Lavenham, Suffolk
Population: 1,800
Issues: Satnav traffic, housing, social cohesion


First-time travellers to Lavenham in Suffolk find themselves questioning their sobriety. If they turn out not to be drunk, then it must be the houses because they are slewing all over the place. Roofs shrug and buckle on cock-eyed gables. Buildings lean over as if they are resting their head on a neighbour’s shoulder. If the English village is a state of mind, this one trumps the most active imagination.
Lavenham comes across as the village equivalent of a celebrity who has everything: looks, money, history, hard times, depression, recovery. Most of the timbered houses here were built in the second half of the 15th century. That it has survived in this form is due to three things: solid craftsmanship, a brilliantly waged war of preservation in the 20th century, and the sometimes inconvenient truth of new money.
The fabric of the place is part of its own small industry. You can barely move for preservation orders, not just on the houses but on the trees too.
Forty years ago they did away with overhead wires and ran them under the streets. Americans love it. Until recently coachloads came to the Swan Hotel to see the panel of signatures bearing the names of their fathers who were stationed at the nearby wartime airbase. Tourism fell off a little after the attack on the World Trade Centre, which reminds you that nowhere, not even the quintessential English village, is purely local. Far from it in this case: one of its sorest problems, the traffic, is imported in ever larger lorries coming across the countryside from Felixstowe and Harwich. They thunder by on the A1141 just 18in from the front doors. In a modern twist to an old problem, it has become more acute as a result of drivers being sent this way by their satnavs rather than the more suitable route from Hadleigh to Sudbury.
Lavenham takes the business of being Lavenham very seriously. Five years ago it published its own design statement, stressing the need for two and three-bedroomed houses for young families. Every Thursday morning there is a community surgery at the top-of-the-range new village hall behind the medical centre. Yet all is not happiness here. They love the place, but so does everybody else, and that’s the problem.
Some of the younger ones are struggling to house themselves. They don’t so much resent the people living in the lovely old houses as the newcomers who want to live their lives apart, as if they’re too good for the villagers. There are shades of Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life in their perceptions of these strangers in their midst. “Some are very snooty,” says 36-year-old Melanie Newman, who lives in a housing association property in Long Meadow, with her husband and their two children. “They’ve not lived here five minutes and they think they own the place. They hardly ever show up in the village, just buy all their stuff from Waitrose in Sudbury.”
She works part-time in a local shop, and her husband works for a farm contractor outside the village. The Newmans, like other young families wanting to stay in Lavenham, point out that the stock of suitable housing has declined as a result of the council’s sell-offs. Just three of the new homes to be built by the housing association will be three-bedded, and they are hoping they will not be fourth on the waiting list.
Margaret Bale shares her anxieties. She is the new local officer (minister) for the Salvation Army. There is an impression that everyone is older and wealthy, she says, but there is a parallel reality of youth and poverty.
“There are families who are forgotten,” she believes. “They are almost invisible.”
the majority of the 1,800 residents, it works. In some cases literally so, for there is a growing number of homes in which, thanks largely to the internet, small businesses are thriving beneath the skewy but tastefully restored eaves. Mike Hodges, for example, who runs a photography business from Church Street.
Or Claire Calder-Marshall, who runs a flourishing gallery in the Crooked House on the high street.
Traffic is an extremely hot potato in Lavenham. The street has the biggest unbroken run of homes of this epoch anywhere in Britain. Shake them to bits and you are destroying more than property. Some of Calder-Marshall’s neighbours insist the only answer is to slap a World Heritage Site designation on the village. No, says Lyn Gurling, Lavenham parish council chairman and convenor of the Thursday morning surgeries; do that and you staunch the lifeblood that keeps the village from turning into a full-blown museum.
Bollards, says Tony Ranzetta, of the magnificent De Vere House. Bollards and wider pavements to lessen the spray which is fast corroding the lime mortar on the house fronts. No, say others; redesignate the road from an A to a B.
It’s the damaging indifference of incomers that is at the heart of the Battle of Lavenham, whether they arrive in human or vehicle form. They’re not all bad. They never were. In the 21st century Poles come to work in the kitchens of the Swan, just as there were Flemish weavers coming to set up their looms in Water Street in 1335.



