6.1 Bampton Morris Dancing, Bampton, Oxfordshire, 1977. © Homer Sykes.
In a lecture called When was Modernism? Raymond Williams asserted that:
We must search out and counterpose an alternative tradition taken from the neglected works left in the wide margin of the century, a tradition which may address itself not to this by now exploitable because quite inhuman rewriting of the past, but for all our sakes, to a modern future in which community may be imagined again (Williams 1987: p. 52).
In this address he demonstrates how the modernist tradition in literature and art is a product of an ideological construction that privileges narratives of isolation, alienation and the anonymous relocation to urban centres, as central to what constitutes prevailing notions of the modern. He calls for a re-evaluation of this tradition and as such, a rethinking of modernity itself. For Williams, this alternative way of thinking modernity will start with an exploration of the ‘wide margins of the century’. In these margins lie traditions, practices, and artefacts of visual and written culture and that have been consigned to limbo: ‘a condition of neglect or oblivion to which persons or things are consigned when regarded as outworn, useless, or absurd’ (Oxford English Dictionary). It is within these wide margins, this area of limbo, that this book has been situated, in an exploration of the marginal terrain of the non-metropolitan.
The main concern of this study has been to challenge the way we think about the rural. My intention has been to move from the passive aesthetic register of the landscape, towards a re-imagining of the countryside as an active, inhabited and practised realm. The preceding chapters have been diverse in their subject matter, each one taking as its theme a knot, a troublesome spot that prevents a smooth rendering of a countryside situated in a pre-modern past, instead forcing a re-evaluation of the rural as a complicated and at times uncomfortable site of modernity.
Central to my thinking has been a desire to complicate the distinction between the city and the country, acknowledging not only their inter-related nature, but also the multiple degrees of what might be considered ‘country’. In part, this smudging of the two terms has been achieved through the use of the word non-metropolitan. This anti-definition works to designate manifold locations, but perhaps most usefully those places which, although far from urban, find it difficult to identify as rural. This difficulty in identification is not because these places are not situated in rural locations, it is because they are very likely to also possess features associated with the urban, such as motorways, litter, power stations and large new housing developments. These factors make the term rural an uncomfortable fit, given the connotations of the isolated picturesque that this term engenders. This book moves towards redefining the rural as a multiple terrain, a definition which rather than seeing motorways etc. as urban incursions, acknowledges that they are a significant part of what constitutes an understanding of the modern rural. The designation of non-metropolitan contributes to the vocabulary that can be used to think about the rural opening up new geographical and theoretical terrain. It works to defamiliarise the habitual sense of the rural and provides a space for thinking about places that themselves evade attempts at convenient definition.
Working within the realm of the repeated practices and performances that constitute the everyday has enabled me to, in effect, repopulate the rural as an arena for theoretical and visual analysis, enriching the field of everyday life studies by providing a much needed non-metropolitan alternative to the more frequently travelled routes which centre on (western) urban experience. In Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (2002a), Ben Highmore identifies necessary new directions for everyday life studies, stating that ‘a focus on everyday life would insist on the uneven experiences of modernity on an international and intranational scale for instance, the different everydays of rural and urban communities’ (Highmore 2002a: p. 177). I hope that this study contributes towards an intranational perspective, by shifting the focus towards the English rural and the non-metropolitan sphere as a realm with its own spaces, practices and aesthetics of everyday life, shaped by uneven and at times anxious engagements with modernity.
Key to this changed perspective has been to recast the rural as an active site of modernity, as an alternative to engaging with a narrative of the rural as a victim of forms of modernity imposed from elsewhere. Developing a conception of the non-metropolitan as having its own agency within the narrative of modernity has revealed different ways of telling this story. In exploring the wide margin of the non-metropolitan, different ideas around what constitutes modernity and what constitutes the everyday, different images and different practices become important. One of the important areas of difference that has become apparent through this marginal perspective has been the recurring tension between the ancient and the modern.
