Somerset, a ‘green and pleasant’ energy landscape?

With its agro-pastoral landscape of hedgerows, fields, and
rolling hills and levels, often-sleepy Somerset may be the very
picture of rural England – the quintessential ‘green and pleasant
land’. To reinforce this, the area gained a variety of landscape
and environmental designations over the course of the twentieth
century, including Exmoor National Park and the Quantock, Mendip
and Blackdown Hills Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs).


At the same time the Somerset region is a twenty-first-century
hub of energy production that faces further intense energy
development, both renewable and non-renewable. It is the site of
the Hinkley Point nuclear power stations A and B, and,
potentially C, as well as new supersized transmitter pylons. It
is also increasingly – often controversially – dotted with wind-
and solar-power projects.


To what extent are the two faces of Somerset in conflict with one
another? After all, Somerset has a long, proud record of
historical energy provision, if its coal mining and other
industrial activities are taken into account. How is it that
inconsistencies between public expectations of landscape beauty
and energy security have developed?


As a historian of the Universities of Bristol and Cambridge, Jill
Payne has worked on the historical dichotomy between energy
provision and the aesthetics of landscape and environmental
protection in South West England. In this episode of the
Exploring Environmental History Podcast series, Jill explores
what people have come to expect in terms of energy security and
how this squares with the issues involved in the desire to
protect and preserve landscape and environment in ‘green and
pleasant’ England.


Music credits: Marcos Theme by
Loveshadow and "Out in the rain" by
offlinebouncer, both available from ccMixter.