Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-19T09:29:51.461Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Planning and the Myth of the English Countryside, in the Interwar Period

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

D. N. Jeans
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

A landscape is never so valuable as when it is under threat, and the English rural countryside has been the subject of alarm for centuries. Raymond Williams identified an ‘escalator’ on which literary representation continually looked back upon a past golden age of rural virtue, ensuring that the idea of a ‘true’ rural England has persisted into the twentieth century with extraordinary power Thus Howard Newby can write of the ‘stereotypes and myths which surround the popular image of the rural world’, while, at the same time, he claims this fallacious perception is ‘one of the major protecting illusions of our time’. This illusion has been reinforced by the nature of English society. Sir Lewis Narnier believed English society to be ‘amphibious’ in the eighteenth century, with no sharp divide between town and country among the interests of the ruling classes. By the end of the nineteenth century the countryside, under the influence of Romanticism and a changing class structure, had become the preserve of an upper-class society increasingly separated from industrialism and the great towns. Yet this upper class was cemented by the public schools and the universities to include not only landowners, but an array of occupations, including many intellectuals. Until the First World War, despite increasing mechanisation and specialisation in the countryside, the land presented a rural face largely unspoiled by the intrusion of industrial and urban uses. Land was held in large estates, farmed by tenants in a world of mostly irregular fields, lanes and hedgerows, with buildings that preserved vernacular styles.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , October 1990 , pp. 249 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 Williams, R., The Country and the City (1973, London 1985 ed.).Google Scholar

2 Newby, H., Country Life. A Social History of Rural England (London, 1987), p. 1.Google Scholar

3 Ibid., p. 3.

4 Williams Ellis, C., Britain and the Beast, Readers Union (London, 1938), p. xvGoogle Scholar

5 Yorkshire Observer, 7 July, 1934Google Scholar; Birmingham Gazette, 7 July, 1934.Google Scholar

6 Marshall, H. in Ellis, C.W., England and the Octopus (Portmeinon, 1928), p. 164.Google Scholar

7 Yorkshire Evening News, 19 March, 1931.Google Scholar

8 C.P.R.E. Oxford Shire Bulletin, 1933.Google Scholar

9 Minutes of Somerset Branch, C.P.R.E., 17 July, 1931.Google Scholar

10 Birmingham, G.A. in Blunden, E. (ed.), The Legacy of England (London, 1935), p. 163.Google Scholar

11 C. Williams Ellis, Britain and the Beast.

12 Charles Ford in Blunden, Legacy of England.

13 Trevelyan, G.M., quoted in Sheail, J., Rural Conservation in Interwar Britain (Oxford, 1981), p. 6.Google Scholar

14 , H.H.P. and , N.L.C. (eds.), The Face of the Land. Yearbook of the Design and Industries Association, 1929–1930 (London, 1930).Google Scholar

