More perhaps than any other composer, Edward Elgar (1857-1934) has gained the status of an ‘icon of locality’, his music seemingly inextricably linked to the English landscape in which he worked. Grogan’s study of Elgar’s complex interaction with his physical environment, explores how it is that such associations are formed and whether it is any sense true that Elgar alchemized landscape into music. He argues that Elgar stands at the apex of an English tradition, going back to Blake, in which creative artists in all media have identified and warned against the self-harm of environmental degradation.