A Sense Of Treasured Place

Our landscape has been immortalised by literary greats, but so, too, should those literary greats be immortalised in our landscape.

- Clive Aslet

D. H. LAWRENCE was born at 8a, Victoria Street, a terraced house in the red-brick mining village of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, in 1885. His father had begun work at the Brinsley Colliery at the age of seven, rising to the position of ‘butty’ or mining contractor. reflecting this progress, the homes in which the Lawrence family lived became progressively more substantial.

From Victoria Street, they moved to an end-of-terrace house in what is now Garden road, with a more generous garden. respectable from the front, it backed onto a squalid alley, which was Mrs Lawrence’s bête noire.

This occasioned another move, this time to walker Street—‘a house on the brow of the hill, commanding a view of the valley, which spread out like a convex cockle-shell, or a clamp-shell, before it,’ as Lawrence described in Sons and Lovers.

The final move took place when Lawrence was 19 and brought the family to the gentility of a semi-detached house, 97, Lynncroft: the author felt a quiet pride in the achievement.

Lawrence may have left three years later, hardly ever to return, but Eastwood and its locale remain Lawrence country, as surely as the Stour valley, on the border of Essex and Suffolk, is Constable country. They were a mental landscape he mined for his novels, in the same way that his neighbours dug coal from the ground. ‘I shall never forget the Haggs—I loved it so,’ Lawrence later told one of the family who had lived at Haggs Farm, in ‘the old England of the forest and the agricultural past’ just outside the village.

Eastwood has changed, but literary pilgrims still feel that they’re breathing the same air as its most famous son. Shouldn’t such places be treasured? Don’t they deserve a category of protection in their own right?