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.”
