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GUEST ESSAY
The English Countryside Is a Place of Profound Inequality
July 29,
2023
By Rebecca
Smith
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/29/opinion/british-countryside-working-class.html
Ms. Smith
is the author of “Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside,” from
which this essay is adapted.
Often
people assume I am someone I am not. My childhood was spent making dens in the
hidden corners of the landscaped gardens of a grand country estate in the Lake
District. I wandered woods full of baby pheasants being fattened up for the
shoot. I roamed the hills listening to my Walkman like a modern Brontë sister.
I had lakes to paddle in and a dinghy that we bumped down the path to a
private beach.
But they
weren’t my gardens. It wasn’t my beach.
Until the
age of 18, I lived on three private country estates in England. First in
Yorkshire, then in Bedford, then on Graythwaite Estate, in Cumbria in the Lake
District. In each of these my dad had the job of forester, working his way up
until he was head forester, overseeing 500 hectares of woodland at Graythwaite,
where the job came with a three-bedroom lodge on the estate.
The house
was old and four miles from any kind of shop. But to me, it was idyllic. It had
an open coal fire, a huge walk-in pantry and bay windows. A story — probably
apocryphal — had it that there had been an upstairs but the landowner didn’t
like the way it ruined his view, so he just sliced it off, like a layer of
Victoria sponge cake.
Our house
was a tied cottage. For centuries, it was not uncommon for the offer of a job
in the English countryside to include accommodation. The rent would be minimal
or nothing — a fact reflected in the wages. And when the job ended, so, often,
did your right to housing.
There was
tied housing for the servants of the families and houses on grand country
estates — for the gardener, gamekeeper, plumber, forester and tenant farmers.
For
workers, it was a precarious, contingent way of life. Both the quality of the
accommodation and your rights to it were entirely dependent on the benevolence
of the landowner. But none of that lay heavily on me as a child. In the summer,
I would climb out of my bedroom window when I should have been asleep and ride
my bike up and down the estate road. My brother and I made rhododendron perfume
to sell to visitors and dangled from an old tire swing. We didn’t realize yet
that the ground was shifting beneath our feet.
***
For a lot
of people, the English countryside is Elizabeth Bennet starting to change her
mind about Mr. Darcy as the road opens up to a view of Pemberley, or the new
Mrs. de Winter and the drive that “twisted and turned as a serpent” up to
Manderley, “lovelier even than I had ever dreamed.”
But for the
landless who work and belong to the British countryside but do not own a piece
of it, it’s a place of profound inequality. Damp, cold and underresourced but
beautiful.
When I was
growing up on Graythwaite, it was still possible to live, work and raise a
family in some of the most beautiful parts of England on a working-class wage.
That’s less true now. Rural Britain, long a scenic playground for the rich, is
in danger of becoming only that, for tourists, second-homers and wealthy
retirees.
Hawkshead,
about five miles from Graythwaite, is one of the prettiest villages in the Lake
District. It used to have two banks, a police station, four pubs, cafes and
businesses. When I was a teenager, I worked in the King’s Arms, one of the
pubs. There was a chalkboard on which someone had written, “I wandered lonely
as a cloud, then thought: Sod it, I’ll have a pint instead.” Wordsworth, whose
cottage is a popular stop a few miles north, would not have approved.
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The author
playing in the garden at Graythwaite . Rebecca Smith
These days,
there are still lots of cafes, but now the police station is apartments, one
bank is a gallery, and the other one is a ticket office for a Beatrix Potter
attraction. Many of the village homes are vacation rentals or second homes,
empty for most of the year, pushing the prices higher for the few homes that do
go up for sale. There were always bus trippers, but the streams of tourists at
this time of year, its busiest, make it feel a bit like a rural Disneyland.
In the
early 2000s, when a lot of the big landowners were starting to realize how
profitable renting property to these visitors could be, Graythwaite Estate
decided not to employ a forester anymore. Dad became self-employed, and we
started paying market rent. The farm and other houses on the estate started to
become vacation cottages; some became beautiful wedding venues. Eventually, Mum
and Dad moved to a terraced house in a nearby town. It had a yard, not a
garden, but it was theirs.
This story
is repeated in many of the prettiest places in Britain. In some of the villages
around where I grew up, as many as 80 percent of the houses are second homes,
according to housing advocates.
Over and
over again, people who grew up or made a life there have been forced to make
way for others. (In Dinorwig, a former slate-mining town in Wales that is
popular with visitors, a schoolteacher told The Guardian that her family was
evicted by a landlady who admitted that she could make four times as much by
renting their home to tourists.) These visitors spend money in the local shops,
but they don’t put children in the school. They don’t become part of the church
congregation. A way of life slowly suffocates.
***
When I
lived at Graythwaite, the estate threw big hunting parties every winter. Men
came from all over the world to shoot, mainly pheasant but a few deer, too, to
help control the deer population. Range Rovers would be parked in rows at the
side of the woods, and shots would echo off the fells behind our house on cold
mornings.
I once
joined the shoot as a beater. I tagged along with a few other estate kids and
the dogs to flush out birds from copses of trees or bushes. I hated it. I don’t
think it was the shooting of the pheasants I didn’t like; it was tramping
through the cold, wet grass for someone else’s fun. As a child, I found it
troubling on levels that I couldn’t yet pick apart, and my parents never
suggested I do it again.
As an
adult, I was invited on a pheasant shoot in Scotland by an old boss. I went,
admittedly thrilled to be on the other side of the party. I sat high up on the
heated seats of a Range Rover and watched the beaters and their dogs go ahead
and scare the pheasants into the sky. I ate one of the fanciest sausage rolls
I’ve ever tasted. I felt as though I had put on the wrong shoes.
I think
that growing up the way I did has given me a kind of class ambiguity. As if
having access to all this land, the outside world and all that’s in it, made us
rich. As a teenager, if I answered the phone and it was one of the landowners,
I learned to change my accent — I could and can still do a pretty good
imitation. But class is one thing; land is another. If you don’t own land,
you’re forever at the mercy of the people who do.
The author
and her brother, Tom, waiting for the school bus outside the lodge house at Graythwaite.
Rebecca Smith
Tied
housing still exists, albeit in a much-reduced form — and mostly for people who
work in agriculture or hospitality. These days, I live in a new house in the
suburbs near Falkirk, in Scotland. The central heating is cozy and reliable. I
don’t need to chop logs or get coal delivered. When I move the pictures on the
wall, I don’t see the true color of the wallpaper, untouched by soot. It
doesn’t take hours to get to my kids’ school or the hospital.
But
elementally I know that I am not where I am meant to be. I am constantly drawn
to tree-lined roads, dry stone walls and a house — big or small, old or new —
in the country.
I have been
back to Graythwaite a few times, but it always felt like trespassing. In my
dreams, though, I am often in the garden of the old house, in the shade of the
big trees. Comfy as a dandelion in the dirt.
Rebecca
Smith is the author of “Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside,”
from which this essay is adapted.
Review
Rural by Rebecca Smith review – a personal study of
working-class life in the countryside
Her timely defence of blue-collar rural communities
works best when the Cumbrian author explores how urban money severs the links
between locals and their landscape
Richard
Benson
Mon 19 Jun
2023 02.00 EDT
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 author had a poor but happy childhood spent in
tied houses on country estates where her father worked as a forester
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)
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