Until I plotted a book on England’s best views I had not realised how much people cared. Ask them to nominate a favourite church or house or even town and they will casually suggest a few. Ask for a view and you delve deep. A view is personal, intimate. It is not a landscape but the experience of a landscape. Many suggested places where they had fallen in love or found consolation. A number said simply, ‘The view from the end of my garden.’ Rejecting such a choice for ‘England’s best views’ could be a personal slight.
That may be why Hazlitt advised his readers always to walk the countryside alone to avoid distraction, though he hurriedly added they should ‘afterwards dine in company’. Lord Clark was of a different opinion. He wrote, ‘With the exception of love, there is nothing else by which people of all kinds are more united than by their pleasure in a good view.’
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