Landscape with bulldozer: machines, modernity and environment in post-war Britain

In the landscape of post-war Britain the bulldozer was not a native species but a naturalised one. Some might even have called it invasive. The bulldozer arrived in Britain as a consequence of war and as part of an army. Massed formations of crawler tractors with bulldozer blades, manufactured in the United States, crossed the Atlantic as vital elements of the vast armoury of equipment brought to Britain by the American armed forces during the Second World War (see Figure 3.1).¹ The bulldozer itself, while in origin a civilian machine, has always had a close relationship with the technologies of