the eyes of geographers as well as the eyes of
artists, novelists, poets and explorers. Made for creatives, the course is
purely project-based and students are free to draw aspects from their own
interests such as music, film and literature into their work.

11. ‘So far, I have not managed to push the envelope to breaking point’ says
Dr Peter Knight, the module's convenor. ‘The students have to tie their
mountain biking or music or dressmaking somehow back to the key
themes of Geography and to the existing Geographical literature, but
Geography is a broad church.
Nobody has yet come up with a topic in which we can't find Geography’.
The module is taught with several sessions run by a practising artist to
inject a completely different perspective on landscape, and all the guest
lecturers are asked to emphasise how the world can be seen in different
ways from different points of view.

12. PLACE – PLENTY TO EXPLORE

15. 2007: GA
CONFERENCE
Give Geography its Place
Image: Andrew Stacey

16. WHERE ARE YOU FROM?
Near places – Places located
in adjacent settlements and
the wider surrounding region.
In the UK, rural urban
migration flows took
place between cities and their
surrounding countryside.
Far places – Distant places
Within the same country, or
places in other countries
often at a considerable
distance away.

17. BUZZFEED
STEREOTYPES

18. NORFOLK GA SESSION -
SLIDESHARE

19. OCR ‘A’ & ‘B’
GEOGRAPHY
TEXTS

20. CUP AQA ‘A’
LEVEL TEXT

21. THE MAP THAT CAME
TO LIFE

22. PLACE

23. 2018 RUNNING OF THE
MODULE…
PETER’S BIT…

24. 24
GEG-30014 Inspirational Landscapes
Peter Knight p.g.knight@keele.ac.uk
Guest contributors: Miriam Burke, and several Keele Geographers!
Lecture 1: What’s it all about?
How does the module work? What is it all about?

25. 25
GEG-30014 Inspirational Landscapes
Peter Knight p.g.knight@keele.ac.uk
Guest contributors: Miriam Burke, and several Keele Geographers!
Lecture 1: What’s it all about?
How does the module work? What is it all about?

26. 26
How does this module work?
See online handbook on VLE for deadlines, reading, etc
Weekly 2-hour sessions weeks 1-11.
Plus opportunity for extra1-hour sessions in weeks 3, 6 and 9.
Follow-up discussion, reading, and thinking.
NB: (i) Core Geography (places, things, ideas, theory…)
(ii) People/things that are new to you
(iii) Project material
NB: VLE, Facebook Group, … and talk to each other.
Your own project (75%)
In-class test (25%): covers people/things mentioned in lectures

27. 27
What is this module?
1. Where are we going?
“Extreme Geography”
The purpose of University?
The purpose of Geography?
…The purpose of this module??

28. 28
What is this module?
What can you see already?
Exercise 1.
(What can you see… what do you choose
to notice, about this room that we are in?)

29. 29
What is this module?
LANDSCAPE
ARTISTS GEOGRAPHERS POETS ETC… ETC…
I N S P I R E S

30. 30
What is this module?
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
T.S.Eliot from "Little Gidding"
painting by
Wyndham Lewis

31. 31
What is this module?
"And what should they know
of England who only
England know?"
Rudyard Kipling,
from "The English Flag"

32. 32
What is this module?
"The only real voyage of
discovery consists not in
seeking new landscapes, but in
having new eyes; in seeing the
universe through the eyes of
another, one hundred others -
in seeing the hundred
universes that each of them
sees." Marcel Proust
(wikimedia commons)
Marcel Proust
"À la recherche du temps perdu" (In Search of Lost Time)

33. 33
What is this module?
2. Where do we start? Landscape: the heart of geography
Matthews and Herbert (2008) p.100:
“Geographically, the concept of landscape refers to a part
of the Earth’s surface viewed as a whole, including a set of
phenomena, their characteristics, and those aspects of the
biophysical and human environment that are influential.
Alexander von Humboldt defined landscape as “the total
character of an Earth region”. As such, it subsumes three
core concepts of geography – space, place and
environment – and can lay claim to providing geographers
with their elusive ‘object of study’.”

34. 34
What is landscape?
www.thefurtrapper.com
Monument Valley
discuss...