15 Morning Post, 20 July, 1929, Letter.Google Scholar

16 Devon Gazette, 25 November, 1931.Google Scholar

17 Cornish Evening Tidings, 21 September, 1928.Google Scholar

18 Ivor, Brown in Blunden (ed.), Legacy of England, pp. 215–16.Google Scholar

19 Midland Daily Telegraph, 11 April, 1929Google Scholar

20 Darwin, B. in Blunden (ed.), Legacy of England.Google Scholar

21 Sheail, Rural Conservation, p. 3.

22 Clerk to Rayne Parish Council to Secretary, C.P.R.E., 2 April, 1929Google Scholar

23 Williams Ellis, C. in The Face of the Land, p. 13.Google Scholar

24 Cornish Evening Tidings, 21 September, 1926.Google Scholar

25 Report of the Petroleum Filling Stations Committee, May 1929, Cd. 3330., HMSO, London.

26 Oxford Times, 11 March, 1933.Google Scholar

27 The Service Station, May 1931.Google Scholar

28 Quarterly newsletter, S.C.A.P.A., New Series No. 18, November 1937Google Scholar

29 Northwestern Daily Mail, 29 October, 1930.Google Scholar

30 Devon Gazette, 5 November, 1930.Google Scholar

31 Newcastle Journal, 5 November, 1930.Google Scholar

32 C.P.R.E. File No. 161/1BC.

33 Midland Daily Telegraph, 9 January, 1930.Google Scholar

34 Welsh Gazette, 9 January, 1930.Google Scholar

35 Kentish Express, 24 January, 1931.Google Scholar

36 Shell-Mex to C.P.R.E., 6 November, 1929Google Scholar

37 The Times, 17 July, 1930Google Scholar; Punch, 6 August, 1930.Google Scholar

38 Somerset County Council to C.P.R.E., File No. 161/1.

39 Chamber of Commerce Journal, December 1931.Google Scholar

40 Essex Weekly News, 28 February, 1930.Google Scholar

41 Secretary, C.P.R.E. to Sir Lawrence Weaver, 30 December, 1929Google Scholar

42 Bristol Times, 14 January, 1932, Letter.Google Scholar

43 Ivor, Brown in Blunden, Legacy of England, p. 13.Google Scholar

44 Williams Ellis, C. in The Face of the Land, p. 13.Google Scholar

45 Derby Daily Express, 29 January, 1929Google Scholar

46 Yarmouth Independent, 11 May, 1929Google Scholar

47 C.P.R.E. Minutes, 29 October, 1930.Google Scholar

48 C.P.R.E. File No. 114, 4 November, 1929Google Scholar

49 King, A.D., The Bungalow (London, 1984), pp. 156–92.Google Scholar

50 Williams Ellis, C., England and the Octopus, pp. 140–2.Google Scholar

51 C.P.R.E. Minutes, 25 July, 1933.Google Scholar

52 Clerk to Worksop Council, Daily Mirror, 23 June, 1932.Google Scholar

53 Western Independent, 13 November, 1932.Google Scholar

54 Thomas, Sharp in Ellis, C.W., England and the Octopus, pp. 144–5.Google Scholar

55 Secretary, C.P.R.E. to the Warden of New College, Oxford, 15 August 1935, File No. 244.Google Scholar

56 News Chronicle, 27 October, 1936.Google Scholar

57 The Times, 16 May, 1936.Google Scholar

58 Planning Officer, Hampshire County Council to Secretary, C.P.R.E.

59 Secretary, C.P.R.E. to H. Rosburgh, 1937, File No. 244.Google Scholar

60 West Lancashire Evening Gazette, 9 August, 1933.Google Scholar

61 Architectural Journal, 2 January, 1929Google Scholar

62 The Times, 26 July, 1934.Google Scholar

63 Country Life, 1 August, 1936.Google Scholar

64 Williams Ellis, C., in The Faces of the Land, p. 18.Google Scholar

65 C.E.M. Joad in England and the Octopus, pp. 648. See also Joad, C.E.M., The Untutored Townsman's Invasion of the Countryside (London, 1946).Google Scholar

66 Lockley, R.M. in England and the Octopus, p. 228.Google Scholar

67 Hines, G.C. in England and the Octopus, pp. 160–61.Google Scholar

68 Birmingham, G. A. in Blunden, Legacy of England, p. 189Google Scholar

69 Brighton and Hove Herald, quoted in Sheail, Rural Conservation, pp. 105–6.

70 C.P.R.E. File No. 244.

71 Norwich Mercury, 26 October, 1937Google Scholar

72 Priestley, J.B., English Journey (London, 1934), p. 3.Google Scholar

73 Wiener, M.J., English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981), p. 6.Google Scholar

74 Stanley Baldwin, quoted in Wiener, English Culture, p. 100.

75 Illustrated London News, 13 June, 1936.Google Scholar

76 Gilg, A.W. (ed.), Countryside Planning Yearbook (Norwich, 1986).Google Scholar

77 H. Newby, Country Life, pp. 213–31. and Green and Pleasant Land. Social Change in Rural England (London, 1979).