Coronavirus is driving a wedge between social classes and fuelling hatred between city and country folk
The divide between Town and Country has been with us for centuries, and each passing day of the pandemic seems to widen it. Yet it’s far from obvious which side has the moral high ground, writes Richard Askwith
The lilac tree behind our dustbins is blooming. I noticed its blossom glow the other evening, as we clapped the NHS. It always surprises me: that brilliant, elusive shade, somewhere between lavender and purple, which appears without warning each spring and fades within weeks to the colour and texture of dirt. Right now, the colour is rich as fresh paint yet also, mysteriously, light and powdery as blusher. In the cool evening air, the sweetness of its scent is dizzying.
I don’t know how the tree got there. It’s lived here longer than us – and we’ve been here nearly 30 years. Yet each year it startles me: the rest of the year it’s just a tangled thicket. And each year its unexpected blossom fills my heart with gladness.
It’s not just about the lilac. That gratuitous outpouring of colour marks a turning-point in my year, when the slow hang-over of winter is blown away by the realisation that, all around, nature is bursting back to life. In the lanes leading out of our village, verges froth with nettles and wild-flowers. There are bright white lambs in the fields; there’s a bounce in the turf; branches sag with fresh green leaves; and the days are as long as you want them to be. The more time you spend outdoors, the more you sense that elusive something that scientists call “geosmin” but most of us call “spring” – and the harder it becomes to keep out of your head the glib thought that all’s right with the world.
It isn’t, though. That’s the trouble.
For most of us, these are the worst times we’ve lived through. But how bad is that, exactly? It depends where you’re looking from. For some, recent weeks have brought unbearable pain and grief; for others, immense stress, sacrifice and fear. But many have experienced no first-hand pain from coronavirus at all. In late April, according to YouGov, more than half of us still didn’t personally know anyone who had had the virus. And although we’re gloomier than we were before the virus came along, contentment levels have actually been rising since lockdown began.
This is a catastrophe that, more than most, distributes its cruelties capriciously. The virus is worse for the old. The preventive lockdown is worse for the young. Both are worse for people from Bame backgrounds than for the average white person. Both are worse for those with underlying health problems than for the fit and well. The poor, irrespective of age or ethnicity, suffer far worse than the comfortably-off. And key workers – especially the NHS workers who risk their lives daily on hospital front lines – are exposed to far greater risk than the all-but-useless majority stuck at home.
Uneven distribution of psychological pain adds to the unfairness, and to our disconnectedness. Each of us has our own unique vulnerability profile. How old are you? How healthy are you? How exposed are you to infection? How happy, or hateful, is your home? Can you still earn a living, or make ends meet? And what about your loved ones – and your circle of close and distant friends? How vulnerable or exposed or bereaved or financially damaged are they? And then, just in case you’re tempted to feel optimistic for a moment, what about all their circles of loved ones, or the circles of customers, businesses and nations on which your future ability to support yourself – or even to go out safely – will depend?
We are indeed all in this together, in the sense that our hopes for a tolerable future depend on co-operation and constructive recognition of our interdependence. In the here-and-now, however, we are in it separately. Each of us has to navigate our own private journey towards relative peace of mind.
On the rare occasions when we reach that elusive destination, we tend to feel guilty for having done so. Such guilt is unsurprising but misplaced. There is nothing selfish about finding moments of equanimity to shore up your mental health, any more than it is selfish, in an aircraft emergency, to follow the official advice to put on your own oxygen mask before trying to help anyone else. Yet the instinct remains to reproach ourselves for not being miserable enough – just as William Wordsworth reproached himself two centuries ago for being “surprised by joy” while in mourning for his sister. As a result, a lot of us are living in a more or less permanent state of psychological tension.
