Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside

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Every village used to have a vicar. Now we see the vicar once every 9 weeks as he has 9 village churches to get round. Take a Look at Our Summary of November Highlights, Whether You're Looking for the Latest Releases or Gift Inspiration Thompson said: “I think most of us care deeply about the countryside but it’s funny how often it’s characterised as a place of escape for city-dwellers. In her book, Rebecca writes so honestly from both personal experience and research. I’ve learned about bygone trades and ingenious community schemes. I’ve been frustrated by social inequality and reassessed my relationship with Airbnb. This is a gorgeous, truly illuminating book—affectionate, perceptive and fascinating. I’m so happy to be publishing it.” Many of the streets on Smith’s estate are named after victims of the 1923 Redding Pit Disaster, which claimed 40 lives after the shaft became flooded leaving many trapped. As hope of rescue faded, one miner had written heartbreaking letters to his wife. “Dearest Maggie – tell Peggie, James, Lilly, Jeannie and wee Maisie to keep up. In this beautifully observed book, Rebecca Smith traces the stories of foresters and millworkers, miners, builders, farmers and pub owners, to paint a picture of the working class lives that often go overlooked.

Work in the countryside ties you, soul and salary, to the land, but often those who labour in nature have the least control over what happens there. Starting with Rebecca Smith's own family history - foresters in Cumbria, miners in Derbyshire, millworkers in Nottinghamshire, builders of reservoirs and the Manchester Ship Canal - Rural is an exploration of our green and pleasant land, and the people whose labour has shaped it. Beautifully observed, these are the stories of professions and communities that often go overlooked. Smith shows the precarity for those whose lives are entangled in the natural landscape. And she traces how these rural working-class worlds have changed. As industry has transformed - mines closing, country estates shrinking, farmers struggling to make profit on a pint of milk, holiday lets increasing so relentlessly that local people can no longer live where they were born - we are led to question the legacy of the countryside in all our lives. This is a book for anyone who loves and longs for the countryside, whose family owes something to a bygone trade, or who is interested in the future of rural Britain. The message is as clear as it was in those outrageous-but-true stories of Lord such-and-such moving whole villages because they spoiled the view: you can create the countryside, but you cannot live here, retire, return or raise your children here — and if you do manage that, they cannot come home. What a lovely read this is, so thoughtful and moving, yet also challenging and provocative too. Rural has deservedly been chosen as a LoveReading Star Book. Author Rebecca Smith looks at the history and future of those born, bred, and working in the countryside. This isn’t just a surface picture of rural life, it deep-dives into this world, and shows an element that most won’t have seen or even understand. At first I felt as though she was slightly ambivalent, sitting on a sharpened edge of awareness and I wasn’t sure where she was going to settle. The further I read, the more I realised that she holds a true love, personal and honest and pure, for the countryside. This book feels important, as though it had to be written now, and should be read by those who hold power, who make decisions. Her questions, her mourning, emphasise the reality of working in our most rural areas, this isn’t a theme-ride version, this is truth. I felt as though I was on a meandering course as I read, dipping in and out of her family, discovering history, examining the social and economic aspects of rural life. It has somehow seared itself onto my soul and I cried as I finished. Highly recommended, Rural is a very special read, one that highlights the joy and difficulties of living a working life in our countryside. Rural shows that this attitude has only consolidated over subsequent years. Smith suspects her upbringing confers a kind of “class ambiguity”. Descriptions of her childhood proximity to lakes, gardens and treehouses lead others to assume that her family was wealthy or well-connected. She has been blithely invited to shooting parties. In an episode of the recent documentary series Grayson Perry’s Full English, the only rural dweller and Cumbrian representative the artist sceptically interviews while questing for the “northern soul”, is Lord Inglewood of Hutton-in-the-Forest.But politicians and “action groups” can never leave anything alone. Tinker and chisel, tinker and chisel, so now there are restrictions once again, which coupled with our bizarre planning system, and hysteria every time a landlord does something to upset a tenant, which means; surprise surprise; landlords are exiting the market, rents are rising because the supply is restricted and getting ever tighter, there is no money for repairs, and like this disgraceful and sentimental article, every minor offending of a tenant by their landlord is blown up to a major event (their Mapledurham cottage is falling down!). The first thing is the voice. Somehow the author has honed her prose to make it both precise and personal. She speaks directly to the reader with a clarity that is completely unaffected, but recognisably individual. She’s an honest observer, but each anecdote is diffracted through a lens of personal experience, often brimming with mischief. There is much I recognise. The privilege of living on a grand country estate; of coming home through magnificent gated entrances, and the discomfort of having ‘a boot in both fields’ and a kind of class ambiguity: ‘to fit in with the workers, but also the owner.’ And it is a Conservative government that is the main culprit in this; it should argue for the beautiful benefits of the free market, but no, it must make things worse by its leaden handed and ill informed interference. And some tenants lose the house they may have lived in all their lives (as did my family (farmers)) but that is because things change and life moves on. It is sad but nobody has a right to be a hansom cab maker or artist at some one else’s expense.

This is a book for anyone who loves and longs for the countryside, whose family owes something to a bygone trade, or who is interested in the future of rural Britain. I was five months pregnant with my third baby when I learned about what kind of life Mary-Ann must have led. When the censuswas taken in 1891, she was pregnant with her fifth child – and was housing 11 lodgers. Just five months later, her baby, James, died. Her next child was born 10 months after that.

