Simon English
England Revisited

For the national arts programme The Re-Enchantment, London based production agency Artevents commissioned artist Simon English to revisit the 75 points that he first encountered in the making of his monumental All England Sculpture of 1971.

From July until September 2010 Simon revisited hedgerows and roadsides, flyovers and forests, fields and fallow terrain, cities, town and hamlets. During his journey Simon catalysed another generation of encounters between people and place and between artist and landscape. He photographed 40 years of history as inscribed in the English landscape.

This site shows the images of the points revisited alongside the images taken in 1971. You can also view Simon’s video diary which record observations about the differing landscapes, communities, ecologies and industries of the 1970’s and those of this millennium.

The boundaries made by the English hedgerow may be dissolved and a field may now be a car park. The advent of Dutch elm disease, the demise of mining, new telecommunication apparatus, crop modification, physical regeneration, climate change, farm diversification and shifting parameters of the urban, the semi-urban, the semi-rural and the rural have occurred. What was once the edge has sometimes moved to the centre and where had been central may now be between. Communities and farms have diversified, people have passed and populations have shifted. Species have invaded and yet, in some places, the vista will remain unchanged – trees near, trees nearby and trees forever.

England Revisited used the technological opportunities of the present to re-visit the past and re-enchant the leylines of a journey first made almost 40 years ago. In 1971 Simon used map pins, stills and photographic slide film, photocopiers, maps and handwritten correspondence.

In 2010 Simon used GPS tagging and virtual cartography to once more write the word England down the length of the actual country.

England Revisited is a new art work about change.