When I first started university, I’d tell people I came from rural north Norfolk and listen as they enthused about the county I’d been longing to escape since my teens. They’d mention second homes, sailing and shooting (it was that kind of university), and I’d grasp that we weren’t really talking about the same place. I knew their Norfolk—the chi-chi delis and bijoux antique shops, the barn conversions with expensive cars parked out front—but they didn’t know mine.
In mine, the region’s famous skies loomed over fields so hedge-stripped and intensively farmed that they resembled barren tundra when winter winds sliced in from Siberia—or, if it was mild and wet, vast swathes of mud that left you becalmed. My first home was an old farmer’s cottage with no electricity, no hot water and a roof so scantily tiled that in winter, snowflakes tumbled down through cracks in the bedroom ceiling. In my Norfolk school, a classmate’s sister gave birth in the girls’ loos at 13; later on, a friend’s boyfriend lost his mind to drugs, and another’s older brother his life.
As those who’ve joined the pandemic-triggered stampede out to the countryside have no doubt been discovering, the countryside is a different place when you live there year-round. But it’s the quaint version that lives most vividly in the collective imagination—the grand estates, cobbled streets and rustic pubs, rather than the electric fences and scrub and, yes, housing estates known to born-and-bred countryfolk.
Of all that gets erased—or at least elided—in glossed and glancing versions of the bucolic idyll, poverty and disadvantage are the most notable. Each and every one of us living an urban life—even those of us who have experienced rural poverty—are prone to slipping into that denial. There’s a feeling among city-dwellers that the countryside is another country altogether.
A housing crisis? But it’s such good value—I mean, have you seen what you could get for the price of your poky two-bed maisonette in Zone 4 out in the shires? This is said despite the fact that the number of households categorised as homeless in rural local authorities in England increased by 115 per cent in just two years after 2017/18, rising to 19,975. Reporting on the findings by the Rural Services Network and countryside charity CRPE, the Guardian spoke with one woman who had been forced to live in a horsebox.
Austerity? Its impact was urban, surely! Yet as a paper by geographer Andrew Williams and Cardiff University colleagues highlighted last year, the past decade has seen a hollowing out of social infrastructures such as libraries, youth centres and bus routes in rural areas, while the merger of district councils and the creation of unitary authorities have compounded deep cuts with a loss of focus on those places furthest out in the sticks.
All these changes have only worsened an ever-present, if neglected, poverty problem. Yes, in general there are somewhat fewer people in rural areas living in straitened circumstances. Official statistics suggest, for example, that the proportion of households in the countryside below the main poverty line in 2017-2018 was 15 per cent, compared to 18 per cent in urban areas. But when you consider that many fewer rural Britons have the characteristics that put you at most risk of poverty—being young, being from certain ethnic minorities—that 3 percentage point difference is strikingly small. Moreover, if you drill into hardship in particular groups—by looking, for example, at the proportion of pensioners in absolute poverty—the difference disappears.
And none of the data takes any account of local living costs other than housing. While the views are (mostly) free, everything else in the countryside is more expensive: more people live further from supermarkets, meaning they are reliant on higher-priced shops; skeletal public transport systems make getting anywhere more expensive; an older, poorly insulated housing stock means it’s costlier to stay warm. (In 2017, it was estimated that the rural population need to spend more than £190m extra to heat their homes.) It doesn’t end there, either. When access to GPs’ surgeries and hospitals is more difficult, that takes a toll on health. When a lack of decently paid, reliable work and prohibitive property prices mean the young can no longer afford to live where they grew up, that only adds to the isolation of the old.
Farmers, once the hub of every rural community, are faring no better than their neighbours. The remorseless grip of giant supermarkets on the prices they are paid for staples like milk has now been a cause of pressing concern for a whole generation. In parts of the industry, as well as rebooting the subsidy regime, Brexit has worrying implications for access to labour and, potentially, markets as well. Last year alone, a combination of weather conditions and the pandemic meant that—on the official figures—farm incomes dropped by 16 per cent.
