Book Review

All is not well in arcadia

Real England: the battle against the bland

We're all urbanites or suburbanites these days (well, over 90 per cent of us) but the myth of rural England, it seems, remains deeply rooted in the national psyche. When the influential travel writer Henry Vollam (H.V.) Morton was lying sick in Palestine in 1925 he fantasised about an England of woodsmoke in village streets, of rolling hills and elder-lined lanes. He later set out in his Bullnose Morris looking for this "real" rustic country and produced one of the most influential travel books of the twentieth century, In Search of England, a seductively nostalgic picture of gnarled yokels and picturesque village pubs.

Morton was a Londoner and so, of course, was Brixton boy John Major, whose attempt to conjure up an idealised version of England involved warm beer, cricket on village greens and spinsters cycling to Evensong (copied incidentally from George Orwell). Prone to such sentimentality, Londoners and other city dwellers often have a misty-eyed view of life in the sticks and many of them actually decide to go and live there.

But as these two books show, all is not well in our rural Arcadia. Partly because so many city dwellers insist on going to live in the country, property prices are increasing beyond the means of people whose families may have lived there for generations. At the same time, rural services are under constant threat, with pubs, post offices, village shops and churches closing at a terrifying rate. Instead of organic communities of workers involved in country pursuits, many villages are now soulless dormitories, waiting for their commuting inhabitants to return each evening from the nearest city. The PR executive has evicted the blacksmith, while the old thatched inn has been turned into a weekend retreat for a family from Kensington.

Most of us who live anywhere near the country know all this, but the mirage of a rural existence that is somehow more authentic, rewarding and relaxing remains tempting for many. In reality, escape to the countryside merely means that the new villagers spend more time in their cars than they used to, ferrying their children in and out of town, and probably experience less sense of community than they had in their suburban street.

Richard Askwith's latter-day exercise in Mortonesque travelling takes him around rural England in search of what he takes to be a lost country, a place where people were once truly part of a community, where the names on the village war memorial were still those of ancestors. His quest is sparked by a sort of anxiety familiar to many a middle-aged individual: that nothing seems fixed or durable, that we are losing our real connection with place.

Inevitably he visits many a village where the lawns and hedges are immaculately clipped but where there are few people around during the day and little for them to do. Incomers, he realises, have brought a kind of prosperity to rustic backwaters but in the process have often ousted the indigenous inhabitants and created a sort of chocolate-box desolation. Farmers are bled dry by voracious supermarkets or bankrupted overnight by diseases, while old-fashioned rural livelihoods are reduced to theme-park pastimes.

Not that the perceptive Askwith falls for any nostalgic nonsense à la Morton (who incidentally was a Nazi sympathiser and hence keen on blood and soil). He points out that the countryside of yore was often a place of hardship and deprivation and somewhere that many people wanted to leave as soon as they could. He also sensibly observes that public-spirited incomers have often done a good deal to stimulate the village economy and community by joining in with more enthusiasm than the longer-established locals.

Perhaps most encouragingly, he finds evidence that traditional customs do sometimes adapt and survive, albeit in forms that might be unrecognisable to the yeomanry of a century ago, and that pockets of rural solidarity have managed to withstand the onslaught from the metropolitan intelligentsia. In the end, he returns from his travels to his home village in Northamptonshire, relieved to have found that a meaningful link still exists between the past and the present in rural England.

No such cheer lightens the more militant tone of Paul Kingsnorth's critique of modern England's invasion by corporate blandness. His book looks at the countryside and makes similar points about the dismal lot of farming and the loss of the village inn to the chain brand gastropub; but he is also - and rightly - indignant about the way property developers, marketers and big business are hell-bent on making everywhere the same. From Northumbria to Cornwall the high street is an identical parade of Starbucks and Tesco Metro, with the old-fashioned, distinctive and local cast into economic oblivion.

Much of what Kingsnorth says is palpably true: whose heart has not sunk on exploring an unfamiliar town to find that just about everything one can consume is no different from that on offer at home? There are exceptions, of course (Ludlow springs to mind, or Modbury in Devon), but evidence of the homogenising influence of contemporary capitalism is hard to refute.

But is it the whole story? One might argue that the advent of a truly multicultural society has ushered in a degree of variety and consumer eclecticism that was inconceivable 50 years ago. As anyone who is old enough to remember the high street of the 1960s will attest, there is probably more real choice and diversity now than in the dire days of Wimpy and Woolworths.

But this, perhaps, is not Kingsnorth's real concern, and his polemic is not merely directed against the coffee chains and mobile phone emporia. It is, rather, an impassioned plea for us all to take notice of the fact that globalisation - here meaning the infinite replication of brands as well as architectural and cultural norms - is happening literally next door. Each time that a small family-owned café is replaced by Costa, each time that an executive gated community rises up on what was an open space, each time that an out-of-town supermarket opens its doors, it is part of the same levelling process. Quoting William Cobbett who inveighed against "The Thing" (the Industrial Revolution), Kingsnorth warns of a similar spoliation of our landscape, rural or urban. The only solution, he concludes, is in community activism.

These are important books, and ones that may make you think twice about that rural idyll in the Cotswolds.

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