Living Off-Grid in Wales

Eco-Villages in Policy and Practice

Elaine Forde

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781786836601
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Rural Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Living Off-Grid in Wales addresses broad debates about the possibility of planning for a sustainable future, by an examination of rural development off the grid. Contrasting Wales's policy on One Planet Development – a planning policy that encourages living off-grid – with a more DIY approach to living off-grid, the book presents case studies from eco-villages that imagine off-grid very differently. The text pivots on the problematic question that if planning is about the spatial reproduction of society, then why should it encourage autonomy from societal systems. The ethnographic case studies in the book comprise an ethnography of rural Wales, and the focus on eco-villages brings a fresh perspective to the anthropological literature on community by considering off-grid as a radical form of social assemblage.

1. Wales

Wales/Cymru is a region of the west of the UK characterised by its landscape of mountain ranges rolling into deep valleys, its language and its industrial heritage. Wales has a population of around three million, mostly living in the south of Wales and in a region called the Valleys, with the opposing north-eastern area of Wales also being populous. The rest of Wales is relatively sparsely populated.

1.1 A Changing Wales

South Wales was formerly an industrial centre, especially for coal mining, arranged around the productive Valleys. The anthracite of the south Wales coalfield was the fuel of the Industrial Revolution, and as such, the industry that grew to enable the extraction of this fuel has given Wales the dubious claim to being the world’s first industrialised nation. Citing continued industrial action, however, Thatcher’s government of the 1980s closed most of the pits, leading to a bitter twelve-month stand-off during 1984–5 known as ‘the miners’ strike’, which was to have a great impact upon Welsh society. Wales’s Valleys are still affected by economic depression. From 2000 to 2006 the Valleys, along with west Wales, were classified as a European Structural Fund Objective 1 region, one of the most disadvantaged in Europe, and that classification has stretched right up until 2020 regardless of attempts at redevelopment during the intervening years.

Civically, modern Wales is defined by its devolved National Assembly, which has sat at the Senedd in Cardiff, the capital, since 1999. Politically, the Welsh Assembly Government is dominated by the Labour Party, which, given the country’s industrial heritage, has been powerful in Wales. The Welsh Assembly consists of political parties similar to those of the UK Parliament, plus Plaid Cymru, the Party of Wales, whose key political aim is an independent Welsh nation inside the EU. Wales’s electoral system uses a complicated form of proportional representation. Constituency votes (first-past-the-post) are supplemented by a regional vote in which seats are allocated according to the total amount of votes received, subject to a calculation dividing that total by the number of constituency seats in the region. The effect of this system is that some Senedd seats go to rather marginal candidates whose total share of the regional vote is not divided, as their parties do not tend to hold any constituency seats. At the time of writing, Wales has no formal legal jurisdiction. In 2018 for the first time since joining the UK Wales began to levy its own tax, a land transaction tax (formerly stamp duty). While some decision-making powers are retained by Westminster, the devolved government of Wales has published a number of innovative policies, particularly around sustainability, and as such it has gained international credibility as a forward-thinking and politically progressive nation.

Often referred to as the ‘Principality’, Wales’s status as an entirely autonomous nation is dubious given its symbolic place in the structure of the British monarchy. In Britain, the main title of the sovereign’s heir is ‘Prince of Wales’. Without a defined legal jurisdiction (as Scotland or Northern Ireland) the idea of Wales as an integral part of Britain is expressed by its closeness to the established order of the Union. Osmond (2002) however, notes the ease with which Welsh people have a sense of their Britishness as something distinct from their Welshness. Neither concept compromises the other (Osmond, 2002: 85).

Wales, though not always an autonomous nation, has a long history of autonomous dwelling. The story of the Tŷ Unnos (one-night house), when told, is presented as a traditional Welsh right; it is popularly thought of as a law laid down by the medieval Welsh king Hywel Dda and never repealed. During fieldwork I heard many times about the idea that a peasant may occupy a dwelling that they (and their friends, neighbours and family) are able to build in one night, as long as by the time the sun rises, a wisp of smoke is seen emerging from the chimney. At this point they may throw an axe from the front doorstep and occupy the space between the door and the axe’s landing-place. This meant that each small cottage or bwthyn could accommodate a family and a cow. Bythynnod were often built at the roadside, and nowadays can be identified along stretches of old roads, such as the A40, and are easily discernible where the otherwise wide road suddenly narrows for an irregular-shaped stretch.

