Explore the vast range of titles available.

Cultural Geography in Practice provides an innovative and accessible approach to the sources, theories and methods of cultural geography. Written by an international team of prominent cultural geographers, all of whom are experienced researchers, this book is a fully illustrated guide to methodological approaches in cultural geography. In order to demonstrate the practice of cultural geography each chapter combines the following features:·Practical instruction in using one of the main methods of cultural geography (e.g. interviewing, interpreting texts and visual images, participatory methods)·An overview of a key area of concern in cultural geography (e.g. the body, national identity, empire, marginality)·A nuts and bolts description of the actual application of the theories and methods within a piece of researchWith the addition of boxed definitions of key concepts and descriptions of research projects by students who devised and undertook them, Cultural Geography in Practice is an essential manual of research practice for both undergraduate and graduate geography students.

At the outbreak of the Second World War the holiday camp entrepreneur Billy Butlin agreed a secret deal to build an Admiralty training camp near Pwllheli in North Wales. The camp would be transferred to Butlin at the end of the war for use as a holiday camp. Whilst planners were initially horrified, the strategic argument that such camps would concentrate coastal development and also provide the necessary places for the expansion of ‘holidays with pay’ prevailed. More sustained opposition came from those concerned about the imposition of a culture of urbanised mass leisure on the Welsh heartland of the Llŷn Peninsula. For some, the threat was ‘bathing beauties’ and alcohol; more profoundly, many feared the destruction of a Welsh-speaking rural polity. National sentiment rallied around an alternative social service camp and an overt form of Welsh nation-building. Nonetheless, Butlin won the case and the holiday camp opened in 1947.

This paper presents an explanation of the appeal of the rural in interwar Wales and the emergence of 'back to the land' tendencies. The context is the fluid and contested understanding of the nation and of national identity. The 'moral topography' of academics at Aberystwyth, most notably the geographer H J Fleure, is outlined. A view of rural society as essentially stable and spiritually virtuous emerges from this work. The development of such ideas within Welsh nationalist politics is outlined and 'back to the land' proposals, from academics and politicians, are discussed. A consideration of the relationship between the traditional and the modern and the role of the rural within this relationship forms the conclusion.

Between 1934 and 1939, over 5000 people, mainly ex-miners and their families, were settled in government-owned land settlements in England and Wales. This policy emerged as a response to mass unemployment, and complemented other schemes for the unemployed developed by the inter-war National Government. This paper will consider the geographical conditions that were imagined, realized and contested in these settlements. Acknowledging the hybrid and liminal nature of these spaces, the paper mobilizes new work in cultural and historical geography and draws out the Heterotopic potential of the settlement programme.

This paper examines how the perceived relationship between environment and health came to be the focus of debate in Wales between 1900 and 1939 and how it influenced the progressive, modernist aims of town and country planning in general and housing reform in particular. The paper suggests that much of the impetus for planned intervention was set in the context of theoretical research on the relationship between environment and health, and that a significant strand of such work was carried out by geographers at Aberystwyth. This paralleled the work of environmental and planning campaigners in Wales and elsewhere who accepted theories on the relationship between environment and physical malaise. The paper outlines some practical responses in the realm of housing and planning that grew from this understanding. It ends by suggesting that these discourses, whilst seemingly anti-urban and anti-modern, were in fact characterized by a particular form of modernism which was expressed in the built environment, particularly of keynote public buildings.