England's Maritime Heritage from the Air by Peter Waller

The economic, cultural, and political standing of the United Kingdom has changed significantly in the past one hundred years. Its physical geography as a small island nation, the land closely connected to the surrounding seas, has of course not. England's Maritime Heritage from the Air by Peter Waller richly illustrates and examines this story of changing human geographies found in more constant physical realities. Using the rich Aerofilms archive—a collection of over a million aerial photographs of the United Kingdom, taken from the early 1920s onward and now held by Historic England—the book is a collection of 150 images of maritime sites, communities, structure, and vessels. With the earliest photograph dating from 1920 and the most recent from early in the twenty-first century, this is a broad but also well-focused sweep of England's twentieth-century maritime history. Much more than a "then and now" collection of aerial photographs (indeed, for most of the locations there is not really a corresponding present-day "now" image), the book offers a very readable analysis of the development and changing fortunes of a range of maritime-oriented cities, infrastructure, and transportation.

The photographs in this well-presented book are full-page size, with an accompanying short essay on the facing page. This allows for both careful scrutiny of the image and an immediate sense of the context and history of the location at hand. The essays are concise but rich with detail and analysis, and they truly help the photographs tell a compelling story—individually and collectively. Overall, these photographs and accompanying short essays are organized thematically in the book. It starts with a collection of images of major ports in England before moving to smaller ports, shipyards, port development, the Royal Navy, famous ships, ferry terminals, fishing ports, and maritime leisure, and finishing with a collection looking at the "downside"—a reminder of the challenging environment and sometimes perilous nature of coastal settlement. This is a logical thematic ordering that helps bring focus to what could be a disparate and overwhelming assembly of images. This book offers a wonderful exemplar of how to present and examine visual history.

The showpieces of the book are the fascinating photographs illustrating different stages of England's maritime experience in the twentieth century. They show both the immediate dockside infrastructure or recreational amenities, and parts of the accompanying cities and towns, illustrating the fabric of the intimately woven built environment between sea and settlement—and how that fabric has disintegrated as the technology and economy of maritime life has changed. Less interesting to geographers, perhaps, are the images that focus on ships, but even there, one can see how those vessels often visually dominated the towns they visited, a symbolic reminder of the power of the maritime industry in the past. Overall, the author has collected a geographically revealing set of images.

The organization of the photographs allows for compelling illustrations of how some of these places have changed. The short series of images of port facilities around Bristol, for instance, shows how the increasing size of shipping, and containerization, has moved the center of maritime life from inland central Bristol to Portishead, and the Severn estuary at Avonmouth (2–9). A similar story can be seen in Southampton (56–66) across a range of photographs, demonstrating the shifting needs and scales of international trade. The photographs reveal how the "containerized" built environment is much more expansive, rationalized, and dominated by extensive roadways (rather than railways), and is somewhat disconnected from the urban settlement. Seen through the urban landscape and built environment, these pictures and others reveal the profound change of the urban economic geography of the marmite industry.

The hope for the future of these dockland areas can be seen emerging in a number of photographs, suggesting the revitalization of these places around retail, harborside upscale living, recreation, and new office locations. What is striking about this, as revealed by the photographs of the urban landscape, is how (often literally) central the original maritime industry was to the development of these towns and cities, and how this contemporary dockland renaissance—while welcomed as an economic revival—looks very much like a cosmetic tinkering with something much more deeply economically and socially rooted. Such can be the sense of perspective aerial and landscape images bring, especially when offering such a rich historical take as this.

Although the photographs in this book are fascinating, and in themselves offer such telling suggestions about the story of the twentieth-century English maritime experience, the 150 accompanying short essays by the author (and, indeed, the thoughtful introduction) are the real strength of this work. With their well-written analyses, not only do they help make sense of the images, but they also point this book in an altogether deeper geographical orientation. Along with the accompanying images, the essays ably illustrate how the geography of these maritime communities and features is really a story of connections with elsewhere—ports are connecting points with the outside world, and the analysis deftly shows how much these places were dependent on this wider context. They show how the changing regional and global geographies of politics, empire, trade, and economy have shaped these points on England's coast: the early importance of the Hanseatic League, the Atlantic trade, then the Industrial Revolution and empire, then the shifting postindustrial economy and technological change. There is a wonderful vignette, for example, in the discussion of the King George Dock at Hull about how, as illustrated in the 1947 image, it developed as a major coal-exporting facility. Today, reflecting the altered economic (and environmental) setting of the UK, it is a center for the importation of coal and biomass for power generation (14–15). More than anything, the narrative and images illustrate Britain's changing relationship with the world—from industrial power and imperial metropole, to a more hesitant participant in a postindustrial, globalized community—and where better to illustrate this changing relationship than those traditional connecting points, the country's ports and coastal settlements?

So while the book is at first a compelling visual history of a changing coastal urban landscape, the essays make it a rich social, political, and economic history, as illustrated by these changing landscapes. Useful for researchers, students, and nonscholars interested in the field, this book is a work of fascinating historical geography, and in this larger story of change and geographical context eloquently conveyed in the analysis, actually transcends the particular places photographed.