Perhaps that’s why we find it so tempting to channel our emotions into blaming other people for their inappropriate happiness. You’ll have noticed the pile-ons to celebrities who have ill-advisedly shared their lockdown idylls on social media, just as you’ll have noticed the enthusiastic dobbings-in of public figures such as Dr Catherine Calderwood (the Scottish chief medical officer who resigned after being caught visiting her family in Earlsferry, Fife) or Robert Jenrick (the housing, communities and local government secretary, who was criticised for driving 40 miles to Shropshire to drop off food and medication outside his self-isolating parents’ house; and, on a separate occasion, for basing himself at a home in Herefordshire which, some said, was not his main residence). Hundreds of thousands of Britons have also been quietly informing the police about their fellow citizens’ breaches of lockdown regulations. Most of the alleged offences seem trivial in the great scheme of things, but it’s comforting to get outraged about them.
Hundreds of thousands of Britons have been quietly informing the police about their fellow citizens’ breaches of lockdown. Most of the alleged offences seem trivial, but it’s comforting to get outraged about them
And when that’s not enough, there’s also the option of rediscovering the pleasures of factional outrage. You’ve probably noticed familiar feuds seeping back into public discourse recently, from the ideological (Left vs Right, Leave vs Remain, Woke vs Reactionary, Green vs Climate Change Denier) to the social (Poor vs Rich, Commoners vs Toffs, North vs South, Bame vs Racist White Establishment). Some have more bearing on our current predicament than others, but it barely matters. It’s just reassuring to get back to the eternal battle between Us and Them, rather than this scary new battle between Us and It.
But you do need to know which side you’re on. Otherwise, there’s no comforting certainty. And there’s one big traditional social fault-line that, despite generating plenty of outrage, offers none of this clarity. The divide between Town and Country has been with us for centuries, and each passing day of the pandemic seems to widen it. Yet it’s far from obvious which side has the moral high ground.
Each claims relative disadvantage and blames the other for worsening its plight. Each, from a certain perspective, has a point. For example: it is obvious that, for most people, lockdown in a crowded city is miserable, stressful and, in the long term, probably unsustainable. It’s also obvious that in the countryside, for many people, much of the inconvenience is minor. I’m not going to enthuse about just how minor it is: there has been more than enough of that sort of thing already, and it has, understandably, gone down badly with those less insulated from the pain. Yet smug accounts of rural idylls proliferate for a reason: they’re true. Despite everything, it’s nice here in south Northamptonshire. It helps if you’re wealthy, but that isn’t essential. Just being in the countryside is the main privilege.
True, there has been death and bereavement here too, and plenty of rural people are getting ill, or putting themselves at risk every day at work, or struggling to afford basic necessities, or torturing themselves about being cut off from vulnerable loved ones, just like people in cities. But the countryside thing makes everything a bit better. A locked-down city is like a giant prison. A locked-down village is just sleepier than usual.
From a strictly selfish point of view, as a slightly reclusive middle-aged writer who mostly works from home anyway, I have to admit that there have been moments – when I’ve been absorbed in my work and my GoodSAM volunteer responder siren hasn’t gone off and I’ve kept myself away from news and social media for a few hours – when I’ve forgotten, briefly, that there’s a crisis at all.
I suspect that some readers will despise me for that confession. I sympathise with them. But it’s the truth. I have become very privileged, in relative terms, since this pandemic began. I have done nothing to deserve it, yet I have been enjoying more than my fair share of nature, more than my fair share of open space, more than my fair share of green fields, trees, wildflowers, birdsong – even, it sometimes seems, blue sky.
As it happens, I am privileged in other ways too: I have my health (so far), my family (so far), work (of sorts) that I can do at home, a comfortable home in which to do it; and I’m an educated middle-class white man. But that’s just me. The broader privilege of enhanced access to many of life’s most precious free gifts is shared by all who live in the countryside; and the more remote your location, the more privileged you are.
As a further perk, and again through no merit of our own, we country-dwellers are exposed to less than our fair share of danger: you’re far more likely to be infected by coronavirus in a crowded city, and far more likely to die of it. When the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed earlier this month that the death rate from Covid-19 has been twice as high in deprived areas of in England, a glance at the accompanying interactive map suggested a parallel interpretation: that the poor are dying in their thousands in built-up areas, while the wealthy shires around them get off lightly.
