No one expects to see pastoral scenes at Finsbury Park, north London, when they’ve just emerged from the underground. But there it was last Christmas: a huge billboard depicting the English countryside as one big meadow – a grassy landscape devoid of people, buildings or roads, imprinted with the words “Explore the life that could be …” Advertising Rightmove, the UK’s largest property-listings website, this was an invitation to Covid-weary commuters to opt out of stressful city life and run for the hills.
The pressures of lockdown life and the realities of working from home have been inducing many to move away from cities to smaller towns and villages. By the end of 2020, the words “detached”, “rural” and “secluded” were Zoopla’s fourth, fifth and sixth most common search terms. Estate agents have been reporting this phenomenon throughout the UK since mid 2020, and the same is true across the EU and in North America too. More recently, however, evidence of rural buyers’ remorse has emerged.
Dissatisfied customers complain about the need to drive everywhere. They miss coffee bars and deplore the fact that everyone in the village sends their kids to private school. But what were they expecting? Could it be that they fell for the vision of rural life offered by sites such as Rightmove: fresh air, great views, unlimited access to nature?
The English countryside isn’t a blank slate for restless urbanites; nor should it be reduced to an amenity for leisure and recreation. It is a complex and real place, suffused in history, politics, power. Understanding this would be the first step in making it more accessible and less mysterious.
In his book about the toxic politics of English nationalism, New Model Island, Alex Niven writes, “the great divide in English life is between the cities and everywhere else”. This is partly a matter of demography and the political choices associated with an older, whiter population. In 2020, the most prominent age group in rural areas was 50 to 59; in urban areas the corresponding figure was 25 to 34. Rural constituencies are much more likely to be represented by Conservative MPs. There is less ethnic diversity outside major towns and cities, and marginally more people voted to leave the EU in rural areas than the national average.
Then there’s the question of access to the land. The Rightmove billboard depicts miles of open country, but as the campaign group Right to Roam points out, the public is excluded from more than 90% of the English countryside and almost 100% of rivers. Meanwhile, English farmland has been turned into a lucrative investment opportunity, particularly since the Tories decided to waive UK inheritance tax on agricultural property in 1984. Much of the English countryside has already been sold off as a result.
The absence of animals or any sign of cultivation in the billboard is indicative of the crisis in farming too. Regardless of where you live, it is very hard to understand the politics of agriculture today, especially post-Brexit. Little of what we eat or buy from supermarkets is wholly produced in the UK, and farmers are blamed wholesale for wrecking the environment and destroying wildlife.
One solution to these problems is to listen to the land itself. Just one single field – even the one in the billboard – can contain clues that help to explain the urban-rural divide that persists today. Leaving aside ancient or prehistoric patterns of human settlement, often visible to the naked eye, the question of ownership is the first key to unlocking the history of a particular patch of ground.
I grew up in a small village in north-west Hampshire and returned to investigate a remnant of heathland a mile or two outside. I was intrigued by the idea that it had once been common land. Having discovered that it was part of a larger area enclosed by a wealthy Scottish family from a neighbouring parish in 1818, it took one click to learn that they had made their fortune from owning a sugar plantation in St Kitts in the Caribbean. The colonial countryside evidently means more than prestigious stately homes.
War has also shaped local landscapes over centuries in ways that are quickly forgotten. The patch of land was handed over to a local farmer in 1942 after the Ministry of Agriculture ordered the requisition of unproductive land for cultivating food. In 1991, on the farmer’s death, local residents fought a vigorous campaign to restore its status as common land. However, the field was sold to a private buyer after the government, according to press reports at the time, deemed that “the maximum amount of money should be obtained from the sale of land of this type”.
However, almost more surprising is the fact that there are still small patches of common land where villagers are entitled to gather firewood. Looking over the hill, I discovered further relics of a feudal era. Many of the large agricultural estates in the area are owned by wealthy investors, some of whom have had very colourful pasts.
In the late 1970s a mystery man called Tim Landon acquired the whole village of Faccombe, about a mile farther east as the crow flies. He was known locally as “The Brigadier” in a reference to his shadowy military connections to Oman. He had supported Sultan Qaboos as he ousted his father, Said, in a well-planned coup. Landon then stayed on as adviser to Qaboos, a service for which he was handsomely rewarded.
These fragments of history show connections between rural England and elsewhere: that is part of their value. The Rightmove billboard is insidious because it promotes the fantasy that the country’s unbuilt environments are there to be colonised – ripe for property developers, reserved for nature lovers or simply a haven for those who like a quiet life. It’s never been more important to challenge the commodification of the English countryside, and the way to start is to understand exactly how this process has happened.
Vron Ware is the author of Return of a Native: Learning from the Land
