Class Conflict and Social Change in the British Countryside, 1990–2013: Urban Values, Rural Issues

Abstract

The Industrial Revolution in Britain was responsible for radically changing the lives of the working classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they migrated from the countryside in their thousands in order to seek work in the rapidly expanding industrial cities such as London and Manchester. This enormous demographic shift ensured that the urbanisation of the landscape was largely responsible for cre- ating clear distinctions between rural and city life. It was during this period of rapid change that the concept of the ‘Countryside Ideal’ or ‘rural idyll’ emerged, which was in direct response to the unsanitary and overcrowded conditions of the heavily industrialised cities. So, the urbanisation of the landscape in the nineteenth century helped to engender the construction of the ‘rural idyll’ and, as Bunce argues, four conditions were necessary to promulgate this ‘ideal’

• 1. It produced the social structures and experiences within which attitudes towards the country and the city could develop.

• 2. It created a political economy which redefined rural-urban relationships.

• 3. It sustained the intellectual and cultural climate in which ideas about the country and the city could flourish.

• 4. It forged the landscapes and living environments around which differential values have formed. (Bunce, 1994, p. 11)