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Rural communities across the UK are suffering as schools, banks, post
offices, pubs and GP surgeries close.
New research by The Observer
reveals that more and more villages are at risk as rural life is
eroded. Radical action is needed to reverse the terminal decline
Three-year-old Matilda has nowhere to play. In her village of
Bickington, on the edge of Dartmoor National Park, there is not a
single swing, roundabout nor patch of public space. There is nowhere
for her to go to nursery either: Little Owls, the nursery group run
from the church hall for eight years, was forced to close last term
after government inspectors demanded more improvements to the building
than the church could afford. Now her mother, Caroline Meek, must
drive to the neighbouring town if she wants to involve her daughter in
any activity. It is not an unfamiliar situation: in the West Country
village (population 270), there are no facilities for adults either.
Built on the fertile red soil of Devon, Bickington was until recently
a thriving farming community whose inhabitants were able to stroll
between a post office, pub, garage, village hall, two churches and a
police house. Now, save for an ailing village hall and the remaining
church - which recently put up a notice asking for more worshippers -
all are gone.
'I love this village,' said Meek, whose family has roots in the area
stretching back 300 years and who moved back five years ago to start
her family. 'But it's got nothing to recommend itself to anybody
without family ties. The lifeblood has been drained out of this
village by the closure of one service after another. It's a slow
strangulation. We're clinging on at the moment, but we need something
radical to happen to take us off this track of slow death. If nothing
changes, we're going to lose the fight to preserve any meaningful
village life here at all.'
Bickington is not alone. New research by The Observer and the
Commission for Rural Communities has identified scores of small
communities in the same predicament. By collating the closures of post
offices, GP surgeries, petrol stations, job centres, banks and
building societies and schools across the country since 2000, we have
uncovered a picture of villages throughout England being forced into
terminal decline.
The East Riding of Yorkshire, for example, has lost 77 services since
2000, including six primary schools, 28 post offices and 25 banks and
building societies. Meanwhile, 150 miles away, the county of
Herefordshire has lost 37 services, including three primary schools
and 18 post offices.
Despite the government's pledge to protect rural schools, the research
also reveals that 79 primary and 11 secondary schools have closed in
rural England since 2000. Salisbury has lost four primary and five
secondary schools. In the West Wiltshire district, five primary
schools have closed down.
The research reveals other closures, indicating a gradual erosion of
rural life: North Somerset has lost 11 banks and building societies,
while the Torridge district in Devon has lost 13 petrol stations. Four
local authority districts have lost three job centres each which,
despite the government's pledge to tackle unemployment in rural areas,
local councils have said will result in considerable difficulties -
and not just for those seeking local employment.
'We have serious concerns about the implications for vulnerable people
who desperately need these services,' explained Mandy Govier,
chairwoman of the Jobcentre Plus Group. 'Jobcentres are not just about
jobs. People need to sign on for income support, incapacity benefit
and other services. The offices are also a crucial advice point for
people who need disability allowance, attendance allowance, child,
pension and working credits,' said Govier.
Experts warn that these closures are part of a pattern that is getting
worse. 'It's easy for people to say, "Oh, it's only a local pub" or
"It's just one village hall", but it's the gradual closures that are
so dangerous because you suddenly find the village has reached a
tipping point and it's too late to do anything about it,' said Jeremy
Christophers, a Teignbridge district councillor who was born 42 years
ago in Bickington and maintains vivid memories of the village as a
vibrant community. 'It happened in our village slowly, almost
insidiously. It was only when the pub closed five years ago that we
suddenly realised the impact of having no communal space at all,' he
said. 'Villagers used to meet all the time: queuing at the post office
or over a pint at the pub, but once they had all closed down, we ended
up travelling everywhere in cars, reduced to half-conversations
through half wound-down car windows in the snatched moments before
we're moved on by the car behind.'
The closures revealed in the research are taking place at the same
time as a surge in interest in rural living. More than 800,000 Britons
a year are exchanging cities for rural lifestyles, a migration fuelled
by fear of crime, easier commuting and increasing broadband facilities
that enable home working. Experts forecast that numbers are expected
to grow over the next two decades.
Matthew Taylor, the Liberal Democrat MP who was commissioned by Gordon
Brown to carry out a recent National Housing Federation report on
rural living, has warned that, far from injecting new life into
villages, urban migrants can kill the very thing they seek.
'This movement of people is causing the gap between local earnings and
property prices to worsen in key rural districts,' said Taylor. 'It
prices out the young families needed to keep schools and shops alive,
turning villages into ghettos of the very rich and the elderly.