35. 35
What is landscape?
"Landscape is at once an old and pleasant word in common
speech and a technical term in special professions... A simple
exercise will quickly reveal the problem. Take a small but varied
company to any convenient viewing place overlooking some
portion of city and countryside and have each, in turn, describe
the "landscape" (that “stretch of country as seen from a single
point,” as the dictionary defines it)... It will soon be apparent
that even though we gather together and look in the same
direction at the same instant, we will not – we cannot – see the
same landscape."
Meinig, D.W. (1979) The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene.
in Meinig, D.W. (ed) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes:
Geographical Essays. (OUP)

36. 36
What is landscape?
Meinig's ten views of a
landscape:
Landscape as Nature
Landscape as Habitat
Landscape as Artifact
Landscape as System
Landscape as Problem
Landscape as Wealth
Landscape as Ideology
Landscape as History
Landscape as Place
Landscape as Aesthetic

37. 37
What is landscape?
www.thefurtrapper.com
Monument Valley
http://www.petergknight.com/deepgeography/monumentvalley.html

38. What is landscape?
LOOK HARDER!!
And from different points of view
Exercise 1b.
(What do you think the lecturer sees…
what does he choose to notice, about
this room that we are in?)

39. 39
A landscape by John Constable (1776-1837)
John Constable. Landscape: Noon (The Hay-Wain). 1821.
Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London, UK.

40. 40
Enchanted Forest, 1947. Oil on
canvas, 87 1/8 x 45 1/8 inches.
Peggy Guggenheim Collection.
76.2553.151. Jackson Pollock © 2007
The Pollock-Krasner
Foundation/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York.
A landscape by
Jackson Pollock
(1912-1956)

41. 41
"Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer - and
often the supreme disappointment."
Ansel Adams
A landscape by Ansel Adams (1902-1984)

42. 42
“…everyday
life: real
unaltered
impressions...
The street
photographer
freezes a
moment that
you will
forget.”
Markus Hartel
A landscape by Markus Hartel
http://www.markushartel.com/what-is-street-photography.html

43. 43
A landscape by Capability Brown (1716-1783)
Knowsley Hall, Merseyside.
Created, rather than captured??

44. 44
A “landscape” of People
Can a landscape be people?

45. 45
Do buildings count as landscape?

46. 46
Can we call the sky “landscape”?
...or is it a part of landscape? Or just the background?

47. 47
How do we see past or future landscapes?
Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927)
The future, imagined in the past

48. 48
Natural
Anthropogenic
Imagined
Spiritual
etc…
Built
Grown
Written
Painted
Musical
Cinematic
etc…
Heard
Touched
Felt
Seen
Read
etc…
Different ways of classifying landscapes

49. 49
W.G.Hoskins, 1955.
“The Making of the English Landscape”
“One may liken the English Landscape, especially in a
wide view, to a symphony, which it is possible to enjoy as
an architectural mass of sound…
“…but if instead of hearing merely a symphonic mass of
sound we isolate the themes as they enter, to see how
one by one they are intricately woven together… the total
effect is immeasurably enhanced. So it is with
landscapes of the historic depth and physical variety that
England shows almost everywhere.”
“Poets make the best topographers.”

50. 50
Gustav Mahler
1860-1911
“The symphony should
be like the world: it
must embrace
everything."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE
CVyN5D60I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE
CVyN5D60I

51. 51
image: http://www.the-american-interest.com/
W.H.Auden
1907-1973
“Generally considered the greatest
English poet of the twentieth
century, his work has exerted a
major influence on succeeding
generations of poets on both sides
of the Atlantic.”
“His poetry frequently recounts,
literally or metaphorically, a journey
or quest, and his travels provided
rich material for his verse.”
Source: Academy of American Poets.
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/120

52. 52
“Because literature thrives on metaphor, it is easy to forget
its origins in the real, tangible world.
Auden’s love for the North Pennines was also a
profoundly personal response to the landscape, and it
is a matter for concern that so little research has been
done on the actual locations which so powerfully
prompted or mirrored the poet’s preoccupations.”
Alan Myers (2004) http://www.seaham.i12.com/myers

