No Future
More linkage to things written elsewhere, in lieu of new blog posts - me in the New Statesman on Penguin Books' English Journeys collection. While it's undeniably sad to see Penguin, that once-great enlightening Modernist institution, perpetuating the myth of rural England, what is interesting about these is that they follow on from an earlier Great Journeys series, which ranged all over the place - but that when they decided to concentrate on (the central part of) this island, they decided that the first country in history to be more urban than rural (ooh, some time 160 years ago) was best represented through a series on its wholly unrepresentative countryside. That only a country so urbanised as ours would become so obsessive about its rural hinterland isn't just a consequence of that urbanisation - I doubt the Dutch, who have a comparable rate of urban density, have the same fixation. Rather, it's surely at least in part because of the contradictory fact that this density is largely artificial - most of the landmass is a sparsely uninhabited countryside. That we should concrete over at least some of this seems entirely sensible. The only problem is that the eventual result would almost certainly be based on cheap, reduced versions of the aesthetics of rural England...
posted by owen hatherley at 2:16 pm
18 Comments:
I'm also not sure that obsession you speak of is that evident (at least not evident among a good portion of the 90% of people who inhabit the urban centres.) A recent survey (yes, I know) had over 50% of people saying the countryside was 'boring' and a good portion could barley recognise any mammal larger than a hedgehog. http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/Countryside-boring-say-most-british.5120723.jp.
Is this not just a rehashing of the academic obsession with juxtaposing the country and the city or something?
Um, is it? I mainly thought the books had an interesting premise, the idea that England = the countryside, and thought it might say something about the fact that a rural party is about to win an election in an urban country.
But the 50% who think the country is 'boring' is encouraging, I suppose, but then one of the main problems with politics today is people thinking stuff is boring. I don't think the countryside is boring, but I do think the idea of it is deeply pernicious, albeit probably something more prevalent among suburban Mail readers than inner-urbanites.
It's a nonsensical juxtaposition in any case. "The country" never once operated as some kind of independent sphere, outside the rest of the economy. And vice versa. "Rural England" includes all those picturesque (industrial) canals. People seem to like rural England anyway, the blighters.
If Britain is as urbanized as you make out, then a "rural" political party couldn't win an election (unless someone's gone and repealed the 1832 Reform Act). In other words, it's ridiculous to call it a "rural party".
A lot of the Tory voters -- the ones who will provide the margin of victory -- will not be "rural". Even the rural-dwelling ones will be city-working. Complexity.
And where do I deny any of these complexities, Anonymous? When I describe the Tories as a rural party it isn't because I think they represent the Squirearchy, but because they currently only have representation in rural and outer-suburban areas. In the next election that will almost certainly change.
...and while I'm being set up into some strange straw man for something Raymond Williams wrote 40 years ago, I never argued that rural areas were autonomous from the rest of the economy. Actually, it's full of business parks, distribution centres and factory farms, none of which feature in the romanticised version of the countryside perpetuated by these books and Simon Jenkins' career as an architectural critic.
I take your point but I think pernicious is a bit hyperbolic. Can you point to a more healthy way of representing the countryside? Do we go down a purely political/ecological route or is there a case for pure aesthetics or something in between such as Robert MacFarlane attempted with The Wild Places?
For what it's worth I'm not sure Iain Sinclair was a particularly good choice of rejoinder - he's hardly the most political of writers. If anything he's an impressionist or an aesthete himself. I'm not sure who you could invoke though - Nick Danziger, Ian Jack?
The piece is about journeys through England, which is why I mentioned Sinclair, as he's done a fair few - he's not Cobbett, but nor does he pretend to be. What would interest me would be a book which took Priestley's approach and actually described the landscape as it is - Carolyn Steel's Hungry City is to some extent the sort of thing I mean.
I think MacFarlane's book does that brilliantly - he does fall into the nostalgic trap occasionally and he can be overly earnest but on pure description and natural history he's absorbing and exact (although he's been pulled up on how unpeopled his landscapes are which sort of misses the point). I will have to look up Steele's book. Thanks.
"...and while I'm being set up into some strange straw man for something Raymond Williams wrote 40 years ago."
That was a good one.
Different Anonymous:
It's just maths: if 90% of the population is urban, and the Tories get (what? 30%? 40%) of the votes, then clearly they aren't a "rural" party. And they don't meaningfully represent a "rural" interest, either.
I don't think it's straw-manning you to observe that the drift of the article is that the countryside is a bad and reactionary place that has “ceased to earn its own living”. (Though I’m sure Norman Tebbit would agree!)
That was quoting J.B Priestley! i'm certainly not against people not earning their own living, albeit depending on how they don't earn it...
It would be silly and simplistic to argue that the countryside is bad and reactionary, much as it would be to argue that the city was good and progressive - living in London it's difficult to think that with any conviction whatsoever. What I was arguing, however, was that the obsession with the countryside on the part of city and suburb dwellers was, after around the mid-19th century, and certainly now is to a large extent, 'bad and reactionary', based on a yearning for a mythical past, not to mention a yearning to be further away from your fellow man. I don't mind if you disagree with that point, but I hope it's clear that's the point.
