Alan Franks
Writer and musician
Writer and musician
The English village fights back
Under pressure from all quarters, the English village is changing and is truly global as it's never been before. Alan Franks reports. (Article first published in The Times Magazine, 10 May 2008.)
We are almost tragic. The vast majority of the English, nearly 80 per cent, live in the cities and towns, while a similar number of us say we would like to live in the countryside. We have a notion of the English village as an idyll of order and tranquility while making the places so expensive that they drive out the lifeblood of their own youth.
Mythology and nostalgia are the forces that preserve this Utopia against harsh evidence, just as they keep alive, even now, the faint thought that trains are pulled by puffers.
As our reports on these pages show, the village is up against it. In parts of the country it is pushed to the brink by dwindling services, closing post offices, falling rolls and threatened schools. It takes many forms, from the huddle of 200 souls hanging on in the uplands while their vital links are severed, to the almost-town of 15 times that size, with all the amenities you could want. So, rumours of the death of the village are exaggerated; the places are changing, that’s all, like the rest of the country. In some cases this is happening so fast that new buildings and new people make them barely recognised by former residents after an absence of three years.
Somewhere in the middle of our view of the rural community there remains the ideal of ideals – a settled place with a pub and a church, a cricket club that plays on the green, a good primary school, a moderate sense of remoteness, no planning blights in the pipeline. It’s an often vague sense of an England gladly lagging behind the vanguard of progress and technology, but also geared up for home industry on the internet. No matter if the branch line from the town got axed back in the time of the Beeching cuts 45 years ago; this is a car-enabled life, and besides, the old trackbed has probably got a new lease as a cycleway. There are about 400 villages in the first category, 1,500 in the second and 1,000 in the third. Untold millions of us would mortgage our lives away for a small but solid, perhaps stone-built chunk of these virtual Heavens.
Farming in the English countryside is just a fraction of the industry it once was, but early each spring there are frantic outbursts of animal activity in the choicest rumps of England. The creatures are fresh from the troughs of City bonus payments and they are converging on the estate agents’ offices to unload seven-figure sums for that rambling old rectory in Dough-on-the-Wold. Their activities may not seem at all relevant to the rest of the population. But they have a profound impact on the rural housing market, and have been doing so for the past decade. Even in such a lean bonus year as this, Charles Arkell, director of Cotswold estate agents Humberts, estimates that between 15 and 20 per cent of properties on their books are going to City bonus recipients or to those who have just sold their businesses.
The English village, therefore, is truly global in a way that it has never been before. Just as the mighty wave of City wealth in 2004 inflated property prices by nearly 50 per cent in the most sought-after pockets of West London, so it washed out to the Home Counties and beyond. Well beyond; in newly fashionable villages and small towns such as Burnham Market, or nearby Holt in resurgent north Norfolk, or the posh holiday spot of Rock in Cornwall, or Southwold on the Suffolk coast, house prices were doubling in three years. These and places like them came to be known as the Red Trouser Belt, this being the garment of choice for the broker at leisure.
The City’s influence did not stop here. So dominant has it become that some companies decamped to the regions. Unlike the red trouser brigade, they were going there full-time, and to work. Land and services were cheap, travel was less stressful and the staff and their families would be happier. For a start they would be able to live in a proper English village and be only half an hour from the city centre. And so Peterborough, Leeds, Newcastle, Chester, Crewe, Exeter, Southampton and others set in train their own splash-and-ripple phenomena, with village house prices soaring in the Fens, the Dales, the Marches, the moors, the forest and at the coast. In some cases this has started renewing the villages, with school rolls rising.
It was the existing young who were priced out. Those without private money or access to scarce council or association housing went to the large local towns where there was still a stock of just-affordable private rentals. The average age of villagers is now five years higher than town dwellers, and in the past two decades the proportion of young people (between 15 and 29) has dropped significantly, from 21 per cent to 15 per cent. It is not as though no one cares. As our study of the Devon village of Lympstone shows (page 19), the affordable housing schemes run by some of nearly 2,000 associations in the UK are helping young parents to stay in their villages through a variety of shared equity arrangements.
Under pressure from all quarters, the English village is changing and is truly global as it's never been before. Alan Franks reports. (Article first published in The Times Magazine, 10 May 2008.)
We are almost tragic. The vast majority of the English, nearly 80 per cent, live in the cities and towns, while a similar number of us say we would like to live in the countryside. We have a notion of the English village as an idyll of order and tranquility while making the places so expensive that they drive out the lifeblood of their own youth.
Mythology and nostalgia are the forces that preserve this Utopia against harsh evidence, just as they keep alive, even now, the faint thought that trains are pulled by puffers.
As our reports on these pages show, the village is up against it. In parts of the country it is pushed to the brink by dwindling services, closing post offices, falling rolls and threatened schools. It takes many forms, from the huddle of 200 souls hanging on in the uplands while their vital links are severed, to the almost-town of 15 times that size, with all the amenities you could want. So, rumours of the death of the village are exaggerated; the places are changing, that’s all, like the rest of the country. In some cases this is happening so fast that new buildings and new people make them barely recognised by former residents after an absence of three years.
Somewhere in the middle of our view of the rural community there remains the ideal of ideals – a settled place with a pub and a church, a cricket club that plays on the green, a good primary school, a moderate sense of remoteness, no planning blights in the pipeline. It’s an often vague sense of an England gladly lagging behind the vanguard of progress and technology, but also geared up for home industry on the internet. No matter if the branch line from the town got axed back in the time of the Beeching cuts 45 years ago; this is a car-enabled life, and besides, the old trackbed has probably got a new lease as a cycleway. There are about 400 villages in the first category, 1,500 in the second and 1,000 in the third. Untold millions of us would mortgage our lives away for a small but solid, perhaps stone-built chunk of these virtual Heavens.
