The Village News
The truth behind England’s rural idyll
Tom Fort
Having read it
★★★☆☆
It started well and finished well but most of its middle chapters were a bit exhausting in their meanderings! The author made some good points, especially about how villages should grow and be maintained. Like so many well-researched texts and explanatory efforts though, the people that would benefit most from reading it, and can do something about the issues it raises, will likely not bother and consequently progress will take much longer!
Anyway, I think the real problem with these things (which I don’t feel was explored enough in this book, but to be fair, wasn’t really its purpose), is our economic model. It doesn’t really allow progressive and flexible approaches to building and sustaining villages, towns and communities and until it does, we may forever be held back by taking the classic, short-term approach to ‘solving’ what the market wants! But as Tom Fort says and alludes to, it’s in our power to get involved and fight for a broader and more inclusive model, whatever the location.
A good passage
The price these villages pay for renewal is to forfeit something of their good looks. They will have had to accept new housing, accretions of banal and homogenous dwellings, arranged by the dead hand and impoverished vision of developers around copses and closes and views and pightles and glebes and other meaningless harking back to bygone days; tacked on to the irregular diversity that comes with organic growth over centuries. But if the village lives, it is a price worth paying.
A second good passage
Today there is a handful of second – and third-generation Chelsfield Parkers left. But the survivors are elderly, and the old community of interest and the spirit it fostered have withered away. The families that have moved in come from all over the economically advanced world, and the one thing they have in common is wealth. Their children go to private schools, and when at home they generally retreat inside their high walls and CCTV-monitored security gates to pursue their private, sealed-off lives.
A third good passage
The strength of demand is irrelevant to any debate about whether or not this is the best model for mass housebuilding. So too are the opinions of the volume builders. They have devised this model because it suits them. It requires nothing from them in terms of decent design or sympathy for place or setting. They do not have to employ architects; all they need is a bank of design blueprints to dip into. The scale of the operation makes huge savings possible through bulk buying of materials and labour. With profits for the ten biggest builders up by a third to £2.4 billion in 2015 they are not likely to look kindly upon any challenge to their way of doing business.