Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
If these books tell us about the past, your next book, The Death of Rural England, gives us some idea about what will happen in the future.
The Death of Rural England is a much more recent book. It is written by Alun Howkins, a historian who officially retired last year, but is still actively writing. Its subtitle, The Social History of the Countryside Since 1900, again gives away what the book is about. The book summarises all the 20th-century changes that we’ve been talking about. If The Making of the English Landscape looks at the countryside from the beginning of human history in England, what The Death of Rural England is doing is looking at the changes to the countryside that we are familiar with. His title, The Death of Rural England, implicitly poses the question that I alluded to before, of whether a rural society remains as something different from urban society any more.
What kind of changes to the countryside can we expect to happen in the future?
As a historian, I don’t do prophecy. As someone who just happens to live in the countryside, what I think is happening is a polarisation between the countryside of production (agri-business) and the countryside which people live in and use for leisure. But rural England has a long tradition of surprising us: that’s why predicting what’s going to happen is a mug’s game that I’m not going to play.
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Paul Brassley is a Research Fellow at Exeter University and a former chair of the British Agricultural History Society. His academic interests are in rural history and economics, with current research projects involving the history of technical change in 20th-century agriculture and the history of rural Europe in the Second World War.