Living in a town or city may also make you less well-equipped to resist coronavirus. Our rural advantages include: cleaner air (which several studies have associated with a lower death rate from the virus); less crowded accommodation; less of the stress that results from being in a densely-populated man-made environment; greater likelihood of having access to a garden (in which we can, if we choose, grow food); and more of the calming benefits of nature. Again, the remoter your rural location, the greater your share in these privileges. The death rate from Covid-19 in the remotest south-western counties is less than a tenth of that in London (86 per 100,000 people) and around a quarter of the national average.
The more remote and rural your location, the slimmer are your chances of getting an intensive care bed if you need one; or, for that matter, of getting to a hospital in time for it to do you any good
All these differences feed into a fairly compelling narrative, in which those with homes in rural areas have it easy and those in cities are unfairly disadvantaged. If you accept that narrative, it’s easy enough to find high-profile countryside-based villains to flesh it out, from the Beckhams in their Cotswolds mansion to Gordon Ramsay and his family in Cornwall – or, for that matter, the Prime Minister recuperating in the spacious, secluded grounds of Chequers. Further afield, the award-winning French novelists Marie Darrieussecq and Leïla Slimani have had scorn heaped on them for publishing journals about their delightful rural lockdown experiences in the Basque Country and Normandy respectively, while across the Atlantic Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel have been pilloried for sharing too much information, with too little empathy, about their idyllic retreat in Yellowstone.
But there is also an opposite way of looking at this, with the country folk as the victims and city-dwellers as the over-privileged villains. Rural areas, in this narrative, are most at risk from the virus. People who live in the countryside are, on average, older. They also tend to be poorer and to have fewer employment opportunities, which makes them especially vulnerable to recession. That ONS map mentioned earlier creates a false impression. Those poor, mainly urban areas suffering disproportionately from coronavirus are indeed poor relative to the countryside’s commuter belts and built-up areas, just as they are poor relative to richer urban districts.
Out in the real countryside, however, in the south-west, east and north (and in most of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), per capita wealth and income is significantly lower than in cities. Meanwhile, in most parts of rural Britain our health infrastructure is much thinner. The more remote and rural your location, the slimmer are your chances of getting an intensive care bed if you need one; or, for that matter, of getting to a hospital in time for it to do you any good. This applies in most developed nations. In the US, there have even been reports of remote rural hospitals, which have been struggling financially at the best of times, closing down just at this worst of times.
Now this vulnerable countryside faces a further threat, from city-dwellers fleeing their virus-ridden cities. In the UK, these well-heeled refugees include owners of second homes (more than 300,000 of them); a surprising number of would-be tourists and day-trippers; and, according to some reports, high-net-worth London families who are paying premium prices to rent rural refuges.
Anger at these groups – expressed in countless anonymous quotes to journalists, social media posts and hostile slogans – has been fierce and blunt. “Tourists, go home”, says a sign in Cornwall. In Pembrokeshire, the message is: “Your holiday, our lives – turn around”; in Devon: “If you do not live here, go home”; in Gwynedd: “Go home rats”. Those are the politer ones. The core message is the same however you phrase it: vulnerable villagers don’t want their safety jeopardised for the benefit of some rich, entitled, selfish townies, who should do their bit for the common good for once and take what’s coming to them in the cities.
For some rural people, this ill-feeling is an extension of the old, worldwide struggle between the Many and the Few. In France, where nearly 1.2 million people fled Paris in the week the lockdown started, the “Parigot home!” graffiti that has greeted them in the countryside is a pun on the slang word for a stuck-up Parisian. In parts of South America, coronavirus is referred to as “the plague of the snobs”. But it’s not just the rich who are invading the countryside. In India, where some 140m people have lost their jobs since the lockdown began, hundreds of thousands of poor migrant labourers have been returning to rural villages, mostly on foot. Similarly, in Peru, where almost a third of workers have lost their jobs, there have been more than 160,000 requests for permission to leave cities, and the roads out of Lima are already lined with people fleeing, with or without permission, on foot.
