THE SQUIRES IN THE SHIRES.

I made that reference with respect to recent objections by the landed gentry to a new Rail Way visible from the Manor House.  Herewith, the Rest of the Story.  "Runaway railway expansion helped inspire Britain’s preservationist movement." It's more subtle than that: there is at least one Aesthetic Tunnel in the south of England in order that Somebody Important would not see the exhaust, or the commoners riding in an open third.

Some people saw this as progress: In 1839 one railway chairman told Parliament that the companies had every right to level anything that stood in the way of their expansion. (He conceded that Westminster Abbey could probably stay standing.) But as that expansion and other development projects accelerated, some people began to worry about what was being lost. If they couldn’t preserve the slower pace of life they were accustomed to, they reasoned, at least they could save the monuments that evoked those earlier times.

That's referring to stone circles, ruined castles and abbeys, and the like. Toad Hall was exempt.

Wealth also helped drive this movement, since rich people didn’t like when the trains cut through their land. To modern-day developers, this is a predictable problem, but in the early 19th century this particular brand of backlash was still new. When, in the early 1830s, a railway company proposed building a new line from London to Birmingham, local landowners, including at least a couple of earls, gathered at public meetings to protest the proposal, and the danger it posed to the ruins of Berkhamsted Castle in Hertfordshire.

Thus, by 1882 Britain had an Ancient Monuments Protection Act, which, these days, might be invoked to protect George Hudson era viaducts and bridges.