Gardiner V., Matthews H. The changing geography of the United Kingdom
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employment concentrations, in effect to live where they please; and clearly a lot of
them of them are pleased by the coast and the more tranquil areas inland. Of course
different parts of the country have been affected to different degrees by this ‘counter-
urbanisation’.
The geography of population change in post-war Britain (see also Chapter 9) is largely
the product of a complex web of interrelated migration flows including:
¿ planned population movement from the conurbations to the new and expanded towns;
¿ job-led out-movement from the cities as described above;
¿ retirement migration, sometimes linked to earlier decisions to buy second homes;
¿ localised ‘commuter’ relocation out into the villages and small and medium-sized towns;
¿ continued depopulation in some smaller and remoter parishes, especially where
the loss of agricultural employment has been pronounced or a large employer has
closed.
And different rural areas, though each exhibiting some degree of population growth, may
be very different in character. Compare for instance some remoter rural areas with an ageing
population (the product of younger people moving out and older people moving in) —with
all that that implies for the local community, birth rate and service provision—with prosperous
commuter areas having a more balanced age structure, thriving services and more generally
the characteristics of suburbs surrounded by fields rather than suburbs surrounded by other
suburbs.
Rogers’ review (1993) of population and social change in England’s rural communities
up to the early 1990s concluded with these key observations:
¿ households are getting ever smaller so that the same number of people in an area will
over time make greater claims on the housing stock;
¿ on average people move every seven years and ‘an ongoing and complex re-sorting’ is at
work as people in different circumstances periodically reassess their options;
¿ in this regard, the preferences and behaviour of the growing ‘service class’ —broadly
those in business and management occupations—tend to be the driving force in the whole
process, with other groups adjusting their residential behaviour accordingly;
¿ regional patterns conceal a great deal of very local variation with adjacent parishes often
faring very differently.
A survey in 1990 of the perceptions of some 3 000 people living in a range of English rural
areas (Cloke et al. 1994) revealed some of the tensions generated by this constant ‘re-
sorting’ of the local population. Some longer-established residents clearly felt strangers in
their own communities. One Shropshire respondent observed: ‘The town types living here
are not true country people; they commute to the towns and don’t adapt to country life.
They should respect the countryside and not try to take over social life’, while a kindred
spirit in rural Warwickshire complained that ‘they think they own the place…they come in
and take over everything…they have put the price of homes up so that the “natives” have to
move out’. Of course, however, it is a fine line between ‘taking over’ and ‘breathing new
life’ into the community.
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BOX 11.1 The Forest of Dean: rural and industrial
Administratively part of Gloucestershire, this former coal-mining area has more in
common visually, culturally and historically with industrial South Wales to its west
than with the picturesque Cotswolds to its east. Sandwiched between the Wye and the
Severn, more forested than farmed and with a scattering of former colliery villages,
restored spoil tips and redundant tramways to remind the visitor of its industrial
heritage, this densely populated but still rural area is seeking a new vocation, with too
large a proportion of its workforce still wedded to manufacturing and land-based
industries with limited potential for long-term prosperity. Only 56 per cent of the
workforce is in the service sector compared with over 70 per cent nationwide.
To gauge local opinion, several village or town appraisals were conducted in
the early 1990s, and taken together they revealed a strong popular attachment to the
area and a love of its wooded environment and sense of community, but six issues
emerged as causes of real concern:
¿ a need for affordable housing for local low-income people—‘the youngsters are
unable to stay in the area’;
¿ a need for more jobs locally and better access to paid employment;
¿ a fear of crime and the perceived insufficiency of the police presence— vandalism,
petty theft and a fear of physical abuse were frequently mentioned;
¿ the very limited mobility of households without a car (5,800 of them in 1991, or
21 per cent of the total), with the difficulties of access to health-care of most
concern;
¿ traffic-related problems such as poor road maintenance and street lighting, various
road hazards and heavy vehicles trundling through the villages;
¿ a general sense of ignorance and alienation regarding the local council and ‘the
powers that be’.
In response to such concerns, the Forest of Dean Rural Development Programme has
placed emphasis not just on attracting new firms from outside the area—the mainstay
of development programmes of the 1960s and 1970s—but on forging a spirit of
partnership working between the various agencies in the public, private and voluntary
sectors, and on encouraging development of and by the local community, not just for
it. But this is a long-term process; tangible results take time to come through.