Nenthead, Cumbria
Population: 400
Issues: Dwindling services, inadequate transport
Coming down into Nenthead in Cumbria on the back road out of Alston over the moors is like arriving from the sky. Far below you is the little linear cluster of houses with a handful of solid stone buildings at its heart. Even from this distance you can just about make them out as the old staples of English village life: two churches, maybe a couple of pubs, a shop with a post office. It appears perfect in its North Pennine remoteness, bang in the middle of the country’s last great wilderness, 50 miles from Newcastle to the north-east and 30 from Carlisle to the north-west. Perfect and tiny, with fewer than 400 inhabitants, really just a squiggle in the road that rises to Killhope Moor and Cornriggs. It looks as if it knows the kind of place it is – enduring and well defined, with nothing remotely new encroaching onto the surrounding peat.
Very deceptive. Fifty yards closer and you notice a peculiar eyesore – a building the size of a football pitch which, for some reason, has been left to rot in this most carefully policed Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Closer still and one of the pubs is not a pub at all but a bolted gastro-house, while one of the churches, the old Methodist chapel, is up for sale.
If you had come here just six months ago there would have been no shop or post office either as the owner had retired and left. This meant that for most of last year there was nowhere in the village to buy anything. You had to go five miles down the road to Alston, an austere market town with steep cobbles, which can prove too much for the old ones.
In the absence of a new proprietor, Nenthead mounted a stirring campaign to set up a community business, selling shares to raise capital, getting a loan from the Co-operative Group and receiving funding and advice from a range of local organisations.
It is now once more the hub of Nenthead’s life. It employs seven part-time staff, most of them young women from the village or the surrounding area, and opens six days a week. The other day, a local businessman came in to post a thousand letters to show the post office what a thriving branch it is and how vital to the community. In the corner is a little table. Ask nicely and they will make you a tea with the kettle behind the counter.
One of the villagers sitting at the table is Helen McAlindon, who has lived here for 58 years. She is talking about the doctor’s surgery, how it used to open on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays plus one night a week, and how it’s now down to one day a week, if that. In comes Ian Wright, who runs Wrights Bros coaches and is the grandson of one of the three who founded the firm back in 1924. Fifteen years ago they had to start diversifying, just like any other concern in these parts, and got into doing the transport for touring bands. But the buses and their village clientele face a crisis, with Cumbria County Council threatening to withdraw subsidy from the Newcastle service.
The authority argues that the community here requires access to only one of the two cities, Carlisle and Newcastle, and that one is to be Carlisle. Over my dead body, swears 78-year-old Sid Wilson, for whom the bus route is the sole means of reaching his family.
The great slab of dereliction in the middle of the village is Wrights’ old depot. They would redevelop it, but there is a potential problem with contaminated ground. It used to be the washing floor for the old lead mines. Nenthead, it turns out, is far from being as old as the hills which cup it. It was a model village planned in the early 19th century by the Quaker-run London Lead Company. As parish councillor Tony Pennell explains, the village today comprises several strands: the remnants of the old mining community, the farming population – declining as everywhere else – a few “hippies” who sought peace here in the Sixties and Seventies, and the inevitable new weekenders from the big towns.
Some speak nostalgically of the vanished pub, the Crown, with its billiard table and its packed darts nights. You never see the young couple who’ve turned it into a restaurant, says one. It’s now called Overwater Lodge, and describes itself as “the home of fine foods”. On a cold day before the spring, you have to go round the back and rap on the private door. The trade is tourist and holiday rather than local, says the owner, ex-serviceman Simon Vance. They did try to keep it on as a pub, but the people who came in to eat didn’t like being there with old men sitting in a cloud of smoke and swearing. The mines where they worked as young Bevin Boys now do their bit for the local economy as a tourist site, but the world which sustained them has vanished in a puff of smoke.

Yet the owners of second homes in the UK number no more than 350,000, which is just one per cent of the total housing stock. An organisation formed last year, called the Second Home Owners Club, argues that they are being scapegoated for a set of circumstances not of their making. How can they be held responsible for pushing villages beyond the reach of the local populace when the number of transactions involving SHOs is such a tiny proportion? What’s more, claims the club’s founder, Graham Green of Lichfield in Staffordshire (he has a two-bedroom cottage in North Devon), he and others like him help to put £1.5 billion into the local economies by spending on improvements to the properties, using local tradesmen and eating in local restaurants.
