Tales from Long Ago No. 1

I have had a career in the sense of careering from one type of work to another. In the late 1980s, I careered into working as a planner in a mental health service in Birmingham. This involved working with psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses to set up a range of innovative services. These included setting up supported housing for people with long-term disorders discharged from inpatient care, a task which required co-operation from local housing associations.

So one day, I went with a consultant psychiatrist to meet the manager of a local housing association in his office in a street of terraced housing. We waited in his office for him to arrive, while the consultant looked wistfully across the street. “I lost my virginity in that house”, he said. The manager arrived and asked his rather glamorous personal assistant to arrange coffee. This she did, using an ornate cafetiere and pouring our cups.

A few months later, I visited an area manager in the Social Services Department. By way of small talk, I commented on her unusual surname and asked if she was related to the manager of the housing association I had met. She went red with rage: “That bastard”, she said, “He dumped me for that bloody personal assistant”.

After that, I have always avoided asking if people are related, however unusual their surname.

Murdering the village

One of my least favourite television programmes is Escape to the Country. This usually features a couple who plan to sell their house in London and buy a larger one in a rural setting. They express surprise at the lack of street lights and corner shops, and distress that the countryside is not as quiet as they had hoped. Cows moo, farm machinery operates, children play, and church bells ring. Their disappointment is that, even in the countryside, it is not possible to escape from people altogether.

Those of us who actually live in a country village see things differently. For us, a village is a community of people who know each other and who help each other out. Help can include things like friendship for the recently-bereaved, advice on how to deal with official agencies, and shared concerns about how to maintain poorly-built speculative housing. My own village has an amazing number of local organisations. In addition to our parish church, they range from sports clubs, fitness classes, groups for mothers and toddlers, friendship groups, the Women’s Institute, a monthly coffee morning to raise money for various charities, a gardening club, a Geology Society, the Young Farmers, the British Legion and several others. A group of volunteers maintains our footpath network, the volunteer who runs our ‘Oil Syndicate’ reduces the price we pay for heating oil, and a volunteer taskforce tidies the place up. Our village hall provides a warm space for people in the depth of winter, while one of my neighbours helps to run the Worcester Food Bank.

This alternative view of village life as a participative community is one reason why the most unlikely places proclaim their village status. Manhattan has a Greenwich Village, East Village and West Village. Closer to home, Birmingham has a new ‘Edgbaston Village’, while the St Johns area in Worcester has been promoted as a ‘village in the city’. These urban villages usually have older and more distinct architecture than the surrounding mediocrity, and this contributes to a sense of separate identity.

Quaintness is a factor in defining rural villages too, at least in the mass media. These usually show an ancient parish church, vicarage and manor house, some old cottages, all surrounding a large village green. This vision of rurality appears at its purest in the television series Midsomer Murders, whose villages are almost empty of traffic (apart from people riding horses), and where the inhabitants usually include a snobby family living in straightened circumstances in a grand old house, a wealthy but unpopular parvenu, an unhappily-married couple running the soon-to-be bankrupt local pub, a rather weird local vicar, and various surly adolescents. All village organisations in Midsomer are the scenes of factious and usually murderous conflict.

This should all put people off wishing to move to the countryside, but this is not the case. Our villages are under siege from speculative house-building firms, so that the old village cores (often designated as a conservation area) are increasingly surrounded by estates of suburban-style houses, mostly built on high-quality agricultural land. Developers are keen to build in rural areas because farm land is cheap (at least until it receives planning permission) and does not have the complications of brownfield sites, but also because there is a real demand for country living. Demand is high because the countryside is seen as safer and cleaner than cities and with better schools. The disadvantages of commuting to work are partly alleviated by using the Internet to work from home, for banking, and for ordering home deliveries from supermarkets and other online retailers.

The resulting estates may be located in a country village, but look like they could be anywhere. The same pattern-book houses, usually detached and about two metres apart, all with garages too small to house a car. The estates usually include a few larger and more expensive houses which have two small garages - too small to house two cars. Despite their price, new houses have limited garden space, usually smaller than found in an interwar council house. New estates do have ‘green spaces’, required by local planning policies. But ownership is usually retained by the developer, who then leases them to a management company. These keep costs low by limiting their work to planting a few short-lived trees and mowing the grass, all for which they charge residents a management fee which increases each year.

Planning obligations require that a proportion of new houses (usually 40%) are ‘affordable’, but this only means that the sale price or the rent is 80% of market rates. This is still beyond the means of many families, particularly those in rural areas where there may be limited local employment opportunities. It is not surprising to find that local surveys carried out for neighbourhood plans often find an unmet need in villages for rented social housing. Another unmet need occurs among elderly people who find their homes too large or too expensive to manage, or too far from local services. Building smaller dwellings close to village centres to enable old people to downsize would have the beneficial effect of releasing larger family homes for those who need this type of accommodation.

All this means that we are not getting the type of house that we most need in rural areas, indicating a failure of our planning system. The new Government proposes to introduce changes, but these look unlikely to benefit rural areas.