Welfare, deprivation and exclusion
The fact is that the demographic and social changes briefly summarised above—as well as
trends in the economy and deficiencies in the availability of affordable housing and of
essential services—have affected different rural residents in different ways, and the
circumstances of a substantial minority are increasingly a cause for some concern. In this
regard four concepts recur in the literature, with subtle differences in meaning. They are
worth setting out, even though they are not always employed consistently, if only to highlight
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the fact that the nature of the problem and its possible causes and remedies are not as simple
as they might at first seem:
¿ Disadvantage is the inability of individuals or households to share in styles of life open
to the majority.
¿ Poverty is the inability of individuals or households to share in styles of life open to the
majority because of a lack of financial resources (the term is usually made operational
by using as a yardstick some measure of departure from an accepted ‘income norm’).
¿ Deprivation is a less precise concept but denotes something more than just the lack of
material resources; it tends to involve value judgements about what is or is not morally
acceptable.
¿ Social exclusion is the process whereby the various systems that should guarantee the
social integration of individuals or households fail to do so. Classic examples are the
employment and housing markets and the way that we deliver education and training to
those in need.
With those interlocking concepts in mind—some of which focus on the sufferer and some
on the sufferer’s context—all that can be attempted here is to list a number of key conclusions
from an in-depth study in 1990 of a random sample of 3,000 households scattered across a
dozen representative rural areas of England (Cloke et al. 1994):
1 About 20 per cent of all rural households are on the margins of poverty (defined as
equivalent to 140 per cent of the income support entitlement of the household in question).
2 Elderly people comprise the biggest single group susceptible to poverty.
3 Poverty and deprivation are to be found in all twelve study areas, though more in some
(e.g. the Nottinghamshire coalfield) than others (e.g. the commuter belts of Cheshire and
West Sussex).
4 For those of working age without their own transport, poor access to job opportunities is
a problem because of the limited supply of well-paid employment and poor or non-
existent public transport.
5 There is a significant variation of access to private transport within car-owning households,
with women typically disadvantaged.
6 The difficulty of access to shops and to health-care is keenly felt in no-car households.
7 The limited availability of affordable rented accommodation—especially for younger
low income people—is a serious problem.
And, shifting the focus to people’s attitudes and feelings:
8 Very different perceptions are held of the benefits and costs of ‘rurality’. One person’s
splendid isolation is another person’s loneliness. One person’s ‘close knit community’ is
another person’s world of prying, gossiping and intrusion.
9 Many people who have lived in the area for most or all of their lives now feel left out and
marginalised as other people move in who are affluent, influential, have different social
and political ambitions and even a different view of what ‘rurality’ is all about.
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10 Most people living in rural areas do not admit to the existence of poverty and deprivation
in their midst. Those with such problems tend to be very largely ‘out of sight out of
mind’; this simply is not the case in our big cities and run-down industrial areas.
Two important questions flow from this scenario. First, how far is ‘rurality’ itself at fault in
‘causing’ or accentuating these problems? And how far does their resolution lie in the hands
of local or explicitly ‘rural’ agencies? The answer to both questions is a tantalising ‘to a
certain extent’.
The ‘rural economy’
It is arguable whether a distinctive ‘rural economy’ really exists any more. It seems
more valid to say that Britain has an ‘economy’ with somewhat different characteristics
in different parts of the country and with the traditional rural/urban distinction becoming
less and less pronounced. In large part this reflects the steady erosion of ‘traditional
rural jobs’.
Thus, as far as England is concerned, the total farm labour force in 1950 was
about 1 million, including around 700,000 paid agricultural workers of different kinds,
while by 1994 the total was 431,000, including just under 200,000 paid workers.
Extractive industry is no longer a major employer in the countryside; indeed as far as
coal-mining is concerned there are only about 5,500 people employed in rural collieries
(1994 figures), compared with over 60,000 in the early 1980s. As for quarrying, the
number of jobs in that sector fell by over 30 per cent between 1981 and 1991. And, with
the ending of the Cold War, defence-related jobs —since the Second World War a major
staple of many rural areas—have similarly fallen significantly (Rural Development
Commission 1995).
However, the evidence suggests that the economy of at least the more accessible
rural areas has adapted well to the decline of employment in the traditional industries.
This is largely because the post-war growth of manufacturing industries, and more
particularly of service activities, has been freed from a need to locate in the traditional
urban and industrial areas by new technologies, especially in communications. As
explained earlier this outflow has been inextricably linked to the residential aspirations
of entrepreneurs, managers and skilled staff in a complex of cause-and-effect
relationships. In the remoter areas, however, the traditional land-based elements of the
economy retain a distinct significance, though even this distinction—between
‘accessible’ and ‘remote’ rural areas—seems to be melting as telematics (the fusion of
telecommunication and computer technology) removes a major disadvantage of physical
remoteness.