Generally, for anyone who is able to flee, flight to the countryside is an instinctive and rational response to civilisation-threatening catastrophes, especially plagues. It always has been; and, generally, it is how plagues have spread. Cultural historians enjoy speculating that Boccaccio may have written much of The Decameron in the Tuscan countryside while 14th-century Florence was in the grip of the Black Death, or that Shakespeare may have written King Lear after leaving 17th-century London to be ravaged by plague without him. They rarely mention that, if they did, others may have paid a lethal price. But that’s why so many country-dwellers, in times like these, view urban visitors with horror. That, too, is instinctive and rational.
In fact, coronavirus isn’t a lethal plague. It’s a nasty, dangerous, mostly survivable virus that will ultimately reach most of us, and it’s at least arguable that our collective interest would be better served by a (controlled) spread across the whole country than by the possibly illusory hope that it can be kept at bay until it is made harmless. Yet it’s hard to dispute that: the more deeply it penetrates the countryside, the more lethal it seems to become. In the US, 55 per cent of rural counties have suffered coronavirus death rates higher than the national average. In Spain, similarly, although most infections and deaths have been concentrated in Madrid and Barcelona. Those rural areas where the virus has penetrated – the thinly populated provinces of Soria and Teruel, for example – have suffered disproportionately, because their health systems couldn’t cope. In Soria, the death rate per 1,000 population is double the national average.
Much of the countryside’s defensive suspicion is directed not at coronavirus itself, which is invisible, but, instead, at visible outsiders who might be carrying it
As for the UK, a study by researchers at the University of St Andrew’s suggests that in the remotest rural settlements of all, the per capita death rate could be 85 per cent higher than in big cities – and that’s just on the basis of age profiles. Factor in access to health-care and the disparity could be greater still.
That St Andrew’s study has yet to be peer-reviewed, but we have long since passed the point where minds could be changed by such details. In some parts of the countryside – South Lakeland, south-east Wales, East Staffordshire, County Durham – the death rate is already at near-London levels, and that’s despite six weeks of lockdown. Not surprisingly, mutual mistrust is rampant. Coronavirus is only part of it. In some parts of the British countryside, details of unfamiliar vehicles are quickly shared on social media, sometimes with photos. (“Hope police catch these scum” said a recent post relating to a sighting in my area.) If the suspicious intruders aren’t free-range exercisers or second-homers, they could be burglars, which is almost as bad. Either way, they’re assumed to have urban origins.
In my optimistic moments, I tell myself that a vaccine or cure for Covid-19 may be nearer than we think. But even if that were true, it’s hard to imagine an antidote to the endemic virus of rural mistrust. Much of the countryside’s defensive suspicion is directed not at coronavirus itself, which is invisible, but, instead, at visible outsiders who might be carrying it. Most rural Britons accept that, right now, our rurality is a great privilege. But we also know that, the moment coronavirus reaches us, that same rurality will be a lethal liability. The invisible border between town and country keeps us safe and, as a result, is policed jealously.
This raises the question: are you an insider or an outsider? The problem, as with most identity politics, is drawing the line. We all instinctively tend to believe that “we” are good and “they” are bad. But who, in this case, is who? Who – and what – counts as rural? Who and what counts as urban? Even the experts can’t agree.
The rural/urban classification used for the 2011 Census had 10 different categories, ranging from “major conurbation” to “hamlets and isolated dwellings”, which might or might not be in a “dispersed” or “sparse” setting. These were sometimes superseded by a local authority spectrum ranging from “Mainly rural” to “Urban with major conurbation” via various intermediate shades such as “Urban with significant rural”. And that’s just for England. An alternative classification, recently developed by the Centre for Towns, divides all the settlements in mainland Britain into six categories.
In this system, there are 12 “core cities” (major conurbations and economic centres such as London and Glasgow); 24 “other cities” (settlements such as Portsmouth or Aberdeen with populations of more than 175,000); 119 large towns (with populations between 60,000 and 174,999); 270 medium towns (25,000 to 59,999); 674 small towns (7,500 to 24,999); and 6,116 settlements classified as “villages and small communities”. This is easier to get your head round but takes no account of each settlement’s rural or urban setting and, as a result, is of limited use when you are trying to make accurate, common-sense generalisations about who lives in the city and who lives in the countryside.
