Figures in the Landscape: the study of the environment

Ortelius's map is one of the first maps of Scotland. A hundred years later Sir Robert Sibbald's Scotia Illustrata, if it had been completed as planned, would have been a complete Encyclopaedia of the country. Slezer followed Sibbald to catalogue visually the principal towns. Barker's Panorama turned this into a highly successful compound of information and popular entertainment. Recognising the physical environment as a source of information led James Hutton to a revolutionary view of geology developed by his successors Lyell and Geikie and down to the present day.

Archaeology paralleled geology as a scientific mode of enquiry into the history concealed in the environment. Under the leadership of Gordon Childe, archaeology began to populate the great empty tracts of prehistory that Hutton and other geologists had opened up to scrutiny. And it was a kind of archaeology in the making, the need to record vanishing buildings of Edinburgh, which inspired the artist Daniel Wilson in the 1830s.

It could be argued that Sibbald's true heir was Patrick Geddes. Geddes saw that human society is a natural form of organisation like any other. It is equally dependent on its environment, but also to understand this needs comprehensive information. This made Geddes both the father of modern town planning and a prophet of modern environmentalism. Geddes found a champion in Percy Johnson-Marshall who helped persuade the University to buy the Outlook Tower that Geddes had made a symbol of his vision, only for it to be sold a few years later. Johnson-Marshall himself played a role in the actual planning of Edinburgh in the 1960s and 70s, and his personal collection now forms a major planning archive, now held in Edinburgh University Library. Right up to date, the Institute of Geography/Edinburgh University Library project Charting the Nation might have been planned by Robert Sibbald himself if he could have imagined the means.