Trevor James raises the prospect of broadening our approaches to local history to take a wider European perspective.

When Professor W. G. Hoskins published his The Making of the English Landscape in 1955, he taught us how to observe and understand the topography of our landscapes, urban and rural, and to do so without necessarily resorting to documents or indeed to do so knowing that no documents were likely to be available. He was guiding us to ‘read’ the landscape...