'In addition, the government protects villages from almost any
development because people want to be able to buy a little house that
will still have a view of green fields in 20 years,' he added. 'But
the villages being protected from development are actually being
killed, because the people who sustain them - tend the fields, keep
the shop running, open the pub every day - can't afford to live
there.'
Recent research commissioned by the Prime Minister from the Commission
for Rural Communities shows that those left behind in villages are
exhibiting a high level of innovation in their attempts to cling on.
'The erosion of distance by new technology has transformed the
possibilities for those living in rural England,' said Dr Stuart
Burgess, chairman of the commission. 'Rural communities are
experiencing a boom in home working, business start-ups and high
levels of entrepreuneurship.'
Such innovation, however, is often strangled at birth, he admitted.
'The potential is there, but rural businesses struggle to access the
support and advice from government. Despite the potential, we are
still at a place where low wages and limited opportunities confine
many young people in rural areas to a stark choice between leaving
their communities or staying and lowering their horizons. This is a
tragic waste of potential.'
The truth is, said Burgess, that most rural villages in England are in
such a perilous state that the closure of a single local service can
push the community on to the slippery slope towards collapse. 'It
creates a domino effect,' he said. 'Once one key service is withdrawn,
the knock-on effect is that other amenities will edge towards closure
as well. And once closures have reached a tipping point, or critical
mass, the life of a village is put at serious risk.'
Bickington recently found itself in this position. It has been forced
to the brink, said Jeremy Christophers, by the recent announcement
from Teignbridge District Council that the village's lack of amenities
has made it officially 'unsustainable'. 'That was a real wake-up
call,' said Christophers. 'If we're tagged as "unsustainable", we
won't be able to get any more grants or developments through the
planning system. It'll kill us off for once and for all as a thriving,
live village community.'
Stuart Hands, a local historian and former parish councillor who has
lived in Bickington since the Sixties, is sanguine about the changing
nature of his village. He points out that, although its pub might have
fallen to rack and ruin, the village is far from crumbling. 'For all
the talk of death, we're not about to turn into a ghost village,' he
said. 'If anything, I'd say we were a very well-maintained village,
which suggests people like living here - even if they're not doing so
in a way that others approve of.
'You can't force people to live in a way they don't want,' he added.
'People move here bringing their city ways with them. They don't want
to talk to their neighbours - and why should they? For centuries,
village communities were forced to socialise with each other because
of an accident of geography. Nowadays, people can create their own
communities based around shared interests.'
Hands believes it is not villages that are under threat - just
society's image of them. 'We shouldn't get hung up on this
old-fashioned idea of what a village should be,' he said. 'We have to
remember that this argument is about individuals and what's best for
them. I agree that a village is impoverished if its community
fragments, but is that what matters? If the individual members of a
community are still socialising and, more to the point, are doing so
in a manner which they have actively chosen, then they are made
richer, not poorer, by any change that has facilitated that.'
Meek disagreed. 'Villagers are dying to be involved in community life.
They leap at any opportunity,' she said. 'We sell 400 tickets to our
village ball every year. But the idea for the ball was generated and
organised during casual drinks at the pub. Without the pub, ideas like
that don't get off the ground.
'Villagers also mind desperately when their community opportunities
are taken away from them,' she added. 'About 100 campaigners have held
a vigil outside our local pub every Christmas Eve since it closed five
years ago.'
Christophers agrees with Hands that clinging too tightly to an image
of what an English village should be might squeeze the remaining life
from it. New times, he believes, need new solutions. 'We need radical
action,' he said. 'We need to think creatively.'
To this end, Christophers will put a motion to the local council
tomorrow to compel the authority to grant exceptional permission to
build affordable homes in villages, covenanted so that they can only
be sold to local workers, and with their price capped so that they
remain affordable for generations. He is also part of a community
group fighting to gather five villages into 'clusters', enabling them
to share facilities, improve access to support programmes and form
community land trusts.
Bickington is not alone in taking action to breathe life back into the
village. The 600 residents of Blisland, Cornwall, recently raised
£60,000 to build the community hall they believe is needed to
resuscitate their village and bring the community back together.
Ashton Hayes in Cheshire is the first carbon-neutral village in
Britain. The Holy Island primary school in Berwick-upon-Tweed,
Northumberland, was saved from closure after the community built
enough affordable housing to push the school population up from five
to 19 pupils, while in Leicestershire, All Saints Church in Sheepy
Magna has installed a post office, internet access and a shop selling
local produce.
'It's an uphill fight though,' said Christophers. 'Our biggest hurdle
is the government's urban slant. There is a feeling that trickles down
to local councils that the problems of the countryside are not as
serious as those of the inner cities, and that, quite frankly, we
should shut up and just consider ourselves lucky to live somewhere
with fresh air and greenery.'
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