‘The last twenty years having witnessed so much change in the village, it is interesting to speculate as to the farther changes that may be looked for in the years to come,’ George Sturt writes in Change in the Village (1912), his observations on rural social history. In the book's final section, ‘The Forward Movement’, he sets out his ideas for what he sees as a shift in outlook among the people he observes toward the changing world around them:

Rural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention puts the focus on this new outlook and new ambitions through a study of writers, artists and other agents that investigated and helped to instigate the changes that Sturt saw coming among the rural people he writes about. Quiet and inconspicuous activities are considered in the context of dramatic changes in material and social conditions throughout Britain in order to examine the histories of relations between rural and urban places, economies, classes, identities, images, arts and cultures. The overarching goal of this project is to promote rural people and places as important yet often-ignored subjects for studies of British modernisation, modernism and modernity.

In the early twentieth century, rural areas experienced economic depression, the expansion of transport and communication networks, the rollout of electricity, the loss of land and the erosion of local identities. Who celebrated these changes? Who resisted them?

The village has served as a longstanding model for British national identity. Changes to the village are ways of discussing the broader changes that shape the nation, and – in the interwar period – the seeming stability of traditional village life served as a counter-narrative to the disruptions brought about by modernity. In their critique of contemporary life in Britain, Culture and Environment: A Training in Critical Awareness (1933), F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson turned to the work of George Bourne (a pseudonym of George Sturt), a writer who documented the changes he saw in village life a generation earlier in his books Change in the Village (1912) and The Wheelwright's Shop (1923). Leavis and Thompson bring in these examples as evidence of the social changes they want to emphasise, but Bourne's work is more nuanced than they let on. As the Introduction to Rural Modernity in Britain demonstrates, Bourne was one of many commentators that saw village populations neither as completely resistant to (or even ignorant of) the opportunities brought about by modernity nor as receptacles for the ideas espoused by mostly urban-based commentators uncomfortable with the changes they saw around them. This chapter brings amateur film-makers to these discussions and considers what moving images of rural Britain from the 1920s and 1930s can tell us about the changes faced by these communities and the ways in which film featured as a response to them. It focuses on films that depict village life in different parts of Britain, made by men and women who used the technology of cinema to take stock of the activities occurring around them. They document the ‘change in the village’ that Bourne and others describe and capture the rituals that continued – or were revitalised – during a period that saw shifts in village economies, infrastructure and social interactions. These films overlap with interwar fiction and non-fiction, but they also offer access to places and exchanges otherwise absent from these familiar depictions. As social documents they present a complex portrait of rural life and provide rich material for studies of social history, interwar literature and amateur cinema, a growing field in film, media and cultural studies.