It seems logical to ask whether our yearning for a life in the countryside is not just because of some imagined loss of innocence, but the response of a nation forced too hastily into the towns by the industrial revolution and its present technological successor. And there is no one better to ask than Ronald Blythe, whose own life spanned most of a century that saw the countryside move from obsessive postwar productivity and subsidy through the grain mountains of Europe to set aside and the current climate of management. Blythe is 85 and is to be found today in the same fold of Suffolk landscape he has inhabited for the past 30 years. He lives alone in the secluded house that the painter John Nash had before him.
Yes, he says, there probably has been some kind of collective trauma, with our species, homo anglicanus, unable to keep pace with the changes. “And yet, you know, our ancestors hardly knew the names of the flowers and the birds. Everyone assumes that they were familiar with them and that it is we who have grown ignorant, but it is rather more the other way round. We’ve got all this information because of our excellent books and programmes on natural history. Many of the people who come here buy a little bit of land and look after it most lovingly. Farmers are becoming conservationists, putting back hedges and cleaning out ditches that haven’t been touched for years.”
Just over the county border in Norfolk, in the picking seasons of the past seven or eight years there have been massive labour migrations from Europe and beyond. At these times, there are as many as 2,000 Portuguese living in Thetford, 5,000 Chinese in King’s Lynn. They may not come out to the villages, yet they inevitably affect village life by putting pressure on the rental market in the towns close by.
“In a strange way,” says Blythe, “it’s all a development from Saxon times. You had the Romans here for 400 years, which was an enormous period really. Then the North Europeans arrived. Human beings are so restless, so resourceful. They always have been, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
“Look at the Poles. Peterborough has a great number of them. It’s not like they are refugees, but brilliant young people moving to where they can make a living and send money back home. Many of the people living around here are the descendents of migrants who came down here from Scotland to farm. There was a sort of £10 train, the equivalent of the £10 fares to Australia, and they put everything on it, the machinery, the horses, everything. They were the saving of us here, they were excellent farmers. My old neighbour here, who died aged 100, he came down on a £10 train.”
The room in which we are speaking is 400 years old. Less than a century ago there would have been a dozen people coming and going – five labourers, a couple of servants, the farmer, his wife, their children and animals. It was a farmhouse, standing in 70 acres on the edge of the village, Wormingford. Today, of the population of 400, just six work on the land.
“It’s a spiritual thing, certainly,” says Blythe of the appetite for village life. “It seems like a moral, untainted place to live, somewhere you can find happiness. It’s odd, isn’t it, because that is so far removed from the reality of how it was, with people often leading lives of grinding misery, and physically trapped by an unforgiving community, much like George Crabbe and Thomas Hardy described it.”
Just as the international power of the City has driven up the top end of village prices, so the defaulting of poor mortgage risks at the foot of the US economy will at least temporarily put a brake on the rise. It is, indeed, a global matter. Here, on the sought-after ground of England, the next wave of trouble will break not only on the villages themselves but on the bits of countryside that remain between them. By 2020 there will be three million more homes, some on the brown sites of existing towns, some on the edges of smaller communities, and some in brand new villages of their own. This demand for new building comes partly from the increase in the population and the length of time we live, but mostly from the breaking up of families and the exercising of our right to live alone. That’s where we are – passionate about villages but not wanting other people around. Very English in fact. And very Utopian. The trouble is that the world’s not getting any bigger, and it’s all joined up.


Lympstone, Devon
Population: 1,700
Issues: Affordable housing
No wonder the Lympets started clinging for dear life to the Devon village that gave them their name. Like young adults in any attractive English rural community you care to name, they did their sums and were traumatised by the results. Average property prices were soaring to eight and nine times average wages. It was the usual story – the arrival of weekenders and the conversion of cottages to holiday lets were driving the market beyond the means of local buyers. Hence the formation of the Lympstone Movement to Protect and Ensure Tomorrow’s Secure.
