urban countryside?
I’ve just read an article in the CPRE’s spring edition of Countryside Voice by self-confessed city lover, Robert Elms, who can’t stand the ‘the dreary predictability of muddy little England’. Compared to ‘the buzz, thrill and noisy creative glory of a city’ to him the countryside is ‘a depressing rejection of all that in favour of safe, samey conformity’. And I find myself nodding in partial agreement. Too much of England has become over-sanitised, too safe, too uniform.
Often when Robert (husband) and I return to visit old walking haunts we are surprised to find how much they have changed. Gone are the haphazard pastures and meadows filled with a riot of dandelions and daisies. No more are there crumbling stone or earth banks, gaps stuffed with old bedsprings and handy corrugated iron. Gone is the decrepit rusty fencing tied up with fading fibrous pieces of bailer twine to the nearest gnarled stump of hedgerow bush. Gone too is the exhilarating feeling of a remote and wild place. In its place we find acre after acre of bottle-green nitrogen ryegrass, geometrically divided by straight, neatly trimmed hedges bounded by bright tight squeaky clean fencing. Smart tanalised styles, each with neat dog gate and sporting a brand new painted signpost. Barn conversions all following the same brown-window syndrome
I feel angry, upset and cheated. But, if I’m honest, I can remember thinking once that all that broken decay was a sign of shoddy farming! Okay, so our rush-infested fields and pastures are either a waterlogged, sink-sucking morass or an ankle-breaking, knee-twisting concrete with nothing inbetween, and they are exacting and unproductive, but we are blessed with a farm that has character. It is totally individual and exciting. So we resolve to leave that old dung-spreader where it was in the field corner, not to make any more hedgerows redundant through fencing them, to tolerate those thickets of brambles springing out here and there and to leave that muddy gateway where the house martins collect the mud for their nests.
Would Mr Elms, I wonder, find this countryside - wild, unkempt, unpredictable - a more interesting exchange for his culturally exciting, glorious buzzy urbanity? Or would he still feel all the countryside has to offer is various forms of soil?
to read the whole article see May edition of Devon Today
7 comments
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April 5, 2008 at 7:49 am
Mopsa
Hmm. That’s really made me think! I’m happy for Robert Elms to stay away from the countryside if he prefers the city life. But it’s a conundrum, isn’t it, this appreciation of the semi-wild state of the land? I know that in order to keep the livestock safe and the hedgerows (and so the wildlife) in good order, that they need to be temporarily “sanitised” by human intervention (banking, hedging and fencing etc) and then left to get on with it, so that in a year or two the squeaky cleanness of it is rubbed off and the natural growth can be enjoyed by human and animal. Can’t say I’ve ever had a love of corrugated tin in hedge gaps or brightly coloured baler twine smacking the eye unfavourably, or found dregs of baler wrap fluttering in trees and mashed underfoot anything other than hateful rather than shabby chic. But yes, golfing swards might be good for keeping some bellies full, but they are incredibly dull and lifeless in so many other ways. I am nervous about some of the deadheading, and need to phase it carefully, to avoid that over-handling of the land. Farming has always been about managing the land, so here’s to unimproved pastures, the supremacy of nature, and interesting and characterful farms.
April 5, 2008 at 1:07 pm
mary
Elms sounds lightweight and trivial doesn’t he. He probably has no conception of the backbreaking work that is involved in providing his no doubt trendy selection of food. He can only sneer. Take no notice Paula.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/biographies/biogs/london/robertelms.shtml
Anyway, the bottle green (as you so graphically describe them) fertilized swards and crops cannot continue. I looked up to see how much energy is needed to make a ton of fertilizer. As I can only think of energy in terms of 1 bar electric fires burning for 1 hr, the equivalent of natural gas needed (1 gigajoule) is 9445 hrs worth of that 1 bar fire. Staggering isn’t it.
I stayed in Kildare a couple of years ago and the hotel overlooked the dock. An Eastern European ship was being unloaded of its cargo of fertilizer which was carried in those woven polystyrene cubes. The convoy of lorries went on day and night for five days. It is something I will never forget and that was just one shipload for Ireland.
April 5, 2008 at 7:29 pm
mary
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3724/is_200103/ai_n8946024
I am being irritated by Elms! He’s like a wasp inside my head. I found the above link and was amazed to see that he makes a living out of slagging off the countryside and the people who live there. para 5 onwards. And that was in 2001 the year of the FMD disaster. What a plonker - I wonder what his agenda is in increasing the isolation and making the divide wider when we should all be coming together in these increasingly difficult times.
April 6, 2008 at 8:52 am
Liz Jamieson
I am going to town later and will buy a copy of Devon Today to see what Robert Elms has said.
Certainly London and the south-east IS the powerhouse that drives the economy (whatever that means, in these fantastic uncertain times). I haven’t read them yet so can’t comment on Robert Elms’ particular views, but I believe in general that the people who pay for our roads and services are entitled to give the side of the story as it appears to them. If some city-lovers do not understand the countryside, then its likely some countryside dwellers don’t understand the cities.
Personally, I don’t much care for an untidy countryside and bits of once flourescent, weather-beaten twine holding a decrepit gate upright just say decay, to me - like this one : http://www.lizjamieson.co.uk/blogpics/gate.jpg
My immediate farmer neighbour litters his countryside with enormous, discarded and now rotting in situ, agricultural-strength plastic bags. I am learning to accept that he is entitled to his opinion and is the author of his own personal hell. And, as long as he doesn’t hurt anyone, he must be free to do that. I can’t help think that we must have room for everyone’s opinion.
I would prefer to see the countryside shared out a little more, with better access for people from the cities, and yes a little bit of neat fencing is certainly appealing to me. A council conservation officer was in my excuse for a kitchen a few weeks ago, but as he sipped my coffee, it became clear that that he hated anyone coming to this area to live. He referred to tourists and incomers as Grokels and how he preferred the beaches and cliff faces all to himself and wished they’d all leave. I chose not to take this personally. It transpired that he’d enjoyed himself once as a teenager in that long hot summer over 30 years ago. I think he may have become stuck in 1976 - he referred to it often, with a dream-like quality in his eyes, and had the date spray painted on his vintage VW Campervan.
It occurred to me then that a child born now, who may turn out to be as mislead as this conservation bloke, is unlikely by the time he reaches 45 to become stuck in 1976. If he is of similar ilk, when he is 45 in 2053, he might become stuck in 2025. There is hope.
April 6, 2008 at 12:03 pm
elizabethm
It’s a difficult balance isn’t it? Over tidiness is anti-environmnet but you do need to intervene because that is what farming is and good fences and strong hedges are a necessity. Haven’t read the Robert Elms article. i do think there are some people who are naturally city types and would not be happy in the country however tidy and groomed it was, and vice versa of course, for those of us who would never settle in a city.
April 6, 2008 at 9:33 pm
paula
I’d hoped that this would draw some interesting thoughts and opinions from you. It has!
I shall do another posting on the subject…bear with me.
Thanks - keep them coming.
April 9, 2008 at 1:31 am
heidi
What entertains us, and our rural/farming freinds here in Oregon, are the rich city folk who move out to the country to have the “country lifestyle”. They build a huge starter castle style house in the middle of two acres, pave most of it, and fence it all like a fortress. Then they complain vehemently about the smell of cow shit, loudly mooing dairy cattle waiting to be fed, slow moving tractors on roads, etc..
I think if you want to live in the country you should truly understand and appreciate what it means to live there. What the culture of the place is.
If you can’t stand the smell of pig poo don’t move in next to the hog farmer.
I know I am being judgemental, but I just can’t stand the silliness of it all.