Nor do I understand why tramping across soggy English fields with a packet of sandwiches is more acceptable than looking at early Renaissance paintings and eating grilled porcini in a Tuscan trattoria. I say this as someone who did not leave the UK until the age of 19, having spent my childhood vainly trying to persuade my parents to go abroad – Belgium, Bali, I collected brochures randomly – instead of Bournemouth.My relatives, like many working-class families, suffered from the kind of mild xenophobia common among people who have had little or no contact with other cultures. It used to surface, in the old days, among Labour MPs who declared they had never possessed a passport, as though it was something to boast about. Under Mr Blair, it has been transmuted into a ritual insistence by ministers that Britain is best at this, that and the other, whereas the truth is there are some things other countries do better. The miracle is that foreigners come here at all, not that the Prime Minister and his family have decided to spend a week in Mexico
More from Joan Smith. It’s plain to me that the last person rural communities need pontificating on their behalf is the royal biscuit-maker and wild-flower-sower.

Having failed to change the face of British architecture back to a version of 18th-century classicism, he’s now trying to imagine what it’s like to live in a farm labourer’s tied cottage with no local transport or shops. It’s plain to me that the last person rural communities need pontificating on their behalf is the royal biscuit-maker and wild-flower-sower. Having failed to change the face of British architecture back to a version of 18th-century classicism, he’s now trying to imagine what it’s like to live in a farm labourer’s tied cottage with no local transport or shops.
The best propagandists for the countryside, in my opinion, are not toffs or farmers, but photographers – and probably the greatest living chronicler of the fragile British landscape, Fay Godwin, is having her first major retrospective exhibition at the Barbican.Godwin is a tiny, bird–like woman who has humped her equipment to the remotest places and recorded them in a way which demonstrates that, one day, all traces of man will somehow be eradicated. From the bleakness of Shetland to Kent beaches, the Scilly Isles to Cumbria, Fay has spent her life looking carefully at our landscape and drawing our attention to how unique it is. As a relatively recent resident of the north Kentish coast, I have been walking the Saxon Shore way each week.

Fay did this in 1983 and made a book of it with the writer Alan Sillitoe.The Romney marshes and the coast around Rye are home territory to Fay, who has spent decades chronicling the beaches from Dungeness to Camber and Winchelsea As a walker you experience the landscape in a unique way. It’s not the same through a car window or viewed on television from the comfort of a sofa. When the BBC finally made two television series with the late Alfred Wainwright, it was a real shame that by then the great walker and writer was too fragile to stride through his beloved Lakeland Fells following his classic Coast to Coast route. Sadly, the programmes were static set pieces, filled with endless helicopter shots, a load of visual candyfloss. But if you can’t walk the countryside, then look at Fay’s images of it.My favourite is entitled “Warning” and shows a poster of a large Ginster’s Cornish pasty complete with “Welcome to Cornwall” slogan Below are two official signs tacked to a post. One reads “parking limited to 45 minutes”, and the other “fish and eels from this river are contaminated and should not be consumed”.Another image is of a tatty mobile home in Shetland surrounded by a breezeblock wall, entitled “Tethered Caravan”.

Reculver Abbey on the Kentish coast is photographed from the caravan site, dwarfed by these ugly excrescences. (I know Margaret Beckett has one but they are still man’s nastiest contribution to the rural environment. Perhaps we could have a ruling from Prince Charles about its role in his new rural hub–world.) Fay Godwin has been awarded many accolades, but not, I notice, a seat in the House of Lords. Surely she’d make a fine crossbench spokesperson on behalf of rural Britain.Those crafty cartographersAnother way of experiencing landscape is through maps. But as a brilliantly entertaining and informative new exhibition at the British Library shows, no matter how detailed they might seem, maps are simply not to be trusted.

Entitled “The Lie of the Land”, it shows just how everyone from the military to pirates used maps for disinformation, propaganda and political purposes.Hilarious maps show how the British decided to divide up eastern Africa with the Germans by just drawing a straight line across thousands of miles of jungle; and the dream city of Wellington in New Zealand was proposed as a series of rectangular plots for sale. Both of these were utopian fantasies created regardless of geography. Contrast them with a German map of Portsmouth, which was created by using the British original and overlaying information gleaned from local postcards, holiday snaps and intelligence reports, to show how Nazi Portsmouth would look following German victory.Cartographers made a good living supplying detailed maps of the North American coastline to pirates, and even creating false islands and naming them after figures such as Samuel Pepys to curry favour back home. A map of Nagasaki made in 1685 shows a small enclosed man–made compound, the only place the Europeans were allowed to live.From the moment we knew how to create and plot maps, then we knew how to distort them too. A charming map of a pretentious home–owner’s estate in Hornsey Lane in 1760 manages to make it look like the north London equivalent of Versailles. Under the heading “Paradise Found” is a religious map from 1675 showing the exact location of the Garden of Eden – obviously an essential part of the Sunday School scripture study class.Cartographers also have a habit of changing reality to suit the social and economic climate. So California originally appeared as part of the American mainland, but by 1666 it had become an island, there for the taking.