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David Dimbleby:
There's an interesting idea here in the Heart
of England, which is that artists started by having a love affair
with industry because they found it dramatic, exciting; it didn't
at the start destroy the countryside: it enhanced the countryside
for the artist. You see the pictures of furnaces blazing away at night,
sparks flying into the sky, all set in a rustic scene, without the
painter saying, 'this is obnoxious, this smoke shouldn't
be going up here' - it doesn't look like that. It looks
like 'here is an added excitement for the eye'. But quite soon, led
by William Morris for instance, people started turning their back
on it and going to the southern part of the Heart of England, to the
Cotswolds, which became absolutely a hotbed of painters and writers
and poets and musicians, looking at that landscape; trying to suggest
that it was possible that Britain had gone the wrong way, that the
industrial revolution destroyed family, destroyed people's lives,
changed the relationship between themselves and their work. And they
began painting these romantic pictures of the Cotswolds. So in the
Heart of England you have these two... stages in a way, is what it
seems to me: first of all this exuberance, this excitement about the
magic, the fascination with the science and the processes and all
that, and then this pulling back, and saying 'no no, this is a false
god, it takes us the wrong way; actually we've got to re-examine
the old life, the medieval life in the countryside.'
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