The wild, romantic side of Britain

The Lake District is now considered a beautiful part of the country – but it was once an unloved wilderness. Alastair Sooke describes the moment this changed.

Before the advent of the railways, great swathes of Britain were inaccessible to the public. Areas such as the Lake District in the north of England were considered wild, desolate and unattractive.

But all this was transformed with the publication of a short book called A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and Beautiful, in which the philosopher Edmund Burke explored the new concept of ‘the sublime’.

The Romantic period that followed celebrated the individual artist’s direct, subjective response to nature…