Cultures of the Countryside

Art, Museum, Heritage, and Environment, 1970-2015

Veronica Sekules

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472423467
• eBook ISBN: 9781317155584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Cultures of the Countryside examines the relationship between the museum and the micro-cultures of the countryside. Offering an exploration of museums and heritage projects in the UK that have attempted to introduce new ways of engagement between localities, objects, and people, this book considers how museums, heritage initiatives, and art projects have dealt with pressing local and global socio-political issues relating to the environment and rural life, including changing demographics and rural practices, local environmental concerns, and global climate activism.

Providing a thorough examination of the representation of competing histories, visions and politics, Sekules asks whether museums and heritage projects can engage actively in shaping cultures, as well as reflecting them. At the core of the analysis is an examination of the findings from a project in the UK's East Anglia, 'The Culture of the Countryside', from which emerged themes closely bound to different countryside landscapes, peoples and heritage.

Aimed at practitioners and students alike, Cultures of the Countryside provides a unique insight into the roles of the museum and heritage projects in rural and environmental issues in the recent past, whilst also offering perspectives and recommendations for the future.

1
Countrification

Maintaining clear distinctions between city and country is one of the great imperatives. But then, how the countryside is seen depends on a person’s perspective. People who live in cities and large towns have different relationships with it from those people who live at the edge, in the suburbs or right in heart of it, among the fields. To city people, the country often provides more of an occasional diversion than a real alternative way of life, as the countryside differs from the city in very broad and numerous ways, culturally as well as environmentally. Personal and business relationships are different. In the city, relationships can be purely practical, transactional, fleeting and peremptory. While businesses and people might aim to inter-relate, country life is undoubtedly slower-paced and more dependent on local cooperation in making society work. There is loneliness and isolation of course, and some people prefer its remoteness and solitude, but there is an expectation that people will take the time to engage socially, the cliché being that, in the village, everyone knows everyone else’s business through such rituals as village hall socialising and school gate gathering. Then there are the gradations of power elites, interest groups, political affiliations, health professionals, country-pursuit aficionados and many others to be contended with. The minutiae of village politics add a whole new level of complexity to country life and probably always have, in spite of the changes in local demographics since the 1980s. ‘The old social certainties are sinking. Respected figures were once Doctor, Squire, big farmer. Now these people are as likely to be a service industry for rich townies.’¹

Another stereotype concerns the social dynamic of belonging and not belonging. Michael Woods articulates very clearly how grass-roots countryside politics works in the parish, charting the jostling for power between long-term country dwellers who feel they ‘belong’, as opposed to the more recent incomers, who throw themselves with enthusiasm into local parish councils to make their mark.² Whether or not people are completely local, recent incomers, weekenders or holiday-makers is noticed, and often matters. Language, accents, dialects and vocabulary are not only marks of social distinction, but also locate the individual specifically. They can, furthermore, be indicative of borders between country and county town, between county and county, between different regions. Apart from the influx of rural migrant workers, which coincided with the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, colonisation of the countryside by incomers has tended to be relentlessly middle class, and all about the pursuit of a quiet, comfortable and more leisured lifestyle.³ Jesse Heley has commented on what has been termed as a new middle-class ‘squirearchy’, which includes urban incomers interested in hunting and fishing and driving about in four-wheel drive vehicles.⁴ However, even these stereotypes are changing as there has been such an increase in the numbers of people with equally distributed and hybrid town and country identities. Local accents are becoming much rarer, while, as we will see in the course of this book, interest in folk customs and cultural marks of distinctiveness are rising.

Class still dominates the countryside, especially evident through the built heritage, with its country estates, grand trophy houses and rectories, the vernacular tradition of farmhouses and humbler cottages for the householders and peasantry. Every region has a ‘county set’ who move around in the reserved areas of the regattas, shoots and race-meetings, when the pearls, hats, bow ties and waxed jackets emerge: the classic conservatism of country smart wear and social distinction. For England, the winding hedgerow-lined lane, leading to a long drive to the manor house, with its formal garden and designed landscape, is an essential component of the imaginary of country-dwelling. While the grand country house has become more and more accessible as a tourist destination, the cottage and the cottage garden has become increasingly a picture book, not to say chocolate box ideal, still much admired and desired. The cluster of pretty houses and gardens, the local pub, the tea shop on the village green, all nestling around an ancient stone church with its neighbouring Georgian rectory, widely constitutes a perfect country image. Sending their children to the tiny local school, close enough to be within safe walking distance, is what many people desire most for their growing families. Then again, the countryside represents different things to children and to adults.

There are still pretty villages, but pressures have come to bear from different directions on almost every aspect of them, ranging from theoretical to practical issues. Rural historians and sociologists widely criticise the rural idyll – for example, both Michael Bunce and Paul Cloke, along with other authors in the 2003 book Country Visions, attempt to move us on in order to contemplate a more varied and hybrid range of countryside cultures.⁵ In practical terms, the ideal village is frequently compromised by the signs of modernising ways of life, such as: the need for house extensions for growing families, garages for their cars, street lights, the supermarket with its brash façade taking trade from the village shop, dwindling attendance at the church and lack of money to fund its upkeep and the spreading sprawl at its edges from housing development eating into the countryside. Some pressures have been economic, some social, some through too much modernisation or not enough emphasis on heritage. But there have also been variations in scale and demographics which have changed countryside cultures enormously. As village populations have alternately contracted and expanded between the 1950s, the 1980s and the 2000s, any idyllic vision of a small-scale quiet life has become not only more and more the stuff of fantasy, but also an important ideal to be regained.