The photograph at the beginning of this chapter is one of the images Homer Sykes made to document the Morris-dancing which takes place in Bampton, Oxfordshire each Spring Bank Holiday. Morris-dancing is not specific to Oxfordshire, it is a familiar practice in many rural places.1 Sykes chose to document the Bampton dancers because of the long history of Morris in the village. The Morris men flapping their handkerchiefs, their legs garlanded with flowers, are redolent of the sort of generic, nostalgic, summer-time, countryside which has been mass produced and marketed as a national image in so many ways that it is almost difficult to take it seriously as anything other than an expression of the clichéd national picturesque, like cricket on the green or the white cliffs of Dover. However, this image should not simply be dismissed as belonging to the raft of cultural production that re-inscribes the rural as ‘of the past’. Sykes’ commentary which accompanies each image in his archive of calendar customs Once a Year (1977) reminds us that Morris-dancing is not simply an invention of the tourist industry or Sunday night television, used as a short hand way of signalling the benign continuity of the countryside. Instead he shows it to be a practice dating back well over 600 years, which has been subject to a number of dynamic changes reflecting the wider socio-political changes of a society in thrall to modernity. First recorded in the time of Henry VII, it achieved great popularity under Henry VIII when it became a staple component of many seasonal festivals. In the seventeenth century it was prohibited along with the celebration of religious feasts by the Puritans. Gradually it once again became popular but lacked its initial vigour and meaning. During the industrial revolution and the associated depopulation of the countryside it went into decline in and some rural areas never really recovered but in Bampton the tradition has persisted with particular vitality, its form going through several incarnations as successive generations redefine its purpose and territory.
Aside from Sykes’ commentary the image itself also accesses something of the complexity of the rural, visually registering the everyday negotiations of the ancient and modern. Describing Sykes’ festival images Val Williams writes that the dancers are:
caught at a moment between an old way of life and a new … Sykes’ Morris Men are cheerful youths, their hair long and bushy, [they] seem aware of the absurdity of their activity, half way between modernity and antiquity (Williams and Bright 2007: p. 17).
There may be an inference here that this feeling of suspension between the old and new is specific to this period in time – that the late seventies in particular, is a point in which a transition between an old and new Britain was taking place. However, as this thesis demonstrates this condition has been a constant characteristic of non-metropolitan experience, evidenced in the tensions played out between development and preservation in Nairn’s Subtopia, and the Shell County Guides detailed Chapter 2; in the anxieties generated by changing occupancies of the countryside in Chapter 3; in relation to the different timescales in evidence in the WI scrapbooks in Chapter 4, as well as in the festive practices explored in Chapter 5.
Williams’ remarks have the dancers occupying a suspended region halfway between two times, two ways of being, antiquity and modernity, whereas the image has them literally suspended, caught with their feet off the ground – they hover. While their dance has them momentarily suspended in the air, the photograph has them in a more permanent fix, suspended forever. Their costume is old, Morris-dancing is old, Bampton is old, yet it is impossible to mistake this image as coming from any other time than the 1970s. Under the traditional hat the men’s hair is abundant in the style of the times, the car in the background is undeniably of that decade, the fact of the car itself places this image within the last century, and the fact of the photograph places the image within the last 150 years. What is happening here is a temporal collage, different points in time are being simultaneously overlaid. The timescale of the 1970s, the present day when this photograph was taken pulls in one direction, while the antiquity of the traditional costumes and movements pull in another, while the dancers perform along this tightrope. Adding to this multilayering of time is that this photograph itself is now an artefact, a piece of the past, archaic in its own way as images from a previous era always are.