Broadly speaking (and sticking to England for simplicity), we can say that out of an English population of nearly 56 million, 46.4 million people (83 per cent) are defined as living in urban areas and 9.5 million (17 per cent) as living in rural areas. But barely half a million people (less than 1 per cent of England’s population) live in the countryside as it is popularly imagined – that is, in rural towns, villages or hamlets in “sparse settings”. Around 10.5 million people live in what we would definitely think of as city (that is, within a “core city”). For the rest, there is a degree of overlap.
Wales (35.1 per cent) and Northern Ireland (37 per cent) have significantly higher proportions of their population living in unambiguously rural settings, while in Scotland the proportions are much the same as in England. In all four nations, rural people tend to be significantly older. The median age in an English “village or small community” in 2016 was 46; in a “core city” it was 34. Rural people also tend to be slightly poorer, slightly healthier (within a given age group) and less likely to have children who go to university. The further you get from the big cities (ie beyond easy commuting distance) the more pronounced these differences become.
But blurred boundaries have never stopped the haters from hating where race or class are concerned; nor will they if the Town vs Country divide turns nastier
Numerically, it seems reasonable for city-dwellers to think of themselves as “the many” and country-dwellers as “the few”. Yet it is also reasonable for country-dwellers to think of city-dwellers as the rich elite and themselves as unfairly disadvantaged “ordinary” folk. The fact that a mass of city-dwellers going into the countryside will generally distribute themselves between thousands of different rural settlements means that, in any given place, it will seem to the rural inhabitants that they are the ordinary majority, while visitors or incomers from cities are a privileged minority.
But it’s not as simple as that. Until Covid-19 hit the fan, around a fifth of the rural workforce was commuting 20km or more to get to work each day, mostly to urban workplaces; 800,000 of them commuted to London. In many cases these commuters were spending more waking hours in towns and cities than in their relatively rural residences. Do they all really count as “country folk”? And what about those who live in the countryside but visit cities irregularly, or those whose livelihoods rely on urban clients; or the second-homers who divide their time relatively equally; or, for that matter, those who moved in recently? Every year, there is a net migration of approximately 100,000 people from urban to rural locations, and in most villages “real” locals, whose family roots in that place go back several generations, are a small and dwindling minority, who often view more recent arrivals with suspicion.
All these difficulties of definition ought to undermine the case for factional hatred. But blurred boundaries have never stopped the haters from hating where race or class are concerned; nor will they if the Town vs Country divide turns nastier. For proof, you have only to look at one of the census-based maps published in Defra’s Statistical Digest of Rural England and compare the nationwide pattern of rurality with a recent map showing the distribution of coronavirus cases around the country. On the whole, there is a striking correlation between densely populated urban areas on the first map and the areas of high infection on the other. The more rural and remote the area, the less severe the impact of coronavirus is likely to have been (so far). There is, however, one striking exception: a dark slash of coronavirus severity across the north, in Cumbria and County Durham. This is what happens to rural areas when outsiders penetrate their defences.
And that, at a glance, is the problem. In normal life, the boundaries between town and country are soft and porous. The hard borders that are now being erected are artificial and unfair. But a significant number of country-dwellers are keen to keep them as watertight as possible – and will remain keen when the lockdown begins to be lifted. Except that “keen” is too weak a word. For some, it feels like a matter of life and death.
How the flight from the cities will play out worldwide remains to be seen. In the UK, however, we face some specific questions of our own. We are an overcrowded island, with little countryside to go round. We have a long tradition of tribal mistrust between Town and Country. And yet many of us don’t even know which tribe we’re in.
