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6 Rural rides: the countryside and modernity The backbone of old England: Akenfield Ronald Blythe’s novel Akenfield: Portrait of an English village was published in 1969, and became a best-seller. The theatre director, Peter Hall (the artistic director of the National Theatre, on London’s South Bank, between 1973 and 1988), decided to film an adaptation.1 For Hall, this was clearly a story for film rather than theatre. As he told Alexander Walker in an interview on 18 July 1974, ‘We were doing something only cinema could do, for the camera had to be there and
8 Rural resistance This book has so far focused mainly on the concentration of political action in the industrial parts of northern England. In rural areas, collective action faced greater barriers to effective organisation. Many historians have assumed that such factors as agricultural tenants’ deference to landlords and plebeian illiteracy prevented the development of any meaningful activity at all.1 This chapter examines why Chartism and other ‘urban’ movements failed to take hold in certain regions, but also other forms of collective action, including
This book is the first comprehensive study of Muslim migrant integration in rural Britain across the post-1960s period. It uses the county of Wiltshire as a case study, and assesses both local authority policies and strategies, and Muslim communities’ personal experiences of migration and integration. It draws upon previously unexplored archival material and oral histories, and addresses a range of topics and themes, including entrepreneurship, housing, education, multiculturalism, social cohesion, and religious identities, needs and practices. It challenges the long-held assumption that local authorities in more rural areas have been inactive, and even disinterested, in devising and implementing migration, integration and diversity policies, and it sheds light on small and dispersed Muslim communities that have traditionally been written out of Britain’s immigration history. It reveals what is a clear, and often complex, relationship between rurality and integration, and shows how both local authority policies and Muslim migrants’ experiences have long been rooted in, and shaped by, their rural settings and the prevalence of small ethnic minority communities and Muslim populations in particular. The study’s findings and conclusions build upon research on migration and integration at the rural level, as well as local-level migrant policies, experiences and integration, and uncover what has long been a rural dimension to Muslim integration in Britain.
Civilising Rural Ireland examines how modern Ireland emerged out of the social and economic transformation prompted by the rural co-operative movement. The movement emerged in response to systemic economic problems that arose throughout the nineteenth century and coincided with a wide-ranging project of cultural nationalism. Within a short space of time the co-operative movement established a swathe of creameries, agricultural societies and credit societies, leading to a radical reorganisation of rural Ireland and helping to create a distinctive Irish political economy. The work of overlooked co-operative experts is critically examined for the first time and reinserted into the process of state development. The interventions of these organisers, intellectuals and farmers built up key institutions that shaped everyday life across rural communities. The movement weathered war and revolution, to become an indispensable part of an Irish state infrastructure after independence in 1922. The strained relationship and economic rivalry that developed between Irish and British co-operators is also explored in order to illuminate the changing relationship between Ireland and the United Kingdom from an economic perspective. Civilising Rural Ireland will appeal to a wide audience interested in modern Irish history and readers are introduced to an eclectic range of personalities who shared an interest in co-operation and whose actions possessed important consequences for the way Ireland developed. The creative use of local and national sources, many of which are examined for the first time, mean the book offers a new perspective on an important period in the making of modern Ireland.
anyone would ever wish to visit Romania, the country he comes from and has left. With disarming candour, he replies, ‘Pero en Romania, no hay euros’. This funny, but poignant, scene of a Romanian child in a Spanish village raises numerous questions about Spanish rural life, social change, human migration and the consequences of the prioritisation of the economic over local cultures and identities
Overwhelmingly, the women prosecuted for murder were rural women of the labouring classes. They came from families without land of their own, who were hired to work in the houses or on the land of others, or families who worked their own modest holdings. Most of the women were economically and socially marginalised. This identity not only shaped the contours of their lives, it also played a role in the killings for which they stood accused, and in the criminal justice responses they faced. In this chapter, I
5 The new rural residents: emerging sociabilities in Alava, Basque Country Josetxu Martínez Montoya The traditional habitat Alava is one of seven territories of the Basque Country, with an approximate population of three hundred thousand, most living in the capital, Vitoria-Gazteiz, and in a few other urban centres. The rest of the territory is formed by about four hundred villages, most composed of a small number of households (four to five in the smaller villages, twenty to thirty in the larger ones). Traditionally, Alava was inhabited by local communities
results from the journey of an oil executive based in Houston, Texas to the rural location of the fictionally named coastal village of Furness in the northeast of Scotland. It is this meeting between urban and rural that I wish to examine at the levels of production, text and critical reception in order to reassess how the rural in Local Hero has been claimed by and for critics of Scottish cinema
In the nine decades of European colonialism in Zimbabwe the theory of rural development passed through many phases – during which different, even opposing points of view assumed orthodoxy. While a simplification, the social psychology of European colonialism was built largely around stereotypes informing perceptions and policies. One such perception
British Rural Landscapes on Film offers wide-ranging critical insights into ways in which rural areas in Britain have been represented on film, from the silent era, through both world wars, and on into the contemporary period. The contributors to the book demonstrate that the countryside in Britain has provided a range of rich and dense spaces into which aspects of contested cultural identities have been projected. The essays in the book show how far British rural landscapes have performed key roles in a range of film genres including heritage, but also horror, art cinema, and children’s films. Films explored include Tawny Pipit (1944), A Canterbury Tale (1944), The Go-Between (1970), Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Another Time, Another Place (1983), On the Black Hill (1987), Wuthering Heights (2011), Jane Eyre (2011), and the Harry Potter and Nanny McPhee films. The book also includes new interviews with the filmmakers Gideon Koppel and Patrick Keiller. By focusing solely on rural landscapes, and often drawing on critical insight from art history and cultural geography, this book aims to transform our understanding of British cinema.