The rural difference

The countryside is different. There are differences everywhere, of course, so we need place-specific approaches to house building. But in our urban society, the rural difference is particularly often overlooked.

Most villages are desirable places to live and, partly as a result, unaffordable to local people. Wages in rural areas tend to be around £5,000 a year lower than in urban areas, and there is less affordable housing: only 8% of rural homes are classified as affordable, compared with 20% in urban areas. Property prices are also higher. Developers swarm round villages with planning applications for executive homes, but there is a serious shortage of non-market housing. The Campaign to Protect Rural England’s (CPRE’s) 2015 report, A Living Countryside (Burroughs, 2015b: 12), showed that, in every region, average house prices were higher in rural than in urban areas. In the West Midlands, where the gap was greatest, the average rural home cost £244,000, compared with £155,000 for an urban home (Burroughs, 2015b: 12). In many villages, no amount of building will make market housing affordable to local people – that horse bolted long ago.

‘The living tapestry of a mixed community’

Does this matter? Should we worry if villages are dominated by retirees and the better off, with the less well off driving in from towns to work or visit their relatives? After all, the death of the village has long been mourned, yet villages survive. ‘The last days of my childhood were also the last days of the village’, Laurie Lee wrote in Cider with Rosie (quoted in Rowley, 2006: 11). In The country and the city, Raymond Williams (1993: 9) recalled a book which claimed that ‘A way of life that has come down to us from the days of Virgil has suddenly ended’; this, he thought, ‘was curious. From Virgil? Here? A way of country life?’

Williams shows how writers in every generation, back at least to the Middle Ages, have declared rural England to be dead or dying (Williams, 1993: 9–12). However, the life that these writers lamented was hard for most people.