The birth of small firms has been particularly important in this respect—and of Britain’s
2.7 million businesses, 96 per cent employ fewer than twenty people. Analysis at county
level shows that it is rural counties in central or southern England such as Devon, Hereford
and Worcester and Cambridgeshire that have the greatest propensity to generate new, almost
always small, firms while the conurbations have the lowest rates of new firm growth. And
research also shows that the majority of new business founders set up their business in the
locality in which they are living—though most new firm founders in rural areas had moved
to the countryside prior to setting up the firm.
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BOX 11.2 The Western Isles, Skye and Lochalsh: does
remoteness matter?
The most north-westerly of the European Union’s 850 ‘LEADER’* Rural Development
Programmes covers nearly 6,000 square kilometres of islands, moorlands and
mountains and just 43,000 inhabitants in this, the remotest region of Scotland. The
main economic activities of the Western Isles, Skye and the neighbouring mainland
are crofting, fishing, fish farming, fish processing, quarrying, construction, forestry,
tourism and the servicing of the local population.
The area’s deep-seated problems include high unemployment and the steady out-
migration of its young people (initially for further and higher education and then for the
better employment opportunities of the urban areas), plus, of course, the difficulty and
cost of transport within the area as well as to and from the major markets of Britain and
Europe. Its assets include the Gaelic language, which has moulded every facet of the
cultural heritage of the area and helped give an underlying cohesion, and a wild and
beautiful environment which brings over half a million tourists every year.
More prosaically, its assets also include ‘Objective 1 status’, meaning recognition
in Brussels that this is one of the European Union’s poorer regions with a Gross Domestic
Product less than 75 per cent of the EU average. With that recognition has come substantial
financial aid. That part of the aid coming as part of the ‘LEADER’ programme has had
to be spent on projects suggested and championed by local people themselves—the
‘bottom-up approach’ which develops ‘the human resource’ as much as the economy in
a conventional sense.
Of the projects supported over the last six years by the local LEADER partnership
of private, public and voluntary bodies (which must put in ‘matching funds’ as a
measure of their own resolve), most have sought to ‘add value’ to the local resource—
be it physical, cultural or human—and/or to grapple with the challenge of overcoming
geographical remoteness. They have therefore included:
¿ establishing a network of ‘community animateurs’ to help local people develop
their own business ideas;
¿ distance learning courses, often using telematics, to foster training and advanced
education without the trainee or student having to leave the area;
¿ interpretative centres to celebrate and explain the history, culture and life of the
area for locals and tourists alike;
¿ various marketing initiatives, including the setting up and support of craft
associations and the opening of dedicated retail outlets.
The future should be bright for remote and rugged regions like north-west Scotland
as discerning tourists and entrepreneurs are increasingly attracted to places of
tranquillity, natural beauty and cultural distinctiveness, and as the Internet promises
to shrink intra- and inter-regional distances still further.
*LEADER (Liaison Entre Actions de Developpement de l’Economie Rurale) is a EU
programme to promote innovative rural development via locally focused partnerships
and community involvement.
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This ‘geography of entrepreneurialism’, coupled with the role of environment and
quality of life factors in explaining the changing geography of potential entrepreneurs, is
central to our understanding of the future and character of rural Britain in the years to
come. The really interesting question, in the age of the Internet, is whether in the early
twenty-first century the growth zone will be not so much the Herefordshires and
Cambridgeshires but the remoter parts of rural Wales, northern England and the Scottish
Highlands and Islands. To the extent that the answer is ‘yes’ then the challenge of
conserving the natural and human-made heritage and beauty of those areas will be
correspondingly greater.
Another important element of the renaissance of rural areas is the growth of
‘countryside tourism’, given the growing interest in the environment and the potential for
the countryside to attract short-break and overseas tourists. Rural tourism has been boosted
by the growth of countryside accommodation and other tourist facilities, assisted by farm
diversification and by new products such as timeshare, all-weather holiday villages, and
what some term the ‘commodification of the countryside’. But often the economic challenge
is to get visitors to stay overnight (picnicking day-trippers and coach parties pump little
money into the local economy) while the environmental challenge is to channel and
accommodate rural tourism and recreation so that it does not degrade the very environment
that attracted it.
