Coming soon! Linda Ross has co-edited New Lives New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain, which is due to be published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press on June 8. Her chapter focuses on Dounreay’s nuclear narratives, with particular emphasis on heritage. Dounreay, in the far north of Scotland, was the site of the UK’s first full-scale fast breeder reactor. It grew to include five reactors, and is now being decommissioned.

The book is part of a wider on-going project on rural modernism, and further details can be found at https://twitter.com/RuralModernism – a synopsis of the volume is below.

“In 1970, the Architectural Press published New Lives, New Landscapes, Nan Fairbrother’s optimistic account of how the British landscape was materially transformed in the post-war decades. Reservoirs, power stations, television and radio-transmitter masts, electricity and telephone pylons, as well as local authority housing and new or improved roads, produced a new rurality. So too did state-subsidised agricultural intensification, wider public access to the countryside, and environmentally protective measures, including landscape designations such as National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Central to Fairbrother’s approach was the concomitant transformation in how British people interacted with these new landscapes in an age of increased mobility. This collection of essays brings a fresh historical perspective to bear on Fairbrother’s concerns. It examines how the changing relationship between government, state and citizen gave rise to a distinct rural modernity during the middle decades of the twentieth century.”