53. 53
FACE AS LANDSCAPE
(OR LANDSCAPE AS FACE)
The face:
“is the geometrical site of all this
knowledge; it is the symbol of everything that
an individual has brought with him or her as
the prerequisite of their life. In it is deposited
that which has dropped from the past to the
bottom of his life and has become permanent
features in the individual”.
(Georg Simmel, 1950)

54. 54
“My skin is like a
map of where my
heart has been”
Natasha Bedingfield
“I Bruise Easily”
http://www.bmi.com/images/

55. 55
“…the burning sand,
the oppressive sky, the
fractured, enigmatic
shards of civilization
which litter the desolate
terrain…”
P.French, 1977. “Westerns”

56. 56
“A sort of granite block, marked by life.
A face made of marble.”
(Sergio Leone on why he cast Charles Bronson
in Once Upon a Time in the West)
“As hard-baked and primitive as the monuments of Arizona that
would serve as his backdrop.”
(Oreste De Fornari, 1997. “The great Italian Dream of Legendary America”)

57. 57
eg Actors faces/costumes as metaphors for landscape
eg (Cinematic) landscapes as metaphors for…(?)
Metaphorical landscapes

58. 58
What are “inspirational” landscapes?
Torres del Paine National Park, Chile. www.contactoturismo.com
And what exactly do they inspire?

59. 59
Uluru (Ayers Rock)
Inselberg. Tourist attraction. Sacred Ground.
Research site. Film set. Home. Seen, touched, etc…

60. 60
Science & Scientists
Inspired by Landscape
“The main stimulus to an interest in
geomorphology is an interest in
visually appealing landscapes… It
is almost certainly true that many
practitioners of geomorphology
became geomorphologists rather
than soldiers, historians, engineers
or accountants because they were
fascinated by such phenomena as
karst, dunes, reefs, glaciers or
gorges.”
Goudie, A.S. (2001)
Geomorphology, Vol.47 p.245
Did a love of great landscapes make you into a geographer?

61. 61
“Recent writers… have heard the
topographical characteristics of the
English countryside morphologically
represented in elements of Elgar’s
musical syntax. …Elgar’s melodic
writing “resembles and suggests the
patterns of nature: gentle undulations
of field and hedgerow, copse and dell –
fruit trees planted in rows to make an
orchard – the linked chain of the
Malvern hills rising up suddenly out of
the Severn valley – and flowing
through all that landscape the curving
and recurving river… Shapes in
melody give back the repeating shapes
of his own countryside…””
Grimley & Rushton, 2004: Cambridge
Companion to Elgar.
Sir Edward Elgar
1857-1935

62. 62
www.nationaltrail.co.uk/uploads/north-downs-way-trail-guide.pdf
“Hardy was inspired and influenced by the
landscape he imagined as "partly real,
partly dream country". Our 3-day tour
explores some of the locations that can be
identified in his novels, and places that
featured strongly in his life…”
“Thomas Hardy Country, South Dorset & The Isle of Purbeck (3 Days)”
www.wessexheritagetours.com

63. 63
“The Skin of the Earth” (1955)
Austin Miller
“The landscape has been compared to a symphony whose
various elements, subtly interwoven, combine to assault
the senses with a pleasure of fine sound... If this is so then
a map is to the landscape as the printed score is to the
symphony. To enjoy the interplay of harmonies and rhythm
most of us must hear the symphony played by a full
orchestra; to appreciate the blending of its elements we
must go out and view the landscape”
Drawing together some of the key points so far

64. EXAMPLES OF PAST PROJECTS:
Impact of the Malvern Hills on Elgar's music
Video diary of a walk in Wordsworth's footsteps
Photomontage of the experience of Dovedale
Influences of Indian landscape on fashion design
Johnny Depp: face, costume and landscape
Landscapes of Lord of The Rings
Landscape design for computer games
Disney morality enforced by Disney landscape
Use of landscape images in advertising
Thomas Hardy and the "Wessex" landscape
Communicating climate change through music

65. 65
NB: This is not a “research” project
You are not necessarily aiming to “find something out”
You can aim to explore or create or review…
Your project can be creative, descriptive…
You must not embark on anything that needs any
formal risk assessment or ethics evaluation.
You must set whatever you do into a framework of
previous geographical work.
eg if you make a geographical landscape dance
video you need to write something about previous
“performance geography” work.

