Robin Friend’s *Bastard Countryside* takes its title from Victor Hugo’s phrase for terrain that is “somewhat ugly but bizarre, made up of two different natures”—land neither wholly wild nor wholly made. Published by Loose Joints in 2018, this is Friend’s first book, drawing on fifteen years of work across the British landscape, and it arrives with an essay by Robert Macfarlane.

The photographs are large-format colour, made with a 5×4 camera and composed within a classical landscape tradition. What disturbs that inheritance is colour and framing pushed toward exaggeration, and a persistent attention to places where the expected pastoral narrative breaks down. Leakage, pollution, wreckage, containment: these are the interruptions Friend follows, in marginal and unkempt zones where the sublime and the discarded share ground.

Macfarlane’s accompanying text names the condition Friend photographs as a synthetic “modern nature,” produced by assemblage and entanglement rather than purity and distinction—and asks what kinds of landscape might be worth passing through, living in, or fighting for. The book’s argument is carried as much by its sequencing and design as by any single image: 51 colour plates across 104 pages, in a section-sewn quarter-bound hardcover with embossed covers and tip-ons front and back, published in a modest 240 × 270 mm format.

For collectors of contemporary landscape photography and of the photobook as an edited object, the pairing is the point: a photographer working at the friction between British pastoral ideals and present reality, and a writer whose thinking about landscape and nature has shaped how that friction is discussed. The volume holds a specific position in a recent line of British landscape books that refuse nostalgia without abandoning beauty.