I'm not sure what use the Maths is, either. In the last three elections the Tories were reduced to a rump in the countryside, meaning that they can be described as being an essentially rural party, much as Labour remained an urban party even when it was winning seats in Dorset (did I mention how much I like Dorset? A lovely place. Another time, maybe). In the next election they will almost certainly win by getting votes in the suburbs and cities. Their 'core vote', if you will, is still rural and outer-suburban, and if they commute to the cities that supports rather than undermines my argument.
Surely the radical line on the countryside is the Ramblers' Association, Kinder Scout and all that? Escape to the mountains and piss off the dukes whilst you're at it.
"The lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside"
(The hound of the Baskervilles By Arthur Conan Doyle)
Doesn't Jonathan Meades argue that the reason for Britain's bucolic fancy, is because it was the first nation to industrialise? And in so doing it made all the first mistakes and was burdened with guilt in face of all its rotten slums?
'Abroad Again: Heaven - Folkwoven In England' (2007)
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qT5FquwhpA)
I don't know but it is an interesting theory when compared to Germany which took advantage of the later so-called and seemingly cleaner 'second industrial revolution' of chemicals and electricity, instead of dirty old steam, iron and coal.
I agree that the countryside is boring when is written in the stereotypical Jenkins manner and we shouldn't forget the history of eighteenth century enclosure in light of his sentimental prose. After enclosure the peasant received a block of ploughland, though without the ‘priceless common rights’ he had “no means to support a cow to fertilise it […]. Before very long he stood at a cross roads in his life; in one direction lay the smoke-wreathed factory gate and in the other a life of drudgery and humiliation as a hired farm labourer.” (R. Muir, Shell Guide to Reading The Landscape, 1981, p. 107.)
The English landscape - as a whole - is fascinatingly complex. Hardly any other landscape on earth has such a geological complexity in such small area, which reflects on the diverse local history of cities and regions. The urban development of places like Nottingham, Sheffield and Manchester are influenced by their different geologies.
"At the base of large regions, whether moorland, vale, fen or wold lies a structure of rock which we can never
greatly alter. These determine soil type and soil depth, and limit the vegetation that each supports. As we pass
swiftly from one region to another by road, or better still in a railway train, we have a splendid view of the contrasts in scenery imposed by these constraints.”
– 7.
J. Thirsk, ‘Introduction’, in J. Thirsk (ed.), Rural England: An Illustrated History of the Landscape (Oxford, 2000), pp. 11-12
A better reference for the history of the English landscape - as opposed to the countryside would be:
England's Agricultural Regions and Agrarian History, 1500-1750 (Studies in Economic & Social History) by Joan Thirsk (Paperback - 20 Feb 1987)
Place-names in the Landscape by Margaret Gelling (Paperback - Mar 1993)
Plus any of the Cambridge series on the history of agriculture in the British Isles by Joan Thirsk
Perhaps concreting over the English countryside, would be an act of suicide, when it has so many diverse uses for agriculture, industry, water, culture and recreation? I think a better understanding of it would be more beneficial than sentiment or cement.
Thanks, really interesting stuff. 'Concreting over' was of course deliberately inflammatory, recalling the regularly expressed fear that we're 'concreting over the countryside' which is generally nonsense. My argument was more 1) that there should be one, two, many Milton Keyneses (well, correcting a few flaws of that one obv) and 2) that any attempt to do this now (thinking specifically of things like this) would be much less interesting.
Or we could spend a while in the countryside and you'd soon realise that it's even darker and more complicated than your louche sub/urban mind could ever understand! I can't wait to show you prehistory, farm nihilism and bucolic fascism. Makes Herzog look like a wuss, the wilds of Wiltshire, they will...heil, oink, heil...
Sorry for the missunderstanding. Interesting link. Does the green belt act like a noose on the urban poor in the same way as aristocractic landownership did in the nineteenth century?
Does the green belt act like a noose on the urban poor in the same way as aristocractic landownership did in the nineteenth century?It's an article of faith amongst a particular kind of laissez-faire Tory that the Green Belt (and indeed planning generally) is responsible for massively restricting housing supply and thus depriving poor urban proles of spacious detached living in favour of suburban. Policy Exchange have been vocal about its many and varied evils, for instance. And for a while it carried some sway in the pre-crunch Treasury, who commissioned Kate Barker of the Monetary Policy Committee to produce an "independent" review of the planning system, aiming to reach the same conclusion.
What's particularly striking about these sorts of assertions is how weak the evidence is: without getting too much into the details, even the relatively sophisticated econometric work depends on a very ambitious interpretation of a residual - that is, they depend on adding up the many costs associated with property, and assuming that anything left over can be attributed to the planning system. (Paul Cheshire takes this approach.) It's convincing only if you want to be convinced; and the wider claims, like McKinsey's 1998 paper, that the planning system damages productivity are even less well-supported.
It's also reasonable to argue that even if the system creates some economic costs elsewhere, these are more than compensated by not allowing planning decisions to be taken solely by developers and would-be developers: that it is reasonable to incur some economic costs, in return for social benefits.
But all that looks somewhat irrelevant now: as was obvious for decades, house prices are not determined in the first place by the supply of housing. They're determined by the supply of credit.
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