When my family moved to Barcombe 50 years ago, the Sussex village’s economy and social fabric was dominated by agriculture—I vividly remember the farmer’s surprise when we objected to him driving his sheep through our garden to reach the field behind our house.
Although our village, with a population of around 1,600, may be a long way from the centre of the world, a recent small initiative offers us, I believe, a glimpse into the future and how we may reorder our communities so that they become better and more sustainable places to live. This concerns what I call directionality.
With the decline and mechanisation of agriculture, the migration of the middle class from cities, the “improvement” in the railway line between Lewes and London and the spread of the internet, Barcombe is now increasingly a village of middle-class professional commuters and teleworkers. The primary school is highly rated by Ofsted and the pockets of deprivation (a number of families use foodbanks in Lewes) are almost invisible. The only graffiti to be seen was scrawled by bored teenagers on Second World War pillboxes during the Covid lockdown.
Our village store is the centre of social interaction. It has a post office and sells basic products. Customers who want variety and lower costs need to drive five miles to Lewes to find a supermarket. Not everyone in the village has a car, and there is a large community of elderly people, many of whom have lived in the village for decades.
In 2016 the village encountered a major challenge. The village shopkeeper, having run the store for 16 years, wanted to retire. After unsuccessfully trying to sell the store for some months, he announced he was going to seek planning permission to turn the premises into a residence. This would have been devastating for the community, especially the elderly.
To avoid that disaster, Barcombe residents set about raising the funds for the village to purchase the property and to rent out the store to anyone who wanted a reasonable and steady income. The community of 650 households raised a total of £388,000.
Two local residents, one with a master’s degree in archaeology and the other with a master’s degree in environmental management, now run an improved shop as a commercial venture. The store processes e-commerce returns and provides a post office and a dry-cleaning depot to the community, But the truly impressive part of this story concerns voting rights in the company that owns the property.
Although the minimum contribution was £500 (which makes up the bulk of shareholders by number), a few of the wealthier village inhabitants provided much larger sums—in one case, £50,000. The group of the largest contributors met and decided, without prompting, that all shareholders should have the same voting rights, irrespective of the size of their contributions.
The value of this community initiative surfaced during the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020. The lockdown made it difficult to travel to the nearest supermarket, and many people, including the medically vulnerable, had little capacity to make this journey anyway. The turnover of the shop in the first three months of lockdown was double that of the previous year. A local shop and post office was vital during the pandemic, and it would not have existed without the participation of more than one-third of all village households.
I saw this as one pebble in a socio-economic avalanche that is crashing through our communities. It seems to me that we are going through one of those historic cycles which the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter described as “creative destruction”. The established order collapses under the weight of its own obsolescence and, simultaneously, a new order begins to emerge. To be trapped in this convulsion is painful and alarming, and yet, even now with rubble and dust around us, we can see the shape of our future emerging in small developments whose significance it is easy to miss.
There is a much bigger example just down the road in the county town of Lewes. Nestling in the South Downs, Lewes was described by William Morris as being “like a box of toys under a great amphitheatre of chalk hills... on the whole it is set down better than any town I have seen in England”. Near to Glyndebourne opera house and Charleston, the celebrated artists’ home, Lewes has a liberal history of progressive action. It is proud of its historical association with Tom Paine, who lived in Lewes before moving to America in 1774; it has its own currency, the Lewes pound; it is a member of the transition town movement; and its football team was the first in the world to pay female and male players equally. Less progressive, but nevertheless distinctive, is the annual Guy Fawkes celebration, regularly relayed on national TV screens.
Although Lewes has historical roles as a transport hub and a manufacturing town, the local economy is now dominated by the service sector, tourism and its links to Glyndebourne, Charleston and two neighbouring universities. London is an hour by (albeit increasingly unreliable) rail, and the town’s attractions are evident in the relative stability of house prices. But what sort of town will Lewes be in future?
Left to market forces alone, it is in danger of becoming yet another commuting hub, attracting a growing number of DFLs (people who have come “down from London”). This is likely to exacerbate inequality in the town, exclude the young and less wealthy from the housing market, and worsen the environmental damage from commuting.
But there is an alternative vision that is being played out in an ongoing planning application before the South Downs National Park (which, based in Petersfield, 50 miles from Lewes, for some curious reason supervises planning applications in Lewes).
Some years ago, the Lewes district council, short of money in an era of austerity, entered a joint venture with a South African financial group (with offices on the Isle of Man) to allocate the unused river frontage to a large housing development. The plan consisted of bog-standard, environmentally unfriendly houses built largely for DFL commuters. In making this choice, the district council disrupted a locally rooted and diverse creative cluster of more than 400 craftspeople who were using the old warehouses fronting the river.
This act of planning vandalism undermined the very distinctiveness that has made Lewes such an unusual and creative town. Fortunately, this market-driven profit-seeking initiative was not viable.