The increasingly tech-driven nature of the job—with the replacement of farm workers with machinery, and the prospect of online trading displacing bartering at livestock markets—means there is often a poverty of company as well. Earlier this year, a Farm Safety Foundation survey found that 88 per cent of farmers under 40 rank poor mental health as the biggest hidden problem facing the industry. They’re right to do so: in the year 2019-2020, 133 people in UK farming and agricultural trades took their own lives.
Rural poverty was, of course, the original poverty. Up until the start of the 19th century, impoverishment was seen as the natural condition of those who toiled with their hands. They were at the mercy of events beyond their control—war, disease, the weather—and it only took one bad harvest for subsistence to become penury. In his book Pauperland: Poverty and the Poor in Britain, Jeremy Seabrook notes that the English language is rich in words for “poverty”: its synonyms tell the story of how it has evolved over time. The words “want” and “need,” he writes, evoke “ruined harvests, lean seasons and grudging earth; a penury that has been the fate of most peoples through recorded time.”
This vocabulary changed when Britain transitioned into industrial life. “Instead of poverty being the common lot, people are ‘stricken’ or ‘afflicted’ by it; and the figure of the ‘pauper’ emerges (from the verb to pauperise, to make poor), spectral, skinny, rapacious.” Ever since the Industrial Revolution transformed our cities from mythic metropolises with streets paved with gold into diabolical furnaces forging the future, the once backwards-seeming countryside has been repositioned as a wholesome retreat—an idyll green and clean. Not just a place you were able to hang your laundry on the line without it getting covered in soot, but a utopia whose eternal rhythms offer solace, especially at times of upheaval.
The pastoral impulse is sometimes socialist and sometimes conservative—or, as with John Ruskin, both together. In Fors Clavigera, he urges the working man to retreat to a “small piece of English ground, beautiful, peaceful, and fruitful. We will have no steam engines upon it… we will have plenty of flowers and vegetables… we will have some music and poetry; the children will learn to dance to it and sing it.”
All this was understandable as a reaction to the urban squalor that Dickens captured so well, but why did that squalor arise in the first place? Largely because rural living standards had sunk so low that people chose—or felt forced—to cluster in those unforgiving cities. The Enclosure Acts passed between the 17th and the 19th centuries had a lot to answer for, dispossessing labourers from the land and denying them ancient grazing and fuel-gathering rights. In Scotland, enclosure is remembered via the Highland and Lowland Clearances. In his new book The Richer, The Poorer: How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed the Poor, economist Stewart Lansley describes how, in one case in 1820, Lord Rossmore invited the villagers on his Isle of Arran estate to a party. When they returned, they discovered he’d had their “unsightly” homes razed. The villagers were moved away to the coast, where they were without land to till.
In this sort of grim context, the Industrial Revolution that Ruskin and his arty friends railed against was inevitably seen as offering a welcome escape for many among the rural working class. In his 1958 cultural survey The Country and the City, Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams, who grew up poor in the Black Mountains in Wales, recalled: “At home we were glad of the Industrial Revolution, and of its consequent social and political changes.”
“When rural poverty is remembered at all, it calls to mind rustic yokels, their trousers held up with orange bailer twine”
And yet as townies gentrify so much of rural Britain, it’s hard to forget that story about Lord Rossmore. The snapping up and then gussying up of once modest cottages by urban incomers writes the rural poor out of the history of their own homes, and consigns them to “modern” dwellings inappropriate to their needs, often at the physical margins of communities, out of sight and out of mind.
By contrast, urban poverty inspires hit albums and runway trends, fetishised by some (in 2018, the company Puma was slammed for throwing a London party whose theme was council estate drug-dealing). Last year, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation launched a campaign against reliance on stock “poverty images,” which send the message that there are some for whom deprivation will always be a fact of life. They had a point, but perhaps the only thing worse than being talked about in the poverty context is not being talked about: needless to say, those stock images were all urban. When rural poverty is remembered at all, it calls to mind rustic yokels, their trousers held up with orange bailer twine.