The late English anarchist scholar Colin Ward details the Tŷ Unnos in his book about housing’s hidden history, Cotters and Squatters. According to Ward it is a long-standing and near-universal squatters’ notion that building a modest dwelling quickly and discreetly – ideally overnight – will mean that it cannot be ordered to be demolished. Films such as Il Tetto (1956) and La estrategia del coracol (1993) indicate that this idea was widespread and not simply archaic. Ward explains that in Wales the practice wasn’t as straightforward as this. Historically, parishes would allow for newly wed couples to set up a modest home and to keep an area surrounding it. In addition to their commoners’ rights providing for strip farming, grazing, firewood, game and other resources, the new household would be provided for. Enclosures effectively put a stop to the practice in its traditional form: typically the enclosed manorial lands could no longer support much more than one farmer. Ward notes at this time an increase in itinerant families quickly setting up home on wastes in other, as yet unenclosed districts (Ward, 2002: 50). This seems to be the origin of the Tŷ Unnos.

1.2 Land and People

This section uses a lens of cultural analysis to look at historic-to-contemporary attitudes to land in Wales as a step towards achieving a deeper understanding of how the history of the rural landscape has been a precursor to living off-grid as part of the contemporary back-tothe-land movement. Questions about land ownership and stewardship in the particular Welsh context are explored. With that in mind, I want to further develop the notion of consubstantiation put forward by Halfacree (2006), who writes on the subject of the contemporary UK back-to-the-land movement. The term ‘consubstantiation’ refers to a deep connectedness felt to the land, a radical ontology in contemporary societal terms, which is defined by the possibly artificial distancing between the country and the city, of the sort that Raymond Williams (1975) expressed in The Country and the City. It is, however, interesting to note that it is scholars in and of Wales who are particularly prominent in this field. Rather than rehearsing established arguments, I will provide some further context as to why the question of consubstantiation is so very pertinent in the Welsh context, and has played a distinct part in creating the ethnographic context explored in this book.

As has been traced in the Introduction, it is feasible to consider going off-grid as a form of land rights activism with a rich heritage. Cragoe and Readman (2010) show that the ‘Land Question’ which arose in Victorian Britain was compounded by data from the 1876 audit of land ownership, ‘Return of the Owners of Land’. Remarkably transparent, this government document published information demonstrating the extent to which land was linked to aristocratic families. According to the return, ‘approximately 75% of the acreage of Britain belonged to about 5,000 people, 710 of whom owned one-quarter of the land area of England and Wales’ (Cragoe and Readman, 2010: 3). In Wales, 61 per cent of land was tied up in large estates of 1,000 acres or more, yet this was a comparatively low figure for the UK. By the time of Parliamentary Enclosures (Victorian era), the Welsh farming landscape was characterised by far smaller land holdings than in England. The extant tradition of a system of partible inheritance meant that at the height of Parliamentary Enclosures, the average size of a farm in Wales was only 47 acres (Cragoe, 2010: 94).

Pine (1996) has noted that, in peasant societies more generally, partible inheritance systems diminished capital resources, fragmented holdings and had the effect of keeping people in place. Pine outlines Górale strategies for consolidating holdings in the Polish Tatra Highlands, as peasant families circumvented the rules with marriage alliance and crafty succession planning. On that subject, Jenkins (1971: 148–50) discusses some traditional modes of succession among tenant farmers in Ceredigion at the turn of the twentieth century. Usually, tenancies were inherited in a system of ultimogeniture. Once a son or daughter married, their parents would provide what may be considered a share of the patrimony – the family wealth, not just the land – to enable the new couple to ‘start their world’ (Jenkins, 1971: 140) on their own holding. The last son remaining at home, usually the youngest, would not marry until his mother’s death, and would then inherit the family’s holding or tenancy. In the mid-1990s, Janice Williams’s research on dietary habits in and around Newport, Pembrokeshire (1996) revealed that the practice of the youngest child staying at home (in the case reported, to help mother with cooking) continued. In recent years furthermore, at least two high-profile probate disputes in west Wales have been resolved with recourse to the norm of the youngest child staying at home to work and eventually inherit the family farm, in contrast to the parents’ stated wishes.¹