Farming in the English countryside is just a fraction of the industry it once was, but early each spring there are frantic outbursts of animal activity in the choicest rumps of England. The creatures are fresh from the troughs of City bonus payments and they are converging on the estate agents’ offices to unload seven-figure sums for that rambling old rectory in Dough-on-the-Wold. Their activities may not seem at all relevant to the rest of the population. But they have a profound impact on the rural housing market, and have been doing so for the past decade. Even in such a lean bonus year as this, Charles Arkell, director of Cotswold estate agents Humberts, estimates that between 15 and 20 per cent of properties on their books are going to City bonus recipients or to those who have just sold their businesses.
The English village, therefore, is truly global in a way that it has never been before. Just as the mighty wave of City wealth in 2004 inflated property prices by nearly 50 per cent in the most sought-after pockets of West London, so it washed out to the Home Counties and beyond. Well beyond; in newly fashionable villages and small towns such as Burnham Market, or nearby Holt in resurgent north Norfolk, or the posh holiday spot of Rock in Cornwall, or Southwold on the Suffolk coast, house prices were doubling in three years. These and places like them came to be known as the Red Trouser Belt, this being the garment of choice for the broker at leisure.
The City’s influence did not stop here. So dominant has it become that some companies decamped to the regions. Unlike the red trouser brigade, they were going there full-time, and to work. Land and services were cheap, travel was less stressful and the staff and their families would be happier. For a start they would be able to live in a proper English village and be only half an hour from the city centre. And so Peterborough, Leeds, Newcastle, Chester, Crewe, Exeter, Southampton and others set in train their own splash-and-ripple phenomena, with village house prices soaring in the Fens, the Dales, the Marches, the moors, the forest and at the coast. In some cases this has started renewing the villages, with school rolls rising.
It was the existing young who were priced out. Those without private money or access to scarce council or association housing went to the large local towns where there was still a stock of just-affordable private rentals. The average age of villagers is now five years higher than town dwellers, and in the past two decades the proportion of young people (between 15 and 29) has dropped significantly, from 21 per cent to 15 per cent. It is not as though no one cares. As our study of the Devon village of Lympstone shows (page 19), the affordable housing schemes run by some of nearly 2,000 associations in the UK are helping young parents to stay in their villages through a variety of shared equity arrangements.
But our villages are growing old. A few are in danger of becoming hypothermic if their lifelines are cut further. These include many whose post offices are set to close – 2,500 out of the total of 14,000. Then there are the consequences of dwindling maintenance services. Along the roads of some remote communities in Cumbria and Northumbria, ice erodes the surface, potholes go unmended, the elderly venture out still less. Yet even in communities on the brink, there is a doggedness, even optimism. Take the remote Pennine village of Nenthead (page 25), where residents formed a co-operative to re-open an abandoned post office and vital shop.
David Butler, head of rural affairs for the Northwest Development Agency, says that even as regions such as Cheshire have been regenerated, with people commuting within it far more than they used to for work, shopping and leisure, there remain pockets of serious poverty in several of the county’s villages. In the furthest reaches of Norfolk and Suffolk, says Ivan Cutting, artistic director of the theatre company Eastern Angles, working-class villages are vanishing. “I mean the ones where it was the working-class residents who ran the hall and the committees.” In more prosperous villages the professional middle classes have swept with customary confidence into the building and management of the village hall, greatly helped by the awarding of a total of £160 million over the past 12 years by the National Lottery Community Fund. For example, in the Suffolk village of Lavenham (above) a new hall hosts every conceivable event from barn dances and touring theatre to crowded “parish surgeries” every Thursday morning. Other village halls around the country feature film nights, Pilates classes, local farmers’ markets, you name it.
Somehow, argues Lord Cameron of Dillington, a former chairman of the Countryside Agency, we must staunch the flow of young people away from villages. “If the young are able to live in the villages,” he says, “they’ll look after the older ones. We also have to start thinking more imaginatively about the things that keep villages going. Transport in particular. For example, if the ambulance is picking up old Mrs Smith, maybe it could pick up a couple more who need to go to the shops.”
Many put the blame on second homeowners. The charge sheet includes the following: they barely grace the village with their presence and contribute nothing to the life of it. They do all their shopping before they come, and don’t understand the concept of social duty towards the struggling village shop. They expect town facilities in the middle of the countryside. They are so ignorant about rural things that they are liable to complain about loud animals as a noise pollutant. They take more than their fair share of a finite stock in an already crowded country. And of course – the main sin – they distort house prices.
The most prominent scourge of the second-homer is the Liberal Democrat MP Matthew Taylor. He has been asked by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to conduct an inquiry into the subject. One of his recommendations is expected to be that the Government should have powers to oppose the purchase of a house by outsiders who do not intend to make it their main residence. Taylor concedes that multiple ownership is not the only problem – mere retirement purchases by wealthy professionals are part of the picture too – but that in certain areas including the Lake District and the Yorkshire national parks it is contributing heavily to the growth of the deserted village. In and around his own Cornish constituency of Truro and St Austell, he says, some villages are “dark” for most of the year, with less than half
of their homes occupied. It has not happened overnight. In February 2005 he told the Commons that in the previous five years second-home ownership in his county had gone up by 40 per cent; some villages on the Lizard pensinsula were down to 20 per cent occupancy for much of the time. He cited the case of Manaccan, where there was a massive disparity between the census figures (25 per cent) and those of the parish council (80 per cent).