This temporal collage, the simultaneity of the ancient and the modern, as this study has shown is important in thinking about how the non-metropolitan everyday is experienced. The grace of the dancers silently suspended above the ground belies the tension and anxiety that lived experience and negotiation of such temporal simultaneity engenders. The moment of suspension captured in this image is a moment that happens again and again in the non-metropolitan arena, in some ways it is taken for granted – inscribed into the daily, in others this tension results in extreme behaviour and rhetoric, as evidenced for example in the CPRE’s image of modernity as a creeping menace in the form of a giant octopus (Williams-Ellis 1928).
By examining the practices of driving, littering, creating scrapbooks and the celebration of festivals through the lens of the visual, this study has brought to light a set of rural aesthetics which are intrinsically related to, but quite different from the habitual image of a lightly and attractively populated landscape. Chapter 2 reveals an unexpected aesthetic of speed in the countryside. Andrew Cross’ film 3 hours from here (2004), takes the form of a somnambulist’s gaze at the modern rural, whisked through time and space as the passive passenger in a northward bound HGV, there are plenty of rolling green hills here, but in this vision they are motorway embankments. Similarly Country Life magazine, with its juxtaposition of adverts for fast cars and pieces on the preservation of ancient windmills, together with montage aesthetics of The Shell Guides, work to speed up and fragment experience of the countryside.
The link between landscape and ownership has been made by many commentators (Rose 1993; Daniels 1994; Wolff 1993) most famously perhaps around the image of Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, in which the portrait genre merged with the landscape to create an image of a man and his possessions: his wife and his land.
In Chapter 3, this traditional aesthetic of ownership was explored in an unusual direction through an examination the visual aspects of littering in the countryside. In the drawings made by the litter trail observers an obsession with the recording of detail can be seen, registering the anxiety inherent in their suspicions of a potential invasion of their landscape by enemy forces. The posters produced by the Keep Britain Tidy Campaign also register this anxiety around changes in who inhabits the countryside, by tying the rural to the country as a whole through their use of nationalist symbols of Britannia and the lion. Whereas Stephen Willat’s photographic and film work Dangerous Pathway (1999) contributes to this visual narrative of ownership, by mapping littering practices as potentially resistive activity which enacts a form of ownership working as a contrary system to that of the economic ownership of the farmer or the stewardship of the concerned litter picker.
Scrapbooks are personal archives with their own aesthetic. The WI scrapbooks examined in Chapter 4 traverse the territory between the private and the public archive. Created communally, the scrapbooks both document and are physically constructed from their creator’s daily lives. These visual artefacts represent specific personal experiences of the non-metropolitan everyday in the 1960s home and village, but also, importantly they are pieces of a national collage which together builds a multi-vocal rurality. This patchwork of the daily is replete with the contrasts that characterise the unevenness of modernity so evocative of the non-metropolitan experience.
The embroidered collage from the front cover of the Binsted scrapbook, showing elements representing the village’s agricultural production intertwined in a design with an electricity pylon is a striking example of how such contrasts become integrated into the visual and conceptual image of the a modern rural.
Folk art and calendar customs are perhaps as clichéd a rural aesthetic as landscape, and are often written about as practices situated in the familiar non-specific past of the rural. Chapter 5 examined contemporary folk art practices, through the lens of archiving and performance. The photographic archival projects of Anna Fox, Homer Sykes and Tony Ray-Jones reveal an aesthetic of strangeness of the non-metropolitan everyday but one that is shot through with a knowing performativity. The villagers portrayed in Fox’s images grit their teeth through their badly made masks and costumes, acknowledging their role in the grim performance of the village and their own connections to the past. Jeremy Deller and Allan Kane’s Folk Archive disrupted the idea of folk art as situated in the past or the countryside. Their photographs of contemporary folk practices together with the current re-enactments of older traditions reveal a slap-dash vibrancy and lazy exuberance. Dubious practices, like drawing in the dirt on the back of white vans might be skilfully undertaken, while re-iterations of traditional practices are often executed with a rushed enthusiasm rather than the traditionally valorised amateur expertise.
