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Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside

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Too often, the lives of rural people have been overlooked or else romanticised, especially by writers. Not here ... Warm, astute and sincere' Ownership is a crucial theme of Rural, both strictly legal ownership and subtler senses of belonging. Landowners – whether benevolent, grasping, indifferent, or rewilding – have the advantage. It is estimated that only 432 landowners possess half of Scotland’s rural land and thirty percent of England is owned by the aristocracy (where, unlike in Scotland, there is no general ‘right to roam’).

It's heart warming and hopeful to hear about the community land ownership projects in Assynt and Eigg and let's hope it becomes more prolific across the country. It’s not a housing crisis, it’s an affordability crisis,” says author Catrina Davies. In other words, it’s not about building more.” She then tours around the northern parts of the UK to look at some of the industries that provide work and income for the local residents and what happens to their communities when those industries change or leave. Work in the countryside ties you, soul and salary, to the land, but often those who labour in nature have the least control over what happens there. Starting with Rebecca Smith's own family history - foresters in Cumbria, miners in Derbyshire, millworkers in Nottinghamshire, builders of reservoirs and the Manchester Ship Canal - Rural is an exploration of our green and pleasant land, and the people whose labour has shaped it. For instance, since the next door neighbour moved, his house has been bought as a second home by some people from the Midlands. They have spent a lot of money on it and its very pretty but they are rarely here. In fact Im not really sure why they have bought it other than for investment purposes.

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She is also clearly full of respect and admiration, as well as love, for her brother, Tom, who manages an area of forestry that he has bought. Living off selling firewood and carvings seems precarious but Tom achieves this and so provides his sister with excellent material as well as a location for recuperation and celebration. A vital, questing book about the often misunderstood past, hard present-day, and possible futures of rural life in the UK' I was particularly keen to read this book as I grew up in rural Lancashire in the 1980s and ’90s. It was a world that even then felt remote and misunderstood. On my first day of secondary school, for example, I was astonished at how many of my new classmates had never heard of the village where I lived. Sadly, I was equally ignorant of city ways, constantly getting lost trying to find the bus station after school for my long and winding journey home. A s the daughter of the forester on the Graythwaite Estate in Cumbria, Rebecca Smith was raised in an even more remote area around 40 miles from me.

The book is better read not as as a single, tidy argument but as a series of interconnected essays linked by Smith’s journey around the country. She was pregnant for much of the journey, and she details how that, and having to manage a family, affected her research. Some readers will find this intrudes on the main narrative, but she is making the point that if you are not well off, and your circumstances are challenging, then a sense of a family connection to a place can feel like the most important thing you have, and have to give. How we manage people’s competing claims to ownership of places is one of the great questions for the world in the 21st century. As Rural shows, the British countryside is a good example of how not to do it. The point is that we have (collectively) chosen to kill the former economic structure. People have no idea what a working rural economy would look because the countryside is just a vehicle for expressing other obsessions of rural idylls or environmental havens or whatever. Rural shows that this attitude has only consolidated over subsequent years. Smith suspects her upbringing confers a kind of “class ambiguity”. Descriptions of her childhood proximity to lakes, gardens and treehouses lead others to assume that her family was wealthy or well-connected. She has been blithely invited to shooting parties. In an episode of the recent documentary series Grayson Perry’s Full English, the only rural dweller and Cumbrian representative the artist sceptically interviews while questing for the “northern soul”, is Lord Inglewood of Hutton-in-the-Forest.This is a moving, tender and illuminating portrait of a class of people rarely thought about, let alone written about, yet who have shaped the dream of the British countryside that still provides our most basic needs.

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