Writing about land and people in Wales in the nineteenth century, David Howell (1977) identifies what he termed a ‘peasant mentality’ to account for visible lack of ‘improvement’ of the land. The peasant mentality, Howell argues, tended to equate successful farming with low expenditure, and it is noted that farmers ‘held land primarily for the cultural status it bestowed and eschewed contact with the money economy as much as possible’. This is something that Hurn has also noted in contemporary Ceredigion (Hurn, 2008: 341). Scholarship on the subject of rural Wales’s farmers has therefore revealed a clear separation between the land and monetary economics, which indicates that what we are dealing with, in classic economic anthropological theory, is incompatible regimes, or ‘spheres’ of value (Bohannan, 1959; or Evans-Pritchard, 1940). This is not to say that in practice land holdings are never sold, exchanged or given a financial value, thus slipping into a differing sphere of value, but rather that – and bearing consubstantiation in mind – these spheres are idealised as being separate and not interchangeable.

Returning to Cragoe, he notes that by comparison with the rest of the UK, Welsh landlords tended to have a direct involvement with their tenants. Tenancies were operated personally rather than through agents, and the idioms of family and tradition were valued by landlords as much as by the tenant farmers themselves (Cragoe, 2010: 96). As such, tenancies in Wales seemed to be hereditary, and were considered secure. Generally, tenants and landlords alike respected the idioms of tradition and family, and operated their farms according to these principles, as a moral economy. This inevitably clashed with the emerging neoliberal paradigm, and cases where newly moneyed industrialists bought farms as an investment seemed to be the most problematic (Cragoe, 2010: 105). Notwithstanding the seeming agreement on the morality of landowning and stewardship, Cragoe goes on to note that the Land Question in Wales eventually hinged on the issue of cultural distinctiveness. Although boasting extensive Welsh heritages, most of the landed class neither spoke Welsh nor patronised any of the Welsh institutions, such as chapels or seats of learning. Contemporary pamphleteers made the most of this cultural disjuncture, and although they did not use the term consubstantiation, they did portray ‘an organic bond between the Welsh people and their landscape’, which of course implied the critique of a landowning class who were politically and culturally anomalous, where consubstantiation was not evident. The Welsh middle class sought in this manner to usurp the aristocracy, and calls for land legislation based on Wales’s distinctiveness began to emerge. Consubstantiation is one of these distinctive qualities, and continues to be evident in the practice of naming farmers according to the name of their farm. One resident of Y Mynydd, one of the eco-villages explored in this book, was formerly a farmer in west Wales. He told me, ‘They used to call me “Weaver Waun Llwyd”’. As a farmer, Mr Weaver had become synonymous with his farm. In Welsh, the term ddaear (ground) is often used in place of land or tir. ‘Ground’ is often used when English is spoken too, in preference to ‘land’. Ground gives a greater sense of the belonging, the grounding, that consubstantiation gives.

The factors outlined in this section have created a particular Welsh landscape that has proved to be advantageous to green lifestyle migrants. Smaller land holdings, not particularly agriculturally improved, a system of partible inheritance, with rights and interests held for a long time by diverse parties such as distant cousins, some of whom perhaps are no longer (if ever) in occupation, has created a fluid market in small parcels of marginal land. Through the Lammas and One Planet Council organisations, low-impact neophytes are readily encouraged to look to Wales to provide a setting for their projects, rather than to develop any particular toolkit for extending OPD to other regions or countries. One conversation from my time at Lammas is notable. This took place during a Lammas experience week, aimed at giving people a taste of what it may be like to live in an eco-hamlet. One couple in particular has gone on to become involved in a Lammas spin-off settlement. Here, Pete (from Leeds) discusses the acquisition of land with Craig:

P: … I mean, how do you go about getting land? [rhetorically]

C: The best place to start is to look in the local press.[happens to be holding a local paper]

P: No, but I mean, you can’t just buy land?! It’s all owned by families what go back as far as Domesday… It’s all Estates. At least, it is where I’m from.

C: Wales. Anyway, you could never get something like OPD in England. It would never happen. It has to be Wales.

Considering that England and Wales have shared the same legal jurisdiction since the sixteenth century, it is remarkable just how far property relations, mediated by cultural values and norms, have created differences in the way land is owned and looked after. This divergence is reflected in the greater devolution of planning powers to Wales, and therefore Wales’s policy context for OPD emerges as a highly cultural policy which must be viewed with this particular history in mind.