This was five years ago, Tomorrow has become Today, and the Lympets have had a modest measure of success. The thing about Lympstone is that it is a holiday village that doesn’t quite see it that way. As a result of that denial, it has now become an interesting hybrid of leisure and work. It even bears the symptoms of a commuter community.
Location, as ever, is the key. Here it is, cleverly poised on the east side of the shimmering Exmouth estuary. Exeter is booming five miles to the north, with its university, a science park under construction, freight transfer depot and two new peripheral villages in the pipeline. Exmouth, two miles the other way, is not doing so badly itself; a new Asda looks likely. What’s more, there is a railway linking these towns, the southern extremity of the cross-county branch line coming down from the sleepier, Tarka the Otter landscape of the north. Lympstone has not one but two stations for its community of 1,700. There is Lympstone Village and Lympstone Commando, the second serving the Royal Marines’ training centre.
Because of topography, the forces of house-price inflation are particularly severe. It’s almost a peninsula – sandflats to the west, sea to the south, enough to thwart the most ingenious developer. It’s a village that evolved facing two ways – outwards towards the fishing, inwards towards the farming.
At the opposite end of the harbour the properties climb up the hill in more spacious gaps. Keep your back to the sea and there’s a niff of Home Counties stockbroker. Then turn round, glimpse the estuary and you understand why the estate agents reckon on what is effectively a 25 per cent premium for the view. It puts even a suburban bungalow up in the high £300,000s.
There were just a handful of Lympets to begin with – about three or four, rising to eight and eventually to a total of 16. They were supported by a further 130 villagers who believed that housing the young adults was the only way to retain the mix of ages and populations that has been a characteristic of Lympstone. Their lobbying of the East Devon District Council was tireless and effective. Five years on, a development of 52 new homes is being completed at St Mary’s Meadow at the village edge. Twenty-one of these, with two to four bedrooms, will be so-called affordable homes for young families. They are the result of a collaboration between a West Country company, Cavanna Homes, and the Exeter-based Sovereign Housing Group, which is partly financed by grants from the Government.
But what does affordable mean here? “Well,” says Sarah Griffin, Sovereign’s regional development manager, “it means affordable by people who could not afford to get into the market by other means.”
Kate McIntyre and her husband fall into that category. He works as a chef at the Swan, and she looks after their two boys of five and one. They have been paying £500 a month for a run-down, two-bedroom cottage in a row of rentals opposite the pub. Here at St Mary’s Meadow that same sum will more than cover the mortgage repayments on a 40 per cent share of the full £200,000 purchase price of their new three-bed home. The appeal of doing it this way is that they can then increase the percentage of their ownership over the years, with the eventual aim of owning the property outright.
This, say the McIntyres, is the only way they could have afforded to stay in the village without pouring money down the rental drain. She was born here, and he close by. She tried London, but missed Lympstone. Her family goes back generations in the village. Looking out of the window in her unfinished home, she can see across to her parents’ house where she grew up. That house was built for them by her grandfather, who used to farm the land on which the new house stands. “I’ve fought tooth and nail to stay in the village,” she says. “No one’s going to shift me.” And no one’s about to disagree.
The Lympets’ stand is seen by many villagers as a crucial moment in Lympstone’s history. But there is a poignancy to the story, as both parish council chairman Peter Acca, and chair of the affordable housing committee, Liane Asel, agree. He built his own four-bed house 30 years ago and reckons it is now worth £400,000-£500,000. She came here from Germany just five years ago, has Lympstone engraved on her heart but can’t afford to buy here even though she has a good job as customer relations manager in a big Exeter wholesaler. “The Lympets took time to have an effect,” she says. “Some of them married and moved away. It’s mostly their successors, rather than the originals, who are being housed now.”
The tourist literature has Lympstone as an “unspoilt fishing village,” which is all wrong. There is no fishing left, just the net-drying poles which are now used to hang washing. But it is on the brink of a most surprising bonanza, involving a form of transport which made its first big impact in Edwardian rural England. Some predictions put the cycle traffic from the brand new national network section between Exeter and Exmouth at several hundred an hour, swelling the trade at the three pubs, boosting business at the Londis and the Shears Place café, even securing the future of the post office and shop. Klonbike they are calling it.