The blurb for Rebecca Smith’s Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside sells it as a call to arms for the countryside’s abused, exploited and forgotten working classes, and its most memorable passages resound with all the get-off-our-land fury of a gamekeeper’s shotgun.
“An Airbnb or a second home might bring in some money for the local shop, but it won’t bring more children to the school,” she writes, revisiting the town near where she grew up in the Lake District. “They won’t be on the fundraising committees for the pantomime or the summer dances, they won’t be part of the church congregation or able to organise the local ceilidhs… by buying a house to experience that for the few weeks, or even a few months of the year, they have gradually suffocated the life forever. Throughout these villages, UK-wide, country shows are being cancelled, pubs are closing down, hotels can’t get the staff and schools are shutting. We have reached the tipping point. Some areas might even have passed it.”
For anyone with experience of country ghost towns that come alive only when the second-homers’ 4x4s roll in on Friday night, this feeling will be infuriatingly familiar. The ongoing displacement of local communities makes Rural feel timely, but it has a wider range of targets than the familiar villains of the interloping urban Farrow & Ball set. Its strength is Smith’s sharp eye for new examples of urban money breaking up the relationships between local people and their landscapes. Corporations who offset their pollution by planting thousands of trees in inappropriate locations where the saplings will die off anyway; absentee landlords who shorten tenancy agreements so farmers can’t plan long-term improvements of the land; the gentry sacking estate workers and hawking their heritage to the leisure industry. For the roughly 20% of Britons who live in rural areas, such trends debilitate in the same way that gentrification does in cities. Smith conveys the emotional and psychological impacts of that without going full Royston Vasey on us, which is no small achievement.
The book starts like a memoir. Smith lives with her partner and young children in a modern house on a 600-home housing development in Falkirk. Oppressed by the area’s lack of natural greenery, she spends a lot of time with her children in a nearby country park. Here she finds the remains of an old stately home, which reminds her of her poor but happy childhood spent in tied houses on country estates where her father worked as a forester.
“Our homes were old, damp and cold, and we were four miles from any kind of shop,” she recalls of those days. “But it was idyllic.” Her personal idyll was one of woodland wanderings, pheasant shoots and other visceral, muddy pleasures, but it’s distinguished by the social niceties of landed estate living; as a teenager, she had to learn to change her accent when answering the phone depending on whether it was a landowner or a friend calling. You can see where her interest in class comes from.
Prompted by her memories and questions, she travels to various rural communities with historical links to industry, each one given a chapter with a title such as “Coal”, “Water” or “Food”. The best are those in which she uncovers forgotten working-class histories and communities: the villages built for forestry workers as forests were planted after the first world war, for example, or the camps for the navvies who built the great dams and reservoirs to supply the cities with drinking water. Less compelling are the chapters such as “Mining” or “Textiles”, which add little to already familiar histories.
In her prologue Smith says she isn’t trying to provide an exhaustive account of the rural working class, but at times her selection does feel random and uneven. Her definition of “working class” is very much her own, based not on economics but on being connected to the landscape through work. This leads her to some odd choices of subject, notably tenant farmers rather than any farm labourers, who surely shaped more of the countryside than any other group of workers. It’s true that social class can work differently in rural areas – Marx himself decided that both the peasantry and the farmers were incapable of acting as classes, and felt they should just move into cities to join the struggle. But it is hard to grasp how certain topics – raves in a slate mine, for example – exemplify a distinct, contemporary rural working-class culture. It would have been interesting to hear her views on how and why they do.
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.
• Richard Benson is the author of The Valley (Bloomsbury) and The Farm (Penguin)
• Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside by Rebecca Smith is published by Williams Collins (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
