Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 2 (2012), p. 318

Despite its subtitle, the controversies at the heart of this book are not really to do with politics or the land question. They are more directly about farming itself: about its place in the modern countryside and the problems of its public image. Published in 2008, but only lately sent in for review, the volume originated in a conference and presents eight contributions on the theme of ‘The Contested Countryside’, with a substantial introduction by one of the editors, Jeremy Burchardt. It sets out to offer historical contexts for contemporary debates including the role of organic agriculture, responses to animal disease, the incidence of rural poverty and the future of field sports.

Issues of food safety became central to popular and political indictments of farming methods in the late twentieth century, as anxieties about the impact of genetic modification and the spectre of ‘mad cow disease’ reinforced criticisms of industrial-style agriculture which had previously tended to focus on ecology and animal welfare. Philip Conford explores a more extensive history of connections between health and methods of food production in his account of the organic movement’s emphasis on the nutritional, physical and spiritual advantages of its approach. Paul Brassley takes a much longer historical perspective on his topic: responses to animal disease, from some of the earliest references to veterinary medicine and cattle plagues, to the involvement in the state in policing food quality.

Simon Miller’s chapter considers the problems of reconciling modern farming practice with more traditional images of the countryside, beginning from a premise which runs slightly counter to the overall theme of the book: far from a ‘contested countryside’, his interest is in exposing conflicts which have not flared into public debate. Miller questions the failure to engage fully with ‘tensions between use and beauty, and between production and amenity’: tensions which were evident in the Scott report and the minority report which accompanied it, but which have, he argues, been largely excluded from political discussion in the post-Second World War period. The reconciliation of aesthetics and economics, leisure and production, is a topic returned to in Alun Howkins’ wide-ranging essay on ruralism and rural England, studded with illuminating detail, which offers a concise and rewarding route into the topic for any reader. Surveying a long twentieth century, Howkins discusses the implications of dominant ideas about the countryside in English life, concluding with the irony that the version of rural England invoked in so many debates about town and country no longer, in fact, exists.

Conflicts pitch town against country over questions about land use, methods of farming, access and privilege. Essays by John Marsh and Berkeley Hill explore some of the difficulties of perception about the role of the agricultural sector within the national economy. Yet, the issue of ‘whose countryside is it, anyway?’ also rages within rural Britain. Paul Milbourne discusses recent traditions of studying deprivation in the countryside, suggesting that the issue has attracted less attention than poverty in an urban setting: his assertion that academic and political interest in the subject dates back only to the 1970s, rather wipes Rowntree and the Liberal campaigns of the early twentieth century off the map. Meanwhile, Graham Cox’s piece on the Countryside Alliance asks to what extent the countryside can be construed as a coherent community, arguing that the campaign engaged in the ‘imaginative enterprise’ of shaping an idea of the countryside as an interest group, albeit an interest group dominated by some very particular concerns. In an interesting piece on a provocative topic he emphasises the significance of the Countryside Alliance’s insistence that rural Britain is about people, rather than landscape, and offers some thoughtful reflections on the notion of ‘marginal moralities’: the position occupied by ‘country sports’ in contemporary culture.

In his introduction to the book, Burchardt observes that, ‘Countryside controversies may be a necessary, even perhaps healthy, part of the modern condition’ (p. 15). The protests of the Countryside Alliance, set against the backdrop of the debates over the future of hunting, provided an extreme illustration of the conflicts examined in this collection of essays. Though the scope of historical perspective varies between contributors (from long surveys to more present-day emphases), the purpose of the volume is to lay out a deeper context to recent problems and tensions. Those problems and tensions are, of course, constantly evolving. But the essays serve as a reminder of continuities as well: the problems of evidence and perception, the distinctive experiences of agriculture as an economic sector, and the long process of accommodation between cultural ideals about landscape and community and the experience of real people in real places.