Instead, most of us were born – and most of us now live – in that sprawling middle ground that is neither wholly urban nor whole rural. To ask us to choose between town and country is like asking us to choose between civilised and natural, or between smooth and rough, or classical and romantic, or comfortable and wild. We may have temperamental preferences: my instinct, for example, is to favour the second adjective in each of those pairings; which implies that, deep down, I’m Country rather than Town. Yet for most of my life, like most people, I’ve happily kept a foot in both camps. Why wouldn’t I?
Now fear of coronavirus is emptying the middle ground, as ruthlessly as Brexit emptied the middle ground of politics. Across the country, you can hear the murmuring of old hatreds. In the space of a few days last month, there were reports of anti-townie vigilantes in Nottinghamshire, a paint attack on a non-local car in Cornwall, an abusive note on a visitor’s windscreen in Cumbria; and wider reports via the National Rural Crime Network (NRCN) of community road-blocks and aggressive drivers targeting cyclists. If self-defence against infection is the immediate motive, this is clearly spiced with a visceral hostility towards cities and the out-of-touch elite who live in them.
There have been reports of anti-townie vigilantes... If self-defence against infection is the immediate motive, this is clearly spiced with a visceral hostility towards cities and the out-of-touch elite who live in them
Each impulse fuels the other. After all, who was it who introduced coronavirus to these shores, if it wasn’t those “citizens of nowhere” that Theresa May warned us about? Decent, ordinary “citizens of somewhere” stayed in their British homes this winter (supposedly) and just-about-managed while shrugging off traditional British diseases. Meanwhile, the self-serving urban elite who sold us down the river to Brussels were swanning off on business trips to China and skiing holidays to Italy, Austria or Colorado – before bringing a fancy foreign virus back home with them.
For those who identify with a rural population that has been scorned for decades by the metropolitan governing class of all parties, it feels both preposterous and outrageous that this same rootless elite now expects to be welcomed into the fragile safety of the countryside. Hence the anger of groups such as the Countryside Alliance, the National Farmers Union, the Country Landowners’ Association and the NRCN, who combined in appalled protest to the Justice Secretary last month when police chiefs loosened official lockdown guidelines about driving into the countryside for exercise. Never mind the plight of millions of city-dwellers shut up indoors like battery chickens: the prospect of more city-dwellers making “unnecessarily long journeys to exercise in rural areas” would “cause untold anxieties across rural communities”.
To dismiss such concerns as the blinkered Nimbyism of the shires is to underestimate the accumulated resentment of a whole sub-set of the population – a half-submerged traditional class of people who earn their livings from the land not far from where they grew up, who have never had university degrees or city salaries or even, in many cases, foreign holidays and who, as they see it, have been treated with contempt by urban sophisticates for far too long.
A dozen years ago I spent a long time travelling through the English countryside, seeking out and interviewing people with deep roots in their local soil and communities: people with no “town” in them at all. Over several months, from Cornwall to Northumberland, I explored a countryside whose fabric and character had been rewoven in little more than a generation.
In village after village, pubs, shops, post offices and schools had closed or were closing. Churches were empty; every street was clogged with expensive cars; agriculture had dwindled to a footnote in the rural economy; and the local businesses that had sprung up to fill the vacuum catered to a new rural population with urban appetites for comfort and luxury. Born-and-bred villagers who had lived all their lives on the same local stage – rather than in the global context in which most of us imagine our stories unfolding – had become rare to the point of extinction. Those that I met were mostly old, and were often astonished, when I found them, that a writer should have any interest in their lives.
Many of them are dead now, but I still treasure the collection of interviews they gave me: with farmers, thatchers, shepherds, saddlers, bodgers, hurdle-makers, huntsmen, fishermen, eel-catchers, ploughmen, poachers, gamekeepers. Each told me their story, offering different insights into the countryside and its memories; each was a repository of disappearing practical know-how; each had memories of local people and traditions that would, in most cases, die with them. Their vanishing world had much about it that would not be missed: most had endured poverty and grinding physical hardship; several had never been to school; and some had barely strayed beyond their village boundaries, ever.