1.3 Themes in Welsh Ethnography

Perhaps it is a reflection of Wales’s contentious claims to autonomous nationhood which has meant that Wales has been the focus of a particular strand of ethnographic research called ‘community studies’ since the 1950s. This approach was typical of ethnography (though perhaps not ‘anthropology’) ‘at home’, which sought ways to illustrate issues and problems with broad-scale societal changes by recourse to comparison with stable and self-contained ‘communities’. It stressed equilibrium as a quality of community life, framing the outside world as the source of change and challenge. This approach to structuring ethnographic research was called the stasis-and-change model and has been remarkably persistent.

Welsh community studies was largely concentrated in the Aberystwyth School of Human Geography (though not exclusively so, as both Manchester and Swansea played a role), and included scholars such as Jenkins, Emmett and Rees among others. The relative absence of much in the way of new theoretical influence in Welsh ethnography since the Aberystwyth school means that any ethno-graphic work on Wales and Welsh culture needs desperately to address community, not least this ethnography about living off-grid, which offers two eco-villages, or so-called ‘alternative communities’, as case studies. Community, alternative communities and alternatives to community are addressed more fully in chapter 4, which interrogates the idea of a community off the grid. The focus of this book is on the socio-technical. Smith and Tidwell (2014) caution that the literature on socio-technical imaginaries focuses on the discourses of social elites about technoscientific policies and practices, yet rarely gives voice to marginal groups’ notions of the socio-technical. My concern is to show how the practice of living off-grid both answers challenges with energy transition and confronts the political economy of the state, policy and state processes. As such, it is intended to be useful as an ethnography of the socio-technical and a welcome development and new direction in the growing body of Welsh ethnography.

Community

The ‘stasis-and-change’ model (e.g. Emmett, 1982) gradually gave way to a more problematised notion of ‘community’. From an initial deconstruction of the notion of community (e.g. MacFarlane, 1977), to its reconstruction – indeed, one that acknowledges that community is a construction (e.g. Cohen, 1985) – as an analytical term, community has retained its position, as Amit notes, as a ‘vehicle for interrogating the dialectic between historical social transformations and social cohesions’ (Amit, 2002: 2). This dialectic is seen to operate in this research context, between broad changes in the way land is used, and how that use is regarded as proper or (im)moral, as described above, and this draws people into new value-regimes to do with consumption and environmentalism. In this context different groups, such as people living off-grid or indeed planners, mobilise around notions such as the idea that proper development is integral to notions of community. It is to these broader questions that I orient the exploration of community in this book. As well as providing an ethnographic account of living off-grid in rural west Wales, the book seeks to confront the salience of the notion of community in the off-grid eco-village context, a context in which community gains a particular but contested usage.

With this in mind, it becomes clear that the community studies tradition and the stasis- and-change model have heightened the notion of an internal, linguistically Welsh and homogeneous model of Wales vis-à-vis the externalities of changing state, migration and transition, and in particular, Welsh political devolution. This has been a challenge for ethnographers of Wales. For instance, Trosset’s 1993 ethnography consciously attempted to transcend the notion of community in her account of Welsh-speaking Wales. In addition to community, which gets its own chapter in chapter 4, three important themes in Welsh ethnography are to be addressed here, and these are nationalism, Celticism and language.

Nationalism

Wales, along with Ireland, Scotland and Brittany, was the subject of an early ethnographic interest in the ‘Celtic Fringe’ (Harvey, Jones, McInroy and Milligan, 2002) that mainly saw the emergence of ethnographies of rural regions acting as the exotic aspect of a centre/periphery dyad prevalent in the social science both at the time and much later on. Since then however, the notion of Wales as a peripheral region of the UK has been roundly challenged by political and civic devolution, at least analytically. Prior to devolution, and the preceding consolidation of nationalist politics in Wales, Wales’s nationalism had enjoyed no particular institutional focal point since the twelfth century (Morgan, 1971: 154). Welsh nationalism, therefore, took other forms of expression.

Jones (2008) explores how Welsh nationalism coalesced around the issue of language. Rejecting modernist theories of nationalism which portray nationalism as a hegemonic, elite practice, Jones illustrates how a geography of nationalism can inform a rather more social constructivist view of actors at all positions in formal hierarchies influencing and shaping social affects (in this case, nationalism). In particular, Jones (himself part of the latter-day Aberystwyth school of human geographers) illustrates how Alwyn D. Rees, as well as being an ethnographer in the community studies tradition and author of the seminal Welsh community studies ethnography, Life in a Welsh Coun...