One element that draws these varied non-metropolitan aesthetics together is a concern with collage. And it is this visual similarity that has significantly contributed to this conceptualisation of the non-metropolitan everyday and specifically its dissonant relationship with modernity. Lucy Lippard’s notion of collage in its broadest sense as ‘the juxtaposition of unlike realities to create a new reality’ (Lippard [1981] 1996: p. 16) (discussed in Chapter 4) is enacted in the contrasting edges of things which seem to butt up against or sometimes overlay each other in non-metropolitan space. It is at these junctures where an A road scythes the edge of a burial mound, or a stiletto moulders under a tree, or a pylon is embroidered in silver thread, where the jolt of the edge is felt and a new conception of what constitutes the rural can begin to be explored.
The areas of investigation on which this book has focused were chosen because they represent stumbling points which productively problematise the idea of the rural space as being outside the processes of modernity. These moments have opened out a field in which the different rhythms and routines of the non-metropolitan everyday and by extension different experiences of modernity invite further exploration. To build on the work carried out by this thesis it would be valuable to examine how visual cultures can complicate two of the more persistent narratives associated with the rural: that it is identified with or situated in the past, and that it is a stable place founded on continuity as opposed to the transience of the city.
The first of these: that the countryside belongs to the past, I think, could be explored by looking at forms of economic engagement with the land, specifically the practices of agriculture and coal mining. There is a mirroring effect of the two industries, farming is wholly identified with the rural and it is often necessary to remind ourselves that it is actually an industry which has often been at the forefront of developments in mechanical, biological and chemical technologies. Whereas mining is so often associated with heavy industry that it is easy to forget the rural locations of many of the pits and the rural nature of the communities they supported. These two areas of production have at various times in the past century been major employers in rural areas, shaping community’s economic and social structures. During the twentieth century both of these industries were subject to immense changes effecting their position as employers: the mass closure of pits in the 1980s and the development of new technologies together with intensive farming methods leading to a radical decrease in the need for agricultural labour. This rapid decline in everyday visibility, if not economic power, means that in many ways they exist now most powerfully in the realm of memory.
Two examples of visual culture which could act as interesting points of analysis for exploring the theme of memory in relation to mining and agriculture are Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave (2001) and Peter Hall’s film of Ronald Blythe’s book Akenfield (2005 [1969]). Neither source provides an easy rendering of the rural as situated in a comfortable past, instead they question the ways in which the past might be re-inscribed into the present. Deller’s film documents a re-enactment staged by the artist of the violent clashes between police and striking miners that took place in the South Yorkshire village of Orgreave in 1984. While Akenfield tells the parallel stories of multiple generations of agricultural workers in a Suffolk village, based on the memories of the villagers as told to the author Ronald Blythe.
Both sources extend the notion of connection with the past through re-enactment and performance building on the exploration of these themes carried out in Chapter 4 of this study. Deller’s re-enactment was staged by police officers and miners who had taken part in the original event, supported by amateur battle re-enacters, while the characters in the film Akenfield were played by people living in the village in which it was set. This aspect of physical re-enactment of the non-metropolitan past indicates that there is fertile ground to be investigated around forms of memory played out through bodily engagement. At the beginning of this book I referred to the tradition of beating the bounds, in which, legend has it, boys had their heads hit against boundary stones in order that they should remember the village’s borders. Surely there is a visual resonance to be found between physical violence and the operation of memory in the clashes between the police and miners in Deller’s film (Figure 6.2). In a similar way to Syke’s Morris dancer, these scenes seem to invigorate the non-metropolitan realm as place that is not situated in the past, but maintains a dynamic engagement with it.
