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This room looks at the area between Nottingham, Wolverhampton and Oxford. Its central themes are the industrial landscape of Derbyshire and the Black Country, and the later rejection of industrialisation by artists who moved to the Cotswolds in search of a rural idyll.

The geology of sites such as Cresswell Crags and of the Peak District became of increasing interest to a nation fascinated by its past and the potential of its natural resources. Joseph Wright’s images of iron forges and cotton mills focus both on the new world of industry and the beauty of its natural setting. Artists celebrated the Iron Bridge and blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale, and tourists visited them enthusiastically.

But by the early nineteenth century many people began to find the industrial ‘Heart of England’ ugly and oppressive, as it grew ever greater in size. A few artists such as Edward Wadsworth sought grim beauty in the slag heaps and chimneys of the midlands. Most turned to an ideal of a pre-industrial world. Following William Morris, they found in the Cotswolds an old England where they could create a slower world of traditional arts and crafts, in a landscape of gentle hills and charming stone-built houses.

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