The ever present rural (1950-2007)

For ‘rural' see ‘urban,' as if the one is simply defined by reference to the other. Though the meaning appears elusive, millions of English people nurtured on a diet of Wordsworth's poetry and Constable's paintings, retain an image of the ‘rustic' or ‘rural idyll' as a haven of unchanging tranquillity. In France, rurality has long been nothing less than an issue of national and collective identity in which its people have long appeared implicated as ‘trustees.' Indeed, on both sides of the Channel, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of this myth in modern social thought. Lamenting the fate of the countryside, and protecting it from further change, is not new, but few causes today provoke as much debate and direct action. In 2002, a mass march organised by the ‘Countryside Alliance' quite exceptionally brought 400,000 people onto the streets of London, giving voice to a growing sense of crisis in rural England (albeit marshalled by the pro-hunting lobby). In France, where street protest is a traditional response, the marches organised by the ‘Conféderation Paysanne' in recent years have similarly widened the political agenda to attract media attention. Certainly, decades of urban growth and modernisation have not lessened public interest in the countryside in either country.

By the 1950s barely half of the population of France lived in the towns, a proportion reached in Britain 100 years earlier. But in France over the ensuing half century industrialisation brought about a profound sectoral and geographical shift of population into the burgeoning urban areas. Rural depopulation provoked a downward spiral of poverty and decline, as rapid modernisation in farm size and structure, together with a progressive movement away from overly protective policies, changed the face of French agriculture. Today, half of France's rural space is non-agricultural. The transformation of the rural world in England was no less turbulent, but was completed a century and a half earlier. With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, the growth of towns created demand for food as well as labour from the countryside.

The use of both more land and more intensive farming was accompanied by better yields, improvements in animal breeding and farming techniques. New machines like the steam-driven thresher, often violently contested by agricultural workers, created pools of rural unemployment. By the mid 19^thcentury, agriculture in England employed a much smaller proportion of the total workforce than any other European country.

Notwithstanding these enduring changes, albeit played out to very different time-scales on the two sides of the Channel, a sense of crisis remains today in the rural areas. Equally in evidence, however, has been the increasing erosion of the so-called divide between ‘rural' and ‘urban.' The most rapidly growing areas of population are no longer to be found in the suburban rings of large cities, but in and beyond the peri-urban fringe. The frontier of social change has now shifted to around the villages and market towns of surrounding rural areas. This late stage of the urban cycle has seen urbanisation give way to counter-urbanisation, often reaching well into the deep countryside. In France, 70% of rural areas, including the ‘rural profond,' benefitted from net migration gains between 1990 and 2000. With this population turnaround, observers began to talk of an urbanised countryside with all the attendant threats to landscape and environment. In seeking to explain the pull of the smaller and more rural places in preference to the metropolitan, it was tempting simply to evoke a growing and widely-shared anti-urbanism. It seemed to follow on naturally from already established patterns of population mobility and migration, both temporary and permanent, relating to retirement, second homes and tourism. This transfer of urban values has not invariably proved positive, and unexpected consequences for such sectors as the housing market and public services have given rise to growing local concern, even hostility. Retirement migration along both coasts of the Channel, as well as selected inland areas, has grown significantly in recent decades, considerably distorting the demographic structure of many local authority areas. Both the growth of second-home ownership and tourism bring more people into rural areas, but on a very temporary basis, clearly creating fluctuating seasonal demands for local services. Whilst in Devon and Cornwall the local proliferation of second-homes attracts increasing attention, the overall impact seems relatively small when compared to areas of Brittany and Normandy. Here in the traditionally most favoured locations along the coast, many communes see well over 50% of their housing stock lying empty for much of the year.

Whilst in the ‘open countryside' agriculture remains the major user of land and future change lies largely in the hands of farmers and land-owners, demands for change in the ‘developed countryside' appear much more complex. The larger number of competing interests and stakeholders involved is best understood ‘on the ground' where both developers and local authorities ultimately require planning permission. The exercise of public control over the development of rural land is fraught with conflicts between different users. The two western peninsulas of southwest England and Brittany exemplify the full range of issues – pressures from development along the coast; loss of protected moorland around the national parks and of good arable land along primary route axes; environmental impact of mineral extraction and nitrate pollution from intensive agricultural practices; management of the growing tourist influx and accommodation of second and retirement homes; use by the military of extensive tracts of land; construction of reservoirs – in short, pressures from more and more sources, that seem to intensify year by year.

Not for a long time has rural space been structured by agriculture alone. Clearly, its role as a major resource base continues but its provision of space for recreation and settlement is no less important. Its enduring role as the repository of protected nature and landscape completes a list of notions of the countryside that are not necessarily compatible. The countryside on both sides of the Channel has become contested space. Unsurprisingly, it was the agricultural community itself that initially gave leadership and support to ‘productivist' methods of farming, particularly in France. The environmental shortcomings of this approach were not fully recognised until the 1980s, with the promotion of more sustainable methods of rural management, backed up with financial incentives. Prior to this, nature conservation has stood apart from agriculture. The earlier designation of national and regional nature parks was followed by an increasingly complex regulatory framework for protecting diverse and fragile natural habitats and their wildlife. In Britain, balancing environmental concerns with social and economic needs has, until recently, provided an uphill task in the face of a powerful conservation lobby.

In the south of England, social inequalities become all too obvious as people move beyond the peri-urban fringe into the countryside. Whilst part-time farming is not a new phenomenon, the occasional appearance for sale on the market of large desirable country houses in otherwise protected landscape locations in and around the ‘Green Belt' has seen the price of farmland soar to record levels in recent years, as a new breed of ‘lifestyle farmer' colonises the countryside. Clearly this represents just a small slice of rural England, but a more general boom in house prices over the last two decades has inevitably impacted on affordability across the whole rural spectrum. In the more remote village communities, particularly in those areas attracting second home buyers, the private mobility of newcomers has had detrimental effects in undercutting rural services, inflating local house prices, thereby increasing disadvantage and social polarity. Nearer to major urban areas, the influx of affluent ‘hypermobile' professionals, who move to rural areas for quality of life reasons but commute to work, has had both social and environmental outcomes.

Not surprisingly, policy-makers in both countries have had to attempt to ensure that the countryside is not only ‘diverse' and ‘thriving,' but also ‘sustainable.' For this reason, the Eden Project in Cornwall became a symbol of rural regeneration and, although unlikely to be repeated on that scale, it has shown the way forward. In rural France, if traditional family farms are to survive, it is likely to be in the broader context of a ‘rurality' that embraces a more direct relationship between farmers and consumers. Many observers have already commented on what has been described as a ‘repackaging' of the rural for outsider consumption, drawing on a reinvestment in traditional local quality products (“produits du terroir...”), rural heritage (historic architecture, crafts, eco-museums...) and reinvented territorial identities (the former “pays”). State funding is available through contracts with the local communes seeking to encourage tourism and recreation. Historic towns and cities on both sides of the Channel have long seen their fortunes boosted by such targeted place promotion. Reappraising and marketing rural heritage provides an appropriate parallel example of sustainable development.