6.2 Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment of the Battle of Orgreave. Filmed for Channel 4, directed by Mike Figgis and produced by Artangel, 2001. © Martin Jenkinson www.pressphotos.co.uk
The second of the persistent narratives: that the countryside is a stable place founded on continuity as opposed to the transience of the city, could be examined through works such as Jordan Baseman’s I hate Boston and Boston hates me (2006), and Witch Hunt (2009) by Delaine Le Bas (Plate 11). Baseman’s film was originally made for Beacon, however it was withdrawn by the artist after the local and national press condemned it as a ‘race-hate video’ (Norfolk 2006).2 It centres on an interview with a female migrant agricultural worker from Portugal, one of the estimated 5,000 Portuguese residents of Boston, who come to the town to work as fruit and vegetable pickers and packers. The woman recounts instances of racial abuse suffered by her daughter and talks about the difficulties of making friends and fitting in in Boston. Her voice is combined with a visual of the flat Lincolnshire landscape; in the distance stand the severe verticals of pylons, in the foreground a flag pole flying the cross of St. George. The winds from the East, from the North Sea and mainland Europe blow the flag outwards causing its emblem – the word ENGLAND, to be read backwards.
This work forefronts the changes in population that have often characterised the non-metropolitan realm, from depopulation during the industrial revolution to the influx of middle class second home owners of more recent times. It reveals the other side of often lauded notion of community, that of insularity and ignorance. Representations of the rural often trade heavily on a denial of change and an instance of the rural as a point of continuity. So it is perhaps inevitable that any evidence of instability is suppressed in this carefully built up rural construction, with any signs of the mutability of such long established conceits greeted with anxiety, anger and hatred. I hate Boston and Boston hates me, builds on the anxieties enacted in Chapter 3 of this thesis regarding the perceived invasions of outsiders, here the fears were sublimated in concerns over litter, however this piece shows how such tensions can force extreme behaviours. While addressing the insularity of community it also demonstrates the embroilment of the non-metropolitan in global currents that facilitate and rely upon the large scale movement of goods, money and people, at the same time showing how these meta-rhythms are played out in everyday experience.
The idea of transience and hostility as a counterpoint to continuity and community are also explored in the work of Delaine Le Bas, which is inspired by her experiences as part of the British Roma community. Her work is particularly interesting because the idea of gypsies can often be part of a romanticised notion of the countryside, a paradoxical concept that embodies a static view of the rural past through a transient community. Often utilising personalised and traditional folk art aesthetics, Le Bas’ installations reveal the overt and covert violence that marks the relationship between travelling families and the more permanent countryside residents. Interestingly her work also accesses the restriction and isolation felt by women in Roma communities, adding a multilayered critique of very specific non-metropolitan experience.
In thinking about modes of artistic engagement with the non-metropolitan a significant area for future inquiry are the cultural ventures that work to reinvigorate the rural, not simply as the subject of artworks but also as a site of artistic production. In England one of the most interesting in their critical and reflexive approach to working rurally is Grizedale Arts situated in Grizedale Forest in the Lake District. Grizedale has a long history as a venue for artists’ residencies starting in the 1970s with land art inspired sculptures being made in response to the location and situated within the forest in an informal sculpture trail. In 1999 under the new directorship of Adam Sutherland, it became apparent that something more than the straightforward interpretation of the rural context offered by this environmental/land art approach, i.e. ‘nature = wild = good’ (Griffin 2009: p. 21) needed to evolve in order to acknowledge the rural as a space of complexity. Sutherland built up relationships with contemporary artists who were also interested in working within and more often than not disrupting unwritten codes which surround how we think of and inhabit the countryside. For Grizedale the past ten years have been characterised by difficulty, but productive difficulty. Changing the way the organisation operated and opening up the rural as a site for contemporary artistic engagement has resulted in some challenging questions:
Is there an intrinsic value of culture? Can artists be of use in a rural community? What does it mean to engage with a community? Do artists really want to puncture their cultural enclave and why should communities care if they do or not? (Hudson 2010).
Some challenging art works were created some of which became indistinguishable from the everyday practices and social structures of the village of Satterthwaite in which Grizedale resides, with artists organising car boