Reviewed by Liz Dexter
The countryside belongs to everyone. (Michael Morpurgo, Foreword)
This interesting volume by the renowned and doughty nature and countryside publisher Little Toller Books brings together essays, memoir and poetry by a diverse range of authors, looking at the futures of rural life and access in England. It represents both a celebration of the centenary of the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) and a call to action for farmers, visitors, landowners and ecologists.
The contributors include Mary-Ann Ochota, Tim Dee, Isabelle Tree, Amy-Jane Beer, Guy Shrubsole, Richard Mabey, Fiona Reynolds, David Matless, Rebecca Smith, Caro Giles, Zaffar Kunial, Sean Borodale, Corinne Fowler, JC Niala, Sophie Gregory, Vicky Spratt, Elizabeth Wainwright, Sarah Eberle, Amina Khan, Maria Benjamin, Louisa Adjoa Parker, Jade Cuttle, Helen Mort, Nicola Chester, Karen Lloyd and Natasha Carthew, with an Introduction by Roger Matlock, CEO of the CPRE, and a Foreword by Michael Morpurgo. Some of the writers were well-known to me, others new, but all had something interesting and useful to say.
Morpurgo celebrates both the CPRE and Farms For City Children, an organisation which places urban children into rural landscapes for a week to teach them about where food is grown and what it’s like to be in the countryside, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and talks about his life in his own village with its decline and change, never quite giving up. Then Roger Matlock writes about his involvement with the CPRE and the crossroads we find ourselves at in terms of how land is used in a time of housing crisis and food insecurity but praises the writers for their innovation and optimism. Then we move on to the individual pieces.
The first main essay, Mary-Ann Ochota’s “Flapjacks Permitted” talks about the people who have come before her in Yorkshire, creating patterns on the rocks, and how terminology matters: as a “child of first and second generations immigrants form Eastern Europe and India,” the people living there 4,000 years ago are not “Our Ancestors” to her, but then actually they’re only the ancestors of a tiny proportion of British people, either, thanks to waves of immigration and geographically distant ancestry (Bronze Age people from near the Black Sea, Romans from all over their Empire, etc.). She moved to “Ancients” which gives more of a sense of belonging to the current “incumbents”, not “descendants”, something to ponder. Later, Corinne Fowler reiterates the theme in her full-length books, that “The countryside’s future cannot be considered without understanding its global past”, adding in the effects of the money made through colonialism and slave-owning brought being back to enclose land and build estates throughout the countryside, and gives a useful brief overview of this process.
Louisa Adjoa Parker writes passionately about access to the countryside being limited for people from global majority communities, those living in poverty and those disabled by a society that doesn’t accommodate them. She calls movingly for a future society where we use the incredible technologies we’ve developed for good, where we look back at old ways of living sensitively with the land and where everyone is welcome and belongs: “Is this too much to imagine?” she asks. Meanwhile, Amina Khan in “Pick Your Own” uses amazingly detailed nature terminology while referencing the Qur’an and its teachings, including the non-idyllic sides as well as the idyllic: “Nature is both beauty and terror, tender and fearsome, and deserving of respect and care in all these states”.
James Shorten takes a scientific viewpoint in “The Closed Countryside”, looking at how competing land uses can be “stacked”: trees grown to sequester carbon can be used in construction; renewable energy can share spaces with agriculture. Moreover, Maria Benjamin in “The Art of Farming” exhorts the reader to recognise farms as creative ecosystems and use imagination as well as policy in shaping rural futures. We also find women-only detectorists celebrating the soil, guardians of water quality to have to officially trespass to carry out their activities, an inclusive housing development in a village that circles gardens with disabled-accessible homes, and rights to land access twinned with community gardening and forestry initiatives.
I’ve only given a snapshot here of this lively, provocative and interesting book from this publisher who always comes up with the goods: I recommend having a look.
Liz Dexter grew up in a village in Kent and retains an interest in rural matters even though now living in Midlands suburbia. She blogs about reading, running and working from home at https://www.librofulltime.wordpress.com.
Adrian Cooper (ed.), Future Rural: Imagining Tomorrow’s Countryside (Little Toller Books, 2026) 978-1915068576, 218 pp., hardback.
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