Simon Schama's 'The Story of Us' - Episode 3

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The third and final episode in Simon Schama's new series explores landscape.

The whole series is as relevant to geographers as it is to social and cultural historians.


The third episode is described as follows:

Simon Schama explores the work of artists who have taken inspiration from the British landscape, and expressed how vital it is to people's sense of who they are.

He takes a look at Philip Larkin’s extraordinary poem Going, Going, conceived at the exact moment Britain and the world were waking up to the environmental cost of progress; the poetry of Seamus Heaney, which sought to find common ground in the Irish landscape in the midst of the violence of the Troubles; and the agitprop play The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil, which asked profound questions about the Scottish people's relationship with their own land.

Simon also visits Derek Jarman’s extraordinary garden in Dungeness, created as he was dying from Aids, which touches on a universal need to connect with nature as a consolation for mortality. And there's an interview with U2’s Bono about his deep affection for Seamus Heaney’s poetry and the role of culture in the run-up to the historic Good Friday Agreement.


52 years ago, Philip Larkin was commissioned to write a prologue to a UK government report, How Do You Want To Live? (HMSO, 1972). This was one of the UK's papers submitted to the landmark 1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the Environment 

Larkin was always going to be a risky choice for such a venture, and it's a matter of record that the great 'n' good in government did not wholly like what he wrote – too near the truth, they likely thought, to be published in full. Indeed, the commissioning committee was so discomforted that they cut a verse out of the poem, something which Larkin went along with at the time. 

Larkin published a slightly revised version of this with the missing bits added back in under the title Going, Going in his collection High Windows. 

Going, going

I thought it would last my time –

The sense that, beyond the town,

There would always be fields and farms,

Where the village louts could climb

Such trees as were not cut down;

I knew there’d be false alarms



In the papers about old streets

And split level shopping, but some

Have always been left so far;

And when the old part retreats

As the bleak high-risers come

We can always escape in the car.



Things are tougher than we are, just

As earth will always respond

However we mess it about;

Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:

The tides will be clean beyond.

– But what do I feel now? Doubt?



Or age, simply? The crowd

Is young in the M1 cafe;

Their kids are screaming for more –

More houses, more parking allowed,

More caravan sites, more pay.



 On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve

Some takeover bid that entails

Five per cent profit (and ten

Per cent more in the estuaries): move

Your works to the unspoilt dales

(Grey area grants)!



And when

You try to get near the sea

In summer ...

It seems, just now,

To be happening so very fast;

Despite all the land left free

For the first time I feel somehow

That it isn’t going to last,



That before I snuff it, the whole

Boiling will be bricked in

Except for the tourist parts –

First slum of Europe: a role

It won’t be hard to win,

With a cast of crooks and tarts.



And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres.



Most things are never meant.

This won’t be, most likely; but greeds

And garbage are too thick-strewn

To be swept up now, or invent

Excuses that make them all needs.

I just think it will happen, soon.

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