Laurie Lee’s iconic Cider with Rosie, about growing up in the Cotswolds in the first half of the 20th century, is celebrated for descriptions of honeyed light, summer’s bounty, and soul-nourishing natural beauty. Yet he also writes bluntly about the poverty he experienced. “Everybody was poor. It wasn’t all rising fields of poppies and blue skies. A large part of it was lashing rain; chaps walking round dressed in bits of soaking sacking, and children dying of quite ordinary diseases like whooping cough,” he writes. This is a book in which murder, suicide, even an attempted gang rape feature. One family is carted off to the workhouse. (The Slad cottage Lee grew up in, incidentally, was last on the market in 2019 for £475,000—which seems almost cheap until you realise it needed complete renovation.)
Rural poverty neither lodges in the mind nor ticks the boxes of the people making policy. For instance, a 2021 report from economics consultancy Pragmatix, commissioned by the Rural Services Network, found that rural locations are missing out on cash from the government’s flagship Levelling Up Fund. The fund’s algorithms rely, among other things, on the benefit claimant counts, giving what the report dubbed a “falsely positive view” of rural areas, where there may be fewer people on benefits but still plenty coping with in-work poverty or the insecurities of seasonal work.
Even where it is acknowledged, rural hardship somehow continues to be something to be endured rather than gripped. As the heroine of Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) quips: “Poverty in the country is a sadness but poverty in the town is a horror.” There is consolation to be had in the beauty of rustic scenery but not, I suspect, to anything like the degree that it blinds onlookers. Your village might look like a picture on a chocolate box, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to buy one to give to your kids.
Last year the BBC website featured a rare case study, profiling a single mother in Norfolk named Lucy, who received Universal Credit and was struggling to feed her two children. She explained how she supplements pasta with eggs from the hens she keeps, and a friendly gamekeeper gives them pigeons and rabbits. On the week when the BBC spoke with her, she and the kids had eaten roast pigeon with foraged blackberries.
It sounds like something from a London restaurant menu—a result of what, in other contexts, would get called “cultural appropriation”—as though it is no longer what we would expect to find the poor eating, despite the fact it is free. Urban foodies have requisitioned the pickling and preserving, the foraging and vegetable-plot tending that once padded meagre and seasonal rural incomes—just as descendants of “upstairs” families have purloined the names of “downstairs” maids like Daisy and Millie.
There were other ways in which Lucy’s story differed from the depictions of poverty we are used to: she is a university graduate and former research scientist; her 11-year-old goes to a private school on a bursary. All the same, she counts the cost of everything, and described having to choose between buying food or putting petrol in the car so her children could get to school. There was no TV, clothes were homemade, school uniforms bought second-hand.
Reading about Lucy’s troubles reminded me a bit of my own childhood. At school (which for me wasn’t private), those homemade clothes got me called a hippy. Once I left Norfolk, that became how I explained the poverty of my childhood: my parents were hippies, they met in a commune. This was only partly true. My father was indeed living in a commune when my mother met him, but she was a graduate, working as an art teacher. The main point at which reality and my newly-adopted narrative diverged was this: hippies were largely middle-class. Neither my mother, nor the man she married, had the kind of safety net that would have made their rural life feel like an adventure. There was no possibility of family handouts, no grandparents we could move in with if it all fell apart, no other option if the piecemeal agricultural work that they were both scraping a living from vanished.
We did eventually move from that cottage with the cracked roof. My mum got it condemned, thinking it might help us get rehoused. It didn’t—the previous tenants had had four children there before finally being allocated a council house—but she found another property at below market rent from the National Trust. It was picturesque, with its thatched roof and the rambling rose we planted by the front door, but it was again badly insulated and without central heating. I was entitled to free school meals, and while I don’t recall ever going hungry, I do remember being cold. I had chilblains on my fingers and toes in wintertime, and frost would pattern the inside of our windows.