I found the history, both of rural life and of her family fascinating and there are some astounding facts and statistics. I was less enamoured with how she tried to weave in her current family situation and felt the book would have been better without that. Too often, the lives of rural people have been overlooked or else romanticised, especially by writers. Not here ... Warm, astute and sincere' Smith is uniquely positioned to harvest the stories of rural and ex-rural working-class communities and turn them into something approaching magic. Rural ascends to beauty because it manages something more than simple reportage [...] This book is tender, glowing, vitally important stories whispered into an ear" But Rural is a book for everyone: we are all of us connected to the countryside one way or another, and it’s full of surprises in what constitutes rural work. A thoughtful, moving, honest book that questions what it means to belong to a place when it can never belong to you … Timely and illuminating’Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment -

The third thing I admire is the synthesis, the recognition that manual workers the world over - be they miners or farmers – and their families - are required to live in remote place and often have little agency or control over their surroundings. It's never heavy handed or pompous, presented with a light and personal touch. The author’s family travel with her to many of the places she visits; her own pregnancy making her especially sensitive to the often-undocumented challenges experienced by women in rural areas. It's heart warming and hopeful to hear about the community land ownership projects in Assynt and Eigg and let's hope it becomes more prolific across the country. The politics of land ownership and rural economics are complex and Smith deserves credit for grappling with some of this territory within an accessible and thought-provoking narrative. There's much to enjoy in Rural" Think of the Creagh Dhu mountaineers who escaped the grimness of Depression-era Glasgow during the 1930s, or the families who poured onto boats to head “doon the watter” when shipyards and factories closed for the annual fair fortnight. In her account of early UK tourism, Smith mentions middle-class wanderers who couldn’t afford the aristocracy’s European “grand tours”, and also the disdain expressed by the likes of William Wordsworth towards the humbler wave of travellers, who were often no strangers to damp, squalid housing or many of the other problems she lists as afflicting rural communities.Ten years later, Rachel was married and pregnant with her first child. She and her husband applied for another local occupancy house in the same area but were, again, told no. This time the reason for refusal was because they didn’t have children. “I was about to have a baby!” And her choices were limited. There is still no way she could afford to buy in the village where she grew up. Opportunities to rent long-term are rare. This is a book for anyone who loves and longs for the countryside, whose family owes something to a bygone trade, or who is interested in the future of rural Britain. About This Edition ISBN: The book is better read not as as a single, tidy argument but as a series of interconnected essays linked by Smith’s journey around the country. She was pregnant for much of the journey, and she details how that, and having to manage a family, affected her research. Some readers will find this intrudes on the main narrative, but she is making the point that if you are not well off, and your circumstances are challenging, then a sense of a family connection to a place can feel like the most important thing you have, and have to give. How we manage people’s competing claims to ownership of places is one of the great questions for the world in the 21st century. As Rural shows, the British countryside is a good example of how not to do it. A wonderful book, beautifully conceived … So immediate and clearly seen, so gracefully and gently written … It is such a valuable thing’Adam Nicolson, author of Life Between the Tides - In the 1870s, the Manchester Corporation Waterworks made plans to buy two small Cumbrian lakes, Wythburn Water and Leathes Water, and the land surrounding them. They wanted to build a reservoir. The city desperately needed access to clean water for its burgeoning industrial population. But the plan met with virulent opposition. Octavia Hill, later co-founder of the National Trust, set up the Thirlmere Defence Association. John Ruskin went so far as to say he thought Manchester itself ‘should be put at the bottom of the Lake of Thirlmere’.

Prompted by her memories and questions, she travels to various rural communities with historical links to industry, each one given a chapter with a title such as “Coal”, “Water” or “Food”. The best are those in which she uncovers forgotten working-class histories and communities: the villages built for forestry workers as forests were planted after the first world war, for example, or the camps for the navvies who built the great dams and reservoirs to supply the cities with drinking water. Less compelling are the chapters such as “Mining” or “Textiles”, which add little to already familiar histories. Dystopian Fiction Books Everyone Should Read: Explore The Darker Side of Possible Worlds and Alternative FuturesComing from the heart, and with a heart’s knowledge, it is a gentle but thoughtful inquiry emanating from the sensitivity, exposure and vulnerability of a way of life and community not used to speaking out. One that exists in deference to a landowning power and class, and the knowledge that you mustn’t bite the hand that feeds and shelters you. It comes from a place where community is everything. The author grew up on a country estate where her Dad was the forester and she tells of the divide between 'the big house' where they were allowed to go for a Christmas party once a year but otherwise kept their distance. Rural is hybrid biography and exploration of Britain's most lucrative rural working-class industries over the centuries through to present day, how exactly these fit into the British cultural landscape and the type of people who underpin them. As someone who grew up in a small town in Northumberland and who remains there to this day - albeit after a detour through a variety of more heavily populated areas such as Newcastle - this book sounded appealing to me, and as other country bumpkins will know, living your formative years in a rural location makes it difficult to ever live, or more importantly be happy, in a city. Interspersing her own family history between chapters dedicated to Land; Wood; Coal; Water; Food; Slate; Textiles; Tourism; Development; Business; and Our Land, Smith explores each industry from its inception and early days and its evolution through to today. We lived four miles from the closest village, which meant four winding miles to the nearest shop and, of course, the school.’ Rebecca Smith’s brother with her mother. Photograph: Rebecca Smith