Simon Jenkins’s notebook: Why a wind farm will never be as beautiful as a railway viaduct

Until I plotted a book on England’s best views I had not realised how much people cared. Ask them to nominate a favourite church or house or even town and they will casually suggest a few. Ask for a view and you delve deep. A view is personal, intimate. It is not a landscape but the experience of a landscape. Many suggested places where they had fallen in love or found consolation. A number said simply, ‘The view from the end of my garden.’ Rejecting such a choice for ‘England’s best views’ could be a personal slight.

That may be why Hazlitt advised his readers always to walk the countryside alone to avoid distraction, though he hurriedly added they should ‘afterwards dine in company’. Lord Clark was of a different opinion. He wrote, ‘With the exception of love, there is nothing else by which people of all kinds are more united than by their pleasure in a good view.’ I am told more Britons pass their time looking at views than visit museums, stately homes or football matches. This embraces not just famous ‘beauty spots’. The countryside as a whole ranked with the royal family, Shakespeare and the NHS in recent Olympics polls of what people most admired about England.

Which makes even more baffling the modern politician’s lack of feel for the countryside. I doubt if Ed Miliband would recognise a blade of grass. He told his conference of something called a town’s ‘right to expand’ into the country, a right I can find in no political philosophy. David Cameron and George Osborne are no different. I enjoyed Private Eye’s spoof of them and their friends travelling to Manchester the other week by train and gazing bemused out of the window.