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. 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.

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. I was particularly keen to read this book as I grew up in rural Lancashire in the 1980s and ’90s. It was a world that even then felt remote and misunderstood. On my first day of secondary school, for example, I was astonished at how many of my new classmates had never heard of the village where I lived. Sadly, I was equally ignorant of city ways, constantly getting lost trying to find the bus station after school for my long and winding journey home. A s the daughter of the forester on the Graythwaite Estate in Cumbria, Rebecca Smith was raised in an even more remote area around 40 miles from me. 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’The Herald - More than three years after the last General Election, there has still been no ban on section 21 evictions, which increased by 121 per cent in the last financial year. Three cheers for the last Labour Government, which never banned them, either. In central and local government until 1979, the Conservatives used to take housing at least as seriously as anyone else did. But since 1997, even Labour in government has failed miserably on this issue. 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.It’s a familiar and all-pervading precarity. I grew up in Fire Brigade houses when accommodation was still provided for rural key workers. I’ve lived in tied or tenanted cottages ever since; my husband variously a gardener, groom and ‘stallion man’ (always a conversation starter, that one.) A change of career meant the leap to rent an affordable ex-tied cottage. I can see our Big House from my bedroom window.

Take a Look at Our Summary of November Highlights, Whether You're Looking for the Latest Releases or Gift Inspiration The publisher’s blurb describes this as “ 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.” Many of us love the countryside but with 82.9% of England’s population, 83% of Scotland and around 80% of Wales (2019) living in urban areas, Britons may seem more detached than ever from rural life. Those of us with UK ancestors are likely to have at least some forebears living in the countryside in the first half of the 19th century, if not later. And with debates about fuel and food dominating recent headlines, awareness of our rural economies, communities and environment urgently needs to improve.

‘Thoughtful, moving, honest’ CAL FLYN

Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex Too often, the lives of rural people have been overlooked or else romanticised, especially by writers. Not here ... Warm, astute and sincere' 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.’ 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"

A vital, questing book about the often misunderstood past, hard present-day, and possible futures of rural life in the UK" A wonderful book, beautifully conceived in its movement between different dimensions of a rural working life, Smith's and her family's and all the others, both past and present ... So immediate and clearly seen, so gracefully and gently written ... It is such a valuable thing' 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.

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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. 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. It’s not a housing crisis, it’s an affordability crisis,” says author Catrina Davies. In other words, it’s not about building more.” 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. The point is that we have (collectively) chosen to kill the former economic structure. People have no idea what a working rural economy would look because the countryside is just a vehicle for expressing other obsessions of rural idylls or environmental havens or whatever.