Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 169

This collection of papers originated in a conference organized under the umbrella of the Conference of Regional and Local Historians in 2002. It serves as a salutary reminder that the encounters and mutual perceptions of town and country can take many and v arious forms.

Two of the papers highlight the connection between industrial activity and the countryside in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Stokes draws attention to the personal links between agricultural improvement and industrial development in south Durham. An example was that of Christopher Mason, an estate owner and agricultural improver, who sold his prestigious Shorthorn cattle herd and ventured into railway investment after the well-publicized success of the Stockton and Darlington railway. Sheeran’s paper presents a different face of the countryside/industry symbiosis in his analysis of contemporary northern landscape paintings. These are here interpreted as evidence of cultural disapproval; George Walker’s ‘Factory Children’ of 1814 shows the children as ‘expressionless and wizened, old before their time’. But the aristocratic interpretation of landscape as cultural harmony was restored by the unknown artist who depicted Sir Titus Salt’s Saltaire Mills, newly relocated to the Aire valley in 1853. He placed them centre-stage, as a new version of the aristocratic country house, adapted to the new world of factory industry.

Moving on in time, Walker analyzes the social evolution of the Lincolnshire show, as it grew in size from its inauguration in 1869. Its success drew increasing numbers of visitors, and a rising proportion of industrial workers, as Lincoln itself became the national centre for the manufacture of farm machinery. This led the organizers to anticipate problems of social order, and the adoption of socially segregationist policies in ticketing, seating and refreshments. Perhaps these were unnecessary; at least the show did not suffer the level of public concern raised by the more boisterous Lincoln April horse fair.

Tebbutt and Walton consider the impact of the open spaces of the northern uplands on the urban and on the rural imagination. Tebbutt takes the case of the north Derbyshire moorland area known as the Dark Peak, and examines the responses of the urban walkers who used it. She shows the mixture of psychological responses evoked by rambling on the moor, foremost of which was the desire for mental and physical self-improvement. The obverse of this was a sense of disgust with the overcrowded and unhealthy town, where healthy manliness was under siege from its environment. Walton considers the debate which resulted from the decision, enshrined in the National Parks and Countryside Act of 1949, to form a new national park in the North York Moors. Opposition to the establishment of the park was intense, continuous and vociferous. Walton shows elegantly the extreme and unwavering distrust to any proposals emanating from the towns; the opposition caricatured the plan as an urban rape of the countryside, in entire neglect of the available evidence. Continuing resentment by rural dwellers of any plan originating in the towns can be traced in the recent activity of the Countryside Alliance and in the controversy concerning hunting with dogs.

Finally, the papers by Grieves and Mansfield centre on the period of the First World War. Grieves looks at the perspectives on the conflict revealed by the (largely middle-class) diary keepers and epistolary writers in rural areas, such as the Rev Andrew Clark of Great Leighs in Essex. Here, there was a sense that rural areas were rather marginalized, not being kept well informed of the war’s progress by the authorities. Some comfort was to be obtained by an emphasis on the eternal round of nature, but the sense of rural isolation and vulnerability was dramatically heightened by the Zeppelin raids, which must have been terrifying on a dark night, as the behemoths roared thunderously overhead (although doing little damage). When rural dwellers ventured into town, they were repelled by the frenetic activity, inflation and conspicuous consumption, although the imposition of food rationing led to the restoration of town-country links, as urban dwellers looked to their country contacts for supplies. Mansfield discusses the curious case of agricultural trades unionism in the Welsh Marches of Shropshire and neighbouring counties in the 1920s. Here the central point is the complete failure of attempts at unionization after its brief flowering in 1917–20. There was an institutional weakness, since the two major unions were bitter rivals, but at bottom efforts to unionize were thwarted by the conservatism of the labourer and the strong paternalism of the farmers and estate owners. Newly-formed organizations – the Women’s Institute, Young Farmers’ Clubs, and the British Legion – served to underpin the conservative cultural consensus. There is a sense here of unionism as an urban export, finding no roots in the profoundly rural Marches.

Overall, these papers serve as a salutary reminder that relations between town and country are always a nuanced affair, and that simple dichotomies are of little analytical value. This is not to say that simple models of town-country antagonism do not continue to operate in public and private discourse to this day, but that they are continually mediated by the course of economic evolution and the varying fortunes of interest groups.