‘Glow worms show the path we have to tread’: the counterurbanisation of Vashti Bunyan

Abstract

Although ‘counterurbanisation’ is very widely acknowledged and studied, certain elements of this migration-led phenomenon lack detailed scrutiny. These gaps need filling in order to appreciate the full flowering of the phenomenon in specific social-cultural, geographical and historical contexts; to enable comparison between these diverse expressions; and to examine their relationships with contemporaneous rural socio-cultural restructuring. One neglected element is counterurbanisation fairly directly informed by the late 1960s/1970s counterculture, a migration strand quickly stereotyped as the ‘hippie’ ‘getting her/his head together in the countryside’. This paper uses the example of British singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan, notably through the gestation and content of her Just Another Diamond Day album of 1970, to illustrate and examine countercultural counterurbanisation. With an additional nod to affective aspects of rurality, it also suggests something of what the lengthy rural journey Bunyan made from London to the Scottish islands, a key inspiration for the 1970 album, provided for her at a difficult, challenging, yet ultimately rewarding period in her life. Indeed, her experiences of (trying to engage with) the countryside on this journey are described as heterotopic, an association which leads the paper to suggest a more general heterotopic status for rurality within counterurbanisation.