When I think about why I’ve been so reluctant in the past to paint a fuller picture—why I’ve glossed over the deprivation—it’s partly because neither me nor my sister felt poor. Ours was a childhood so rich in many other ways. The landscape—our sprawling garden and the fields beyond it; the sunrise-tinted lanes through which the school bus wove, stopping at every village in the school’s sprawling catchment area, to an incongruous soundtrack of the Metallica cassettes that the boys would pass the driver—was an immense boon. At least until its isolation provided the spur to leave.
But perhaps also important in my reticence about declaring myself as having grown up poor was that—even back then—the kind of experiences we had had were not those that the world tended to class as poor. Maybe at some deep-down level, we simply equate poverty with ugliness.
Estate agents have been dubbing the dash for the hills a rural renaissance. Will it truly regenerate our countryside? I’m not optimistic. So far, urban flight has had just one significant, unsurprising impact. According to the Resolution Foundation, since February 2020 house prices have gone up by more than 10 per cent in the least densely-populated tenth of local authorities in the UK, compared to rises of 6 per cent for the most populous deciles. With Ocado deliveries and a social life furnished by visiting city friends desperate for fresh air, those pursuing the bucolic dream may be able to insulate themselves against harsher realities.
Having spent my twenties and thirties in cities here and abroad, I now live in Sussex, in a market town that’s been a magnet for Londoners for decades. In 2020 it was named one of the most expensive in the country, and yet still, this summer, Land Registry figures showed that prices have risen more here than anywhere else in the southeast. It’s a place in which, if you don’t lift your gaze to the South Downs but keep it fixed on the artisanal bakeries and eco-boutiques, you could easily forget you’re living in the countryside. The cattle market went decades ago and if you walk into Waitrose in muddy boots, a well-trained staff member will whip out a mop in a flash. And yet, this is also a town with no fewer than three food banks, a “problem” estate over which police helicopters periodically hover (needless to say it occupies a flood zone on the very edge of town) and an estimated 24 per cent of children living in poverty.
“Farmers are using food banks because we’re not prepared to pay decent prices for our groceries”
Norfolk, too, had its share of incomers even back in the 1980s, albeit second homeowners whose presence was erratic. Nothing stokes tensions quite like holiday homes for “townies” in places where locals can no longer afford to live. Rather than open up the local community, the arrival of such incomers made them close ranks. Although I was born in Norfolk, I was never allowed to forget that my family came from outside the county: that same impulse made for an ugly reaction from locals when an Indian restaurant opened in the nearest town.
Rural poverty contributes massively to the wave of nostalgia and nationalism that is so affecting our country. Yet we still seem collectively reluctant to acknowledge it as a problem. (For all the media’s obsession with the post-industrial red wall, among the top 10 local Leave votes in 2016, four—including the top two—comprise large rural swathes.) As well as facing up to the reality of the problem, the rest of the country also needs to confront its own responsibility. Farmers are using food banks because we’re not prepared to pay decent prices for our groceries. The affluent have more to answer for. Locals can’t afford to stay in their own communities and families because of the incomers’ second homes and readiness to splurge on half-term holiday lets and weekend getaways. And of course there’s the caricature countryside that city-dwellers cling to: a bygone theme park, a pastoral idyll disconnected from contemporary woes, a fantasy that’s rooted in its own kind of nostalgia.
The political talk of recent decades about “opportunity” might gel neatly with go-getting urban desires, but it speaks far less well to the profound and widespread wished-for “opportunity” of those in the countryside: the chance simply to stay put. The problem of rural poverty may run deep, but rural roots run deeper still. John Clare, the so-called peasant poet of the 19th century, observed the impact of enclosure on the landscape of his native Northamptonshire: fields and heaths fenced off, trees felled, marshes drained. It helped push him towards a mental breakdown, but not before he’d written “The Flitting” about his intense melancholy at having to leave the cottage of his birth. Capturing his profound sense of dislocation, he began:
I’ve left mine own old home of homes,
Green fields and every pleasant place;
The summer like a stranger comes,
I pause and hardly know her face.