66. Ways of presenting your project
1. Must include SOME text / commentary and must
include references to literature and a reference list.
2. Can be completely text based (essay-style project)
but does not have to be. Even text-based projects
will probably benefit from illustrative material.
3. Can be non-text, eg poster, video, artwork…etc, but
will need some accompanying explanation or
commentary and literature context.
I will aim to show some example work in week 3

67. 67
CONCLUSION to Lecture 1: What to do now…
1. Decide if you really want to do this module
2. Facebook group discussion: everybody post up a picture, link or
description of something you consider an “inspirational landscape”
(why Facebook?)
3. Check out anything, anyone or any place that you weren’t familiar
with that we mentioned in today’s lecture. Look up Pollock, Auden,
Hoskins, Mahler, Meinig, etc.
4. SET READING Matthews and Herbert (2008) Chapter 1, and
pages 100-104. Also look at the other key texts we’ve identified
online. More than ever, your INDEPENDENT READING is
important.
5. Start thinking about what you might do for your project.
6. Get together and TALK TO EACHOTHER about this module.

68. FACEBOOK GROUP
DISCUSSIONS

69. FOOD LANDSCAPES
CARL WARNER

70. WHAT DID I DO NEXT?
WEBSITE
https://aparkinson51.wixsite.com/inspirationalplaces

71. TOPICS FOR
THE
MODULE(S)

72. SENSE
OF
PLACE
Checklist for Urban fieldwork
Developed by Claire Kyndt

73. CULTURAL LANDSCAPES
The cultural landscape is everything we see
in a place. It is the totality of the changes
which people have brought to the natural
landscape, including the architecture,
infrastructure and demography of a place. It
also includes the art, music (‘soundscape’)
and sporting life of a place.
Simon Oakes

74. SHEFFIELD’S CULTURAL
LANDSCAPE
You have 10 minutes to add yours

75. BRENDAN CONWAY
BEATLES STORYMAP
https://notredamecobham.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=
a4fdfbf9676d4534b62f737bc06e575d

76. SONG LYRICS
Red Tide
Rush
Nature has some new plague
To run in our streets
History some new wrinkle
We are doomed to repeat
Fugitives at the bedroom door
Lovers pause to find an open store
Rain is burning on the forest floor
And the red tide kisses the shore
This is not a false alarm
This is not a test
Stay out of the sun
It only burns my skin
Sky full of poison
And the atmosphere's too thin

78. INVENTED PLACES
OS – 1ST APRIL 2018

79. GOOGLE TRENDS –
INTERESTING PLACES

80. SCRATCHCARD TIME…

81. TECHNOLOGY

82. NEAR & FAR PLACES

83. NEW GA RESOURCE
ON SHEFFIELD

85. GET INVOLVED FURTHER
#125UKPLACES
ADD YOURS HERE….
PART OF MY OS #GETOUTSIDE
CHAMPIONS WORK FOR 2018

86. RECOMMENDED
READING

87. PLACE – Hunstanton / Suburbia
Data Skills in Geography
Royal Geographical Society
http://www.rgs.org/OurWork/Schools/Teaching+resources/Key+Stage+5+resour
ces/Data+skills+and+thinking+geographically/Changing+Places.htm

88. SEEING PLACES
DIFFERENTLY…
Image by Jack Davison

89. QUESTIONS…

90. BARRY HOLSTUN
LOPEZ
“How do people imagine the
landscapes they find themselves in?
How does the land shape the
imagination of the people who dwell
in it?
How does desire itself, the desire to
comprehend, shape knowledge?”
“Arctic Dreams

91. REFERENCES
GEOLIBRARY BLOG
LIVINGGEOGRAPHY BLOG
CULTCHA BLOG
OS BLOG:
https://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/blog/2018/04/mapping-
new-island-april-fools-day
SLIDESHARE PRESENTATION FROM GA NORFOLK BRANCH