Planning and the Myth of the English Countryside, in the Interwar Period

Abstract

A landscape is never so valuable as when it is under threat, and the English rural countryside has been the subject of alarm for centuries. Raymond Williams identified an ‘escalator’ on which literary representation continually looked back upon a past golden age of rural virtue, ensuring that the idea of a ‘true’ rural England has persisted into the twentieth century with extraordinary power Thus Howard Newby can write of the ‘stereotypes and myths which surround the popular image of the rural world’, while, at the same time, he claims this fallacious perception is ‘one of the major protecting illusions of our time’. This illusion has been reinforced by the nature of English society. Sir Lewis Narnier believed English society to be ‘amphibious’ in the eighteenth century, with no sharp divide between town and country among the interests of the ruling classes. By the end of the nineteenth century the countryside, under the influence of Romanticism and a changing class structure, had become the preserve of an upper-class society increasingly separated from industrialism and the great towns. Yet this upper class was cemented by the public schools and the universities to include not only landowners, but an array of occupations, including many intellectuals. Until the First World War, despite increasing mechanisation and specialisation in the countryside, the land presented a rural face largely unspoiled by the intrusion of industrial and urban uses. Land was held in large estates, farmed by tenants in a world of mostly irregular fields, lanes and hedgerows, with buildings that preserved vernacular styles.