A group of locally active citizens (one of whom had been a managing director of Greenpeace) has put in a transformative application which is a mirror image of the previous application. Seven hundred units are planned with a total investment of nearly £400m. The new plan includes an electric vehicle car pool, open spaces, roof gardens and neighbourhood gardens designed to promote social interaction, as well as 210 affordable houses. (For comparison, only 11 affordable houses were built in the whole of the planning area in 2022!) The project will use local Sussex timber for building frames, provide 380 permanent jobs and train local artisans in construction. There will be a mix of living- and maker-spaces, which will give priority access to people with local family connections. And, of course, all homes will be energy efficient and the whole development will be net carbon zero.
This is a pioneering development. It illustrates how we can construct a more sustainable future while protecting the economy, society and the environment.
Through a historical lens
Economic growth is never smooth and uninterrupted. But some disruptions are particularly large and particularly long-lived. And because they are slow, we often fail to recognise the great change that has occurred.
Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in the first half of the 18th century, the major industrialised economies have been through a series of “long cycles” (often referred to as “waves”), each lasting approximately 50-80 years and driven by what we refer to as a revolutionary “heartland”—a new, general-purpose technology. These technologies offer major opportunities for reducing costs and producing new products; each has no technical limits to its availability; and, crucially, each has application across the spectrum of economic and social activities.
Moreover, each requires new infrastructure to deliver the innovative and lower-cost products to ever-more distant markets. The transition between paradigms is a period of enormous economic and social disruption. This is the creative destruction that Schumpeter observed, as the old order is swept aside and the new order advances. As my colleague Carlota Perez is documenting in her forthcoming book, each of these earlier transitions was characterised by political turmoil and populist movements.
The long waves involve a characteristic cycle of infancy when the technology emerges. This is followed by a financial crisis and subsequent economic depression when the bubble of financial speculation bursts. Then comes the era of prosperity, when the heartland technology is deployed throughout the economy and society. But good things come to an end and, in time, the paradigm passes through its high point and is succeeded by an era of decline and decay. It is during this phase of maturity and decline that the core inventions that will drive the next wave begin to emerge.
Economic historians refer to this historical phenomenon as comprising a series of “techno-economic paradigms”. They are more accurately described as “socio-techno-economic” paradigms since, crucially, each of the waves not only comprises the diffusion of new technologies and new forms of economic organisation, but also of complementary political systems, norms, attitudes, culture, lifestyles, consumption patterns and interactions with the environment.
There were three of these waves from 1750 to about 1920, before the fourth, mass production, came to dominate the 20th century. This originated with Henry Ford’s Model T moving production line in 1913. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Roosevelt’s New Deal set the agenda in which the state came to play an important role in the extension of mass production, creating employment, building infrastructure and sustaining consumer confidence. The full potential of the new production system became obvious in the mass production of weaponry such as Liberty ships during the Second World War. After the war, the welfare state supported demand for mass consumption in both Europe and North America. Governments invested in housing and highway infrastructure, which led to rapid suburbanisation and new consumer lifestyles. Mass production’s heyday in the decades after the war until the mid-1970s saw a period of historically unparalleled growth—the so-called “Golden Age”.
From the late 1970s, mass production began to lose its dynamism. Productivity growth and corporate profitability waned. But there was an escape route that delayed the demise of the mass production paradigm until the turn of the millennium. This was provided by cheap labour in the developing world in general—China in particular.
Swathes of industry moved from North America and Europe to exploit low-paid labour, helping to revive declining profitability. And consumers in the high-income countries benefitted from cheap products. However, for many, what was gained on the “consumption side” (low-priced consumer goods), was lost on the “production side” (stagnant and falling wages, increasing labour displacement).
The decaying edifice of mass production fell over with the global financial crisis of 2008. Sticking plaster was used liberally. But the architects of “revival” were the same people who had allowed the problems to be created in the first place, most notably the appointments made by Barack Obama in the US. The plaster sort-of worked (that is, another Great Depression was kept at bay), but economic growth has been at historically low levels in high-income countries—especially in the UK, where real incomes for most of the employed population are still below the levels of 2008.
Now, after the Covid pandemic highlighted the rotten nature of the decaying mass production paradigm, the fissures are opening—massive debt piles, falling equity prices and large layoffs in the high-tech sector.
But we are not only experiencing economic decay. There is a simultaneous degeneration in politics and in social solidarity, with the rise of populist governments, fuelled by xenophobia and offering fantastic solutions. Standing above it all is the burgeoning crisis in the environment. As in the decay of all paradigms, the problem is a systemic one. The economy, the polity, society and the environment are part of a system, and the system is in crisis. The centre can no longer hold.
Is there hope for the future in this turmoil? Previous waves were succeeded by new ways of producing, new ways of living, new ways of trading and new social norms and value systems. Herein lies the hope, and herein, I believe, lies the significance of parochial Barcombe village and Lewes town—early ripples from a fifth wave.