Services and accessibility
A key issue in rural Britain is the steady decline of many services traditionally found in
our villages and small towns and the isolation that this implies for many rural people in
no-car or even one-car households. Two factors in particular are at work, whether the
service be health-care, education, retailing or whatever. The first is ‘economies of scale’,
meaning the lower average costs for the supplier of delivering services in fewer and
larger units. The second is the growing mobility of the car-borne majority which permits
service suppliers—be they retailers, health authorities or breweries—to benefit from
those economies of scale secure in the knowledge that most, but not all, of their clients
will be able to reach the fewer but better endowed larger ‘units’ (superstores, large
health centres, etc.).
The slow but steady withdrawal of rural services matters for four reasons:
¿ people with limited mobility suffer—especially elderly people, households too poor to
run a car, young people seeking work or a richer social life, and mothers in one-car
families at home with young children;
¿ the ‘balanced community’ is eroded if schools, surgeries and post offices are not there to
attract and retain the sort of people just referred to;
¿ the village loses ‘venues’ —school gates, post-office counters and the like—where people
can rub shoulders and undertake the exchange of information which is the stuff of a
caring community;
¿ very local jobs are lost (jobs for school cleaners, surgery receptionists, shopkeepers and
bar staff), which also sustain the balanced community as well as circulate money in the
local economy.
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Survey evidence provided every three years by England’s 8,000 or so parish clerks at
the behest of the Rural Development Commission charts the sorry tale (Rural Development
Commission 1998). The picture in 1997 is shown in Table 11.3.
Not surprisingly, population size plays an important part in explaining variations from
parish to parish in service provision. For example, of parishes with 200 to 299 inhabitants
(i.e. mainly ‘very small villages’), the proportions without certain services in 1997 were:
permanent shop (82 per cent); pub (61 per cent); seven-day bus service (89 per cent); school
(97 per cent). Corresponding figures for parishes with 1,000 to 2,999 inhabitants (i.e. mainly
‘large villages’), were 4 per cent, 4 per cent, 43 per cent and 8 per cent, respectively.
Not all, however, is doom and gloom. Many public and voluntary agencies are trying
to arrest the decline or to come up with compensatory measures. For example, the Rural
Development Commission offers advice and support to village shopkeepers, and the county-
based Rural Community Councils often help run ‘Use it or Lose it’ campaigns. And some
enterprising local or regional entrepreneurs are using lateral thinking, with the post bus, the
post office inside the pub and the mini library inside-the-shop all demonstrating ways of
‘doubling up’ on service provision by running two or more services from one building or
vehicle. Growing community involvement—for example, in community transport schemes
or in supporting small schools—is also helping. So too may ‘telematics’ —the linking of
computer and communications technology with, for example, small post offices becoming
able to offer a much wider range of services to their clientele.
Annual surveys of what is happening on the ground, as recorded by the field officers
of the county-based Rural Community Councils and collated by the present author for the
Rural Development Commission, reveal some of the forces at work. Table 11.4 sets out
some ‘good news’ and some ‘bad news’ for several local services, as revealed in these
surveys. But what is ‘good’ news and what is ‘bad’? Is a petrol filling-station selling groceries
on a bypass half a mile from a village centre a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing for car-less residents of
the village? Better than nothing? Or the last nail in the coffin of the village shop…which
may of course be destined to close soon anyway?
TABLE 11.3 Parishes without certain services
Notes: Percentages are of parishes without certain services. *Other evidence suggests a decline in the
number of pubs and surgeries in the 1990s.
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Housing and planning
.
Well-intentioned policy initiatives have often made the situation worse. The ‘right to buy’
legislation of 1980 which compelled local authorities to sell their ‘council housing’ with
TABLE 11.4 Some factors affecting the viability of village services
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favourable discounts to those sitting tenants wishing to buy, coupled with a virtual embargo
on new housebuilding by those same local authorities, has eroded the pool of affordable
rented housing stock in the countryside. Housing associations were intended to take up the
slack but, for various reasons set out below, their contribution, especially in the smaller
settlements away from the market towns, proved to be insufficient right through the 1980s
and 1990s.
All of this matters for two reasons. First, social justice. Most people—indeed most
politicians regardless of party—feel that young people raised in a certain area, especially if
they are working there as well, have some sort of implied right to find reasonable
accommodation locally when the time comes for them to set up their own homes. Similar
arguments tend to be made for other social groups of local origin—retired people wanting
to move back to be near their grown-up children, lone parents setting up a second household,
etc. Yet frequently such people are obliged to move away to the more plentiful stock of
affordable housing in the towns—even if this means ‘reverse commuting’ to jobs back in
the countryside.
