England’s 100 best Views, by Simon Jenkins – review

I couldn’t decide on starting England’s 100 Best Views whether it was a batty idea for a book or a perfectly sensible one. Why write about something that begs to be seen? Would this not be better as a collection of photographs, with helpful accompanying maps and perhaps a checklist that, once filled in, entitled you to a badge from Big Chief I-Spy?

On the other hand, as Jenkins (he’s Sir Simon, of course, but book reviews know no distinctions of rank) explains in his introduction, a view is more than just a picture: it is something mobile — a collocation of geography and geology, the built environment and the weather, the movements of birds and mammals, and the mood of the person taking it in. It combines things that change in cycles of seconds with things that have changed over hundreds of millions of years.

You need, in other words, not only someone to tell you where to look, but someone to explain what you are looking at. Our author — as well as being briskly opinionated — is more than up to the task. He sees all these time scales clearly: from the Tyndale monument (commenced 1863) he looks upstream to a power station opened in 1967 and a castle started in 1067. Also, it’s clear that he has really walked around these views and thought about them, often preferring a slightly off-canon position. If he has a bias it’s to favour a lower elevation, enjoying that sense of inhabiting the contours of a landscape rather than looking down on it as on a map.

He skips nimbly from social history to geology, from town-planning to ecology. And he almost always has a literary quotation in his back pocket, though you might think that dividing up the ‘sceptred isle’ speech from Richard II and dropping dollops on pages 118 and 134 is a bit niggardly.