Most seemed to feel that this was a small price to pay for a life lived in close harmony with their immediate environment. And most felt marginalised, even threatened, by a new breed of recently arrived countryside-dwellers whose lives were driven by urban wealth and urban values. This didn’t surprise me, but the bitterness was shocking. Right across the country, the complaint was the same, although the dialects were different.
“Villages aren’t villages any more,” said a Yorkshire mole-catcher. “You can live three or four doors from someone and not know ’em, because they commute to work.” A Cumbrian farmer complained about “people who don’t understand the country telling us how to live our lives”. “You got people coming in here, it’s always people who want to make money,” complained a Cornish fishermen. “Why do they always see the potential in things? What’s wrong with how things are already?” Another old Cumbrian said simply: “We’re like the Maoris…”
By the time The Lost Village was published, in early 2008, I was resigned to the idea that this self-identified “lost tribe” of country people was dying out. Its passing seem sad but inevitable: something to be noted, and perhaps even mourned, but not resisted. It was too late; and, in any case, it was progress. But I did wonder how the new way of country living that had replaced the old one could be sustainable. A rural fabric of scattered villages and small, dispersed town had evolved to support a rural economy that was, in the broadest sense, agricultural. The land that separated people was also what supported them. But now agriculture was little more than a footnote in the employment statistics (with most work on the land done by seasonal migrants) while the most influential part of the rural population drew its wealth from a modern, globalised economy created by and for city-dwellers. If the rural economy was still thriving, it was in spite of the countryside’s quaint, dispersed, rural nature, not because of it; and it was cities, not the land, that kept it going.
In my book’s final pages, I concluded that “all that wasn’t going to last: the endless economic growth, the endless travelling, the endless ripping up of a countryside that had, for all its faults, sustained the English for most of their history. Sooner or later, the oil would run out; sooner or later, the borrowed money would run out. Sooner or later, a rural economy based on aromatherapists, pet-groomers and life coaches would burst from lack of substance. Sooner or later, the effects of climate change would force us to rethink our relationship with, among other things, the motorcar. Sooner or later, we would need to learn anew how to feed ourselves from our own farming.”
Six months later, the financial crisis engulfed the world. For a while I thought my prediction was coming true. Instead, the pre-crash order somehow re-established itself. The bankers were bailed out, the reckoning was kicked further down the road; and the “real” country people continued to lose cultural ground to new villagers with semi-urban souls, well-intentioned but different – in short, to villagers like me.
But the minority who identified with the old countryside didn’t go away. Instead, they grew angrier, and their sense of injustice festered. Their anger is focused today on fleeing city-dwellers trying to muscle in on rural safe spaces. But that same anger has been focused for many years on a much more broadly defined enemy: on out-of-touch legislators in Westminster; on patronising metropolitan liberals who sneer at traditional rural practices from fox-hunting to livestock farming; and, not least, on all those cultured, cash-rich middle-class graduates who have flooded into the countryside over the past half-century, gentrifying it, civilising it, remaking it in their own image – and making it unaffordable for those who were born there.
Are we really so arrogant that we imagine that we can sweep aside generations of accumulated rural wisdom and memories, just because we are modern and have belatedly grown tired of our cities?
Today, there is a hint of triumphalism in that anger – as if, this time, the reckoning really had arrived. Just as coronavirus has shown us who the key workers really are in cities (not, as it happens, the hedge fund managers), so it has shown us who really matters in the countryside. And, surprise surprise, it’s not the sophisticated, cosmopolitan graduates. It’s the people who know how to grow things and make things and deliver things. In the words of one popular recent post, much-shared on Facebook in several countries: “Farmers have been constantly attacked by ignorant do-gooders and the media… Where are these Greenies now? They’re tucked up at home while the farmer keeps the country running.”
