Property and power in the English countryside: the case of housing

AuthorPeter Somerville
PositionSchool of Social Sciences, University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK
Introduction

This paper looks at the changing character of social relations in the countryside, with a view to understanding the prospects for rural housing development today. Starting with a brief review of the history of these changes, the paper goes on to consider the issue of rural gentrification and then provides an analysis of the politics of rural housing development. Policies and proposals for rural housing are evaluated and conclusions drawn. Throughout the paper, the focus is primarily on land because the availability of land is crucial for housing development.

Historical background to rural housing in England today

Howard Newby described the two main social classes in the countryside as follows:

[…] a comparatively affluent, immigrant, ex-urban middle class and the remnants of the former agricultural population tied to the locality by their (low paid) employment, by old age and by lack of resources to undertake a move. The former group lives in the countryside mostly by choice (and this includes the majority of farmers and landowners) and has the resources to overcome the problems of distance and access to essential services. The latter group, by contrast, has become increasingly trapped by lack of access to alternative employment, housing and the full range of amenities which the remainder of the population takes for granted ( Newby, 1980, pp. 273-274 ).

This serves to highlight that the issue is not a simple one of “locals” versus “newcomers”. Rather, it is a case of a coming together of “old” landed and “productivist” interests centred mainly on agriculture with “new”, so-called “post-productivist” interests based on a middle-class search for the rural idyll ( Murdoch, 1995 ) or perhaps a bourgeois colonisation of rural heterotopia ( Halfacree, 2009 ), or maybe an expansion of the (urban) “space of flows” into the (rural) “space of places” ( Castells, 1996, 1997, 1998 ; Reed, 2008 ), or a more complex and dynamic concatenation of material, social and cultural forces ( Parry, 2013 ). Meanwhile, the original “locals” have become a shadow of their former selves due largely to the mechanisation of agricultural labour and the decline of domestic service.

Right up to the eighteenth century, Britain and Ireland were overwhelmingly rural and such towns as they had, with the notable exception of London and a number of ports that were reliant on international trade, were what is now called “market towns”, being situated at the centre of local and largely agricultural market operations. In the nineteenth century, some of this rural land became urban as a result of industrialisation. The remainder, however, continued to be dominated by large family estates, which were the power base of a landed gentry (the old ruling class, still represented in the House of Lords), many of whom could trace their ancestry back to Norman times. Then, in the first half of the twentieth century, many of these large rural estates (particularly in Ireland) were broken up and sold to sitting tenants, resulting in what Newby (1987, p. 153) called “a new breed of owner-occupier commercial farmers”. In the second half of the twentieth century and up to the present day, this process has continued but, in addition, large estates have been recreated through agglomeration into corporate landholdings. Cahill (2010) , for example, notes that, over this long historical period, the key change has been from family estates to corporate estates, with the largest single ones being the Forestry Commission, the National Trust, and the Defence Estates. Even so, the monarch (through the Crown Estate) still has one of the largest landholdings in Britain, and more than a third of the total land (urban and rural) continues to be owned by aristocrats (most notably, the Duke of Buccleugh and Queensberry, the Duke of Atholl, the Duke of Cornwall, and the Duke of Westminster).

The importance of this history for understanding rural problems today has been highlighted by Spencer (1997) . He distinguished between two different types of rural area: “closed parishes”, which have “a long history of domination by a principal estate proprietor or a small number of landed agriculturalists” ( Spencer, 1997, p. 78 – I take him to mean something like “gentlemen farmers”, the gentry typically being owners of large tracts of agricultural land) and “open parishes”, where there is a much greater diversity of ownership within the area. This distinction seems to have arisen in the first half of the twentieth century. In closed parishes, the big landowners restricted new housing development, while in open parishes such development was more likely to occur, presumably because of the lack of strong organised opposition to it. The planning system instituted by the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 then effectively set this distinction in stone by allowing local authorities dominated by landed interests (known colloquially as “squirearchies”) to designate small settlements in closed parishes as non-growth areas, thus restricting new development to the open parishes, now designated as “key settlements”1.

If this explanation is correct, it means that key characteristics of the British countryside today derive from the opening up of landownership that occurred largely in the years from 1918 to 1948 (though it continues up to the present day). Many of the former closed parishes have seen a change from an aristocratic landlord to a public landlord but this does not seem to have led to any reduction in the emphasis against (non-agricultural) development, and many other closed parishes continue to be dominated by traditional landed gentry. On the other hand, many (and unfortunately there seems to be no way of knowing how many2) open parishes have become dominated by agri-businesses, who are not necessarily any more interested in non-agricultural development (except for their families and friends) than landowners in closed parishes. Consequently, with the exception of those open parishes designated as key settlements, much of the countryside is effectively closed to new development that is not required for agricultural purposes.

It seems to be generally accepted that the social composition of the countryside has changed radically over the last 100 years or so ( Williams, 1965 ). Many of the old family estates remain, but they do not dominate the national picture as they once did. Agriculture has become far more intensive and more capitalised, still taking up huge tracts of land but employing only a fraction of the labour force that it used to. New employment in the countryside has nowhere near made up for the loss of agricultural jobs (for the most recent confirmation of this, Gallent and Robinson, 2011, p. 304 – “the lack of quality jobs in the villages was a recurring theme”). At the same time, most rural areas have grown in population, mainly due to an influx of commuters and retirees. This has increased demand for housing in these areas while at the same time new housing development has been restricted because of the bias towards agricultural interests. The result has been a long-term failure to provide sufficient affordable housing for those who need it outside of certain key settlements.

Satsangi et al. (2011, p. 185) are clear that the problem has always been, and continues to be, the system of landownership in the country (side):

Land allocated for housing in rural areas has been concentrated in larger settlements, often within or adjacent to designated key settlements in the past, and market towns today ( Cloke, 1979 ; Parsons, 1980 ; Cameron and Shucksmith, 2007 ), focusing the process of middle class gentrification in locations – often village locations – where development has been generally discouraged or where speculators bid for the high end of the market.

Consequently, and ironically in view of the ideology of rural conservation, it is the smaller rural settlements (understood in this paper to mean those with a population of less than 3,000) that have experienced the greatest social change. At the same time, counter to this ideology, the growth of agri-business has seen the greatest destruction of traditional rural environments, habitats and ways of life ( Harvey, 1998 ). The issue of gentrification is discussed separately in the next section.

Rural re-gentrification

The concept of gentry embodies a unity of (rural) production and consumption. In the English tradition, a “gentleman” was a man of leisure, earning income not from his labour but from his ownership of land (his “lady” also lived on unearned income but did not originally own property in her own right unless she inherited it from her husband when he died) ( Cannon, 1997 ; Coss, 2003 ). He did not work, exactly, but he consumed the countryside, typically conspicuously, through so-called “field” sports (hunting, shooting, fishing, etc.) and grandiose projects of building, excavation, landscaping and other rural “improvement” such as deer parks. Arguably, this continues to be true of an elite of landowners today, who are overwhelmingly male3, often do not work (at least not in the countryside) and pursue the same “gentlemen's” sports ( Heley, 2010 , on the “new squirearchy”). Whether they are exploiting the countryside through agri-business or “protecting” it from non-agricultural development or consuming huge swathes of it with their leisure activities, the effect seems to be the same, namely that the countryside works for the benefit of themselves and to keep the landless in their place or to exclude them altogether. In this long-term historical endeavour, the traditional “upper class” aristocrats have now been joined by large numbers of “middle class”...

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