The second reason relates to ‘social balance’. To the extent that our villages become
‘havens of the middle classes’ then, the argument runs, society as a whole is the loser—
including the middle-class people living in those villages. This is part of a bigger
argument about the dangers of ‘social polarisation’, but at a more prosaic level it is
about a reduced capacity for ‘community care’ in the wider sense of the expression.
Where have all the care assistants, school secretaries and for that matter single adult
sons and daughters gone? Few of them on low incomes are to be found living in the
villages and thereby in a position to support their neighbours and the wider community
outside working hours.
Restrictive land-use planning policies, while serving to protect the precious
countryside of this small island, have not helped in this respect. Strict development
control, linked to a variety of green belt, ‘village envelope’, ‘key village’, conservation
and aesthetic objectives, have served to curtail the supply of new affordable housing by
pushing up land prices. And there is a sort of vicious circle at work here. As the rural
areas become more populated by middle- or upper-income people who have chosen to
move there for environmental reasons, so the NIMBY cry of ‘Not In My Back Yard’
gets correspondingly louder when the suggestion is made that a few new houses need to
be built for local people.
‘Housing need’ surveys often reveal that just half a dozen new dwellings in a
given village would make a real contribution to both the ‘social justice’ and ‘social
balance’ objectives set out above—so long as the rents are kept low and so long as
‘nomination rights’ rest with a benign local agency which will ensure that low-income
local households get first refusal when a property falls vacant. But even this modest
target is often beyond the housing associations’ capacity to deliver—for a combination
of reasons:
¿ the prohibitive cost of land at open market prices;
¿ insufficient money earmarked by the government’s Housing Corporation to fund such
rural schemes;
¿ a lack of ‘scale economies’ —it generally being cheaper to build thirty-six houses in a
neighbouring town than six in each of six villages;
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¿ the ‘hassle’ of NIMBY opposition, especially if the parish council is only lukewarm in
its enthusiasm for low-cost housing for local people.
A selection of statistics relating to different years in the early 1990s provides a crude
quantification of the situation:
¿ at least 16,000 new affordable houses are needed each year;
¿ but only about 2,000 are being built;
¿ an estimated 17,000 homeless people are to be found in rural England;
¿ about 70 per cent of all rural residents in a national survey perceived the lack of affordable
housing as a serious social problem in their area;
¿ young married people, followed by young single people, are perceived as those in greatest
need by the same sample of residents.
Looking to the future, only the availability of moderately priced land earmarked for social
housing will permit progress on this issue. In this regard the creation of ‘land banks’ —i.e.
files of landowner promises to sell land cheaply for affordable housing in the right
circumstances—and the operation of what has come to be known as ‘exceptions planning
policy’ allow some reason for modest optimism. The latter allows housing development on
sites within or adjoining existing villages which would not otherwise get planning
permission—so long as the existence of local housing need is proven and legally binding
mechanisms are in place to ensure the allocation and reallocation of tenancies to low-income
local people.
But in the end much depends on local attitudes. If local communities are adamantly
opposed to even modest housing developments intended for their poorer neighbours, then
developers will tend to go elsewhere. This in turn implies a long-term programme of
‘community development’ if some measure of social balance is to be maintained in rural
England into the next century.
Power and decision-making
In recent years geographers with an interest in the sort of issues reviewed in this chapter
have paid increasing attention to the decision-making processes that underlie them. Many
relevant decisions are of course taken by individual people—and decisions to move house,
to take holidays in one place rather than another or to shop here rather than there, have
been much researched. But it is increasingly realised that decisions taken by powerful
public and private sector ‘actors’ are at least as influential as the choices made by millions
of individuals.
In this connection, it should be stated at the outset that ‘the planner’ —meaning the
statutory land-use planning authority at county, district or unitary authority level—is but
one actor on the rural stage, and a relatively weak one at that. This is for two reasons. First,
by and large, the ‘planner’ can only steer development not cause it to happen or prevent it
completely. Second, there are so many more important decision-makers. For example, the
‘accessibility problem’ experienced by so many rural households with limited mobility is
the product not just of their own personal circumstances but of a web of ill co-ordinated
decisions taken by the bus and rail operators, the health authorities and trusts, the big retail