The triumphalism may be premature. One of the few things we can say with confidence about the knock-on effects of this crisis is that it seems to be shifting the balance of desirability between town and country. In the past, city-dwellers who have done well for themselves have been drawn to the countryside by dreams of an idyllic lifestyle. In the job market, however, cities have had more pulling-power; and this – combined with traditional urban attractions such as shops, restaurants, nightlife, accessibility, connectedness and general public buzz – has given cities a relative advantage that has been reflected in sky-high property prices. But where are those attractions now? In their place, we have fear of contagion, fear of over-crowding and air pollution, fear of a disrupted food supply, and perhaps even a new fear of being deprived of recreational open space. Ideas are being floated about the possible rationing of access to green spaces, or perhaps the need for permits or pre-booked time-slots. Rarely has it felt more desirable to have a little chunk of countryside of your own.
Given that our current mass crash-course in remote working has revealed countless hitherto unsuspected ways in which urban employment – of a certain kind – can be maintained without the employee going anywhere near the employer’s office, it seems reasonable to assume that large numbers of white-collar workers – and perhaps employers too – will be thinking about relocating as soon as circumstances permit. Already there has been talk of a “green recovery” that rebalances the UK’s London-centric economy, levelling up neglected regions with new enterprises and industries that reflect our long-term needs in an age of pandemics and climate change.
The urban part of my brain finds such thoughts quite exciting. Maybe there will be job opportunities round here! Maybe the value of my house will go up! More usefully for the nation: maybe property prices in the capital will come down, and some of the most grotesque inequalities of recent decades can be flattened out. Best of all: perhaps we’ll end up with a post-agricultural countryside that actually works, where more people will work from home, more people will earn their livings offering services locally, there will be fewer car journeys, and the comforts, sophistication and values of urban life will be transposed more comprehensively than ever into a rural setting.
Then the rural part of my brain revolts. Are we really so arrogant that we imagine that we can sweep aside generations’ worth of accumulated rural wisdom and memories, just because we are modern and have belatedly grown tired of our cities? Do we really think we have nothing to learn from those who think of their particular corner of rural England as their birthright? In any case, where do the champions of a post-agricultural “enterprise countryside” imagine that the food is going to come from?
Rural traditionalists anticipate a very different future, in which the need for food security would be paramount. Farmers would thrive; the environment probably might not. Instead, we could expect a more intensively farmed, less recreational countryside, perhaps with a greater proportion of its population working on the land. Incomers with urban values – “Greenies”, graduates, commuters, remote-workers – would no longer rule the roost and might even like to try keeping their heads down for a while.
There are drawbacks to both outcomes. From the point of view of traditional farmers and the vanishing tribe of “real” country folk, any further outpouring from the cities would feel like a cultural catastrophe. To those with more urban world-views, the triumph of the old countryside would feel equally unwelcome, given that the old countryside tends to be conservative, illiberal, Brexity and neither woke nor (in the urban sense) Green. As for the rest of us – the part-urban, part-rural majority – we could probably live with either scenario, or some mixture of the two. But the luxury of the middle ground may no longer be an option, in the harsh future that awaits us. Culture wars rarely go well for those who refuse to take sides.
But that’s just how it seems to me today. I can of course have no real idea of what tomorrow will look like. All I know is that old certainties are passing away. The rest is just a kaleidoscope of unknowns. If I insist nonetheless on imagining alternative futures, it is really just one more form of displacement activity: one more way of worrying away at a predicament too big for comprehension. When I remember that, I stop imagining – and stop worrying.
Perhaps that is the real reason why so many people have been feeling unexpectedly contented in recent weeks. We are being forced to accept our helplessness in the big scheme of things. Speculation is pointless; and so, for most of us, is dwelling too deeply on miseries beyond our reach. Sanity comes from focusing on the here and now, supporting where we can, trying not to add to anyone else’s troubles – and, in the space remaining, seeking joy where we can find it.
Having written this, therefore, I will go outside and spend another moment with my dustbins and the lilac tree behind them. For a minute or so, there will be nothing in my mind except colour and smell and, perhaps, birdsong. And then I will feel at peace.
If I think about the future at all it will only be to reflect on the fact that, lifespans being what they are, that tree will probably outlive me. With a bit of luck it will still be gladdening hearts with its unexpected blossom long after I am gone, and perhaps even at a time when the 2020 coronavirus, too, is just a distant, fading memory.
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