Country and city

The story which follows is an exemplary tale of the change of a countryside through development of its resources. It began with an idyllic country estate, developed from defining ownership of a stretch of country, into being a hinterland, to a suburb, then into being absorbed by the growth of a city. It shows how traditions under pressure create change, which, in turn, requires adaptation and leads to new attitude formation. In this instance, it was one of the factors which led to development of one branch of the countryside heritage movement.

For a documentary film, The Country and the City, made by Mike Dibb in 1979, the philosopher Raymond Williams reminisced about his childhood upbringing in the mining valleys of rural South Wales, where his father had been an inspector for the railways. A favoured landmark nicknamed the ‘Tump’ was a prehistoric burial mound and, creating a barrier to intersect the local area, there was the railway carrying coal to the industrial cities of the Midlands.⁶ His point was that deep history was taken for granted as part of the landscape, but, also, that the children constantly and unwittingly negotiated evidence of the connections between country and city. Not only that, but his overriding message in the film was that acceptance of the complete interdependence between country and city has to be critical to cultural understanding. He gave a number of other examples that had been given wider cultural dissemination through art. One of these was the overproduction of corn in the eighteenth century, which led to the development of the gin industry, with the social problems of disorderly drunken behaviour in city taverns and streets, – famously documented by William Hogarth’s series of engravings of Gin Lane. Another, a story which runs through several centuries and is picked up throughout the film, is the development of Tatton Park, a typical country house dominating an extensive landscape near the town of Knutsford in Cheshire, now owned by the National Trust. The estate was originally funded by a legacy to the Egerton family provided through speculative colonial trade and the present house was built at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, when the family’s wealth was at its height. The family also owned the medieval building Ordsall Hall in Salford. Around their estates there, in developing an industrialised textile business, they created the beginnings of the industrial suburb of Salford, which became notoriously the poorest area in the region. Quite by chance, this landscape was described in 1844 in The Condition of the Working Class in England, by Friedrich Engels. He had come to Salford to work in a family-owned mill, and was shocked at the evidence he found there of squalor and need.

If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find, on a peninsula formed by the river, a town of 80,000 inhabitants, which properly speaking, is one large working men’s quarter… Hence it is that an old and therefore very unwholesome, dirty and ruinous locality is to be found there.⁷

His impassioned writing and observations of the exploitation of the industrial workers of the North West by speculative developers and patrician landlords, who operated from the splendour of their country mansions, became a critical factor in the development of his subsequent work with Karl Marx on capitalism. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the Egerton’s fortunes expanded further by the opening of the Manchester ship canal, the head of which was on their land, connecting their landscape yet more thoroughly to the axis of trade between Manchester and the port of Liverpool. For Williams, this episode served as part of the continual evidence of the economic entanglement nationally and internationally between the landscapes of country and city. But if the story is taken a little further, elements creep in which introduce some of the other factors in the complicated history of the inter-relationships between city and country. Salford provides an extreme case of the changing cultures wrought by industrial encroachment, capitalist over- development and, ultimately, the role of cultural heritage in mitigating its effects and reintroducing a level of humanising creativity.

Partly thanks to the continued enterprise of the Egerton family and a large contingent of other local landowning developers, Salford had grown fast during the nineteenth-century period of expansion for the textile industry of North-West England, from a rambling slum district into a large industrial quarter. It became a city in its own right by 1926. But it was still dominated by poor housing and suffered increasingly in relation to Manchester, which developed into one of the major ports of the world.⁸ Salford city became part of the larger conurbation, the metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester in 1974. Then, further decline and loss of employment resulted from the closure of Salford Docks in 1982, as the head of the ship canal in Salford was unsuitable for big container ships. It was at its lowest ebb in the 1990s.⁹

The restoration of Ordsall Hall and its estate became part of the regeneration of the area. It is now a heritage centre, reopened in 2011 following a multi-million pound refurbishment programme which took advantage of the latest ethical conservation methods.¹⁰ It is run by Salford Council, with all the sense of responsibility and positive local pride and propaganda that public ownership entails: as a medieval gem to be celebrated, for the opportunities it provides for education and, equally, for its money-spinning potential. Its activity and enterprises must at least enable it to cover its running costs, and it operates as a place for entertainment, including being available for hire for parties and weddings, for children’s activities, such as a scary ‘ghost club’, as much as it is a place for learning – a large part of which is low-cost or free. Its learning team offer programmes, about the history of the building and estate: through the periods of the Tudors, wartime and so forth, appropriate for all levels of schooling, but also, creative art and story sessions for weekends and holidays. Practical courses are run from the heritage gardens, ranging through the Tudor knot garden, medieval herb gardens, orchards and herbaceous borders. A ‘Dig for Victory’ allotment project was organised in 2015 to commemorate the First World War, with costumed ‘allotmenteers’ advising visitors of wartime growing techniques. Even though the hall is restored and its surrounding gardens productive, the current urban landscape around it, with a population just over 200,000, would be unrecognisable to the Egerton family that inherited it in 1758.¹¹

Figure 1.1 Ordsall Hall, Salford staff acting as historical herb pickers. © DMC Photographic

Salford itself presents quite a different story in 2015. The ship canal, once the main route for industrial produce to leave the country, is a picturesque waterway threading through the city, used mainly for tourist travel in heritage narrow boats. Salford Quays is now a smart development of luxury apartment blocks,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Countrification
• 2 Nostalgia, art and folk life
• 3 Heritagisation and the ‘open air’
• 4 Education and the countryside
• 5 Global village
• 6 At the edge of the farm
• 7 The local contemporary
• 8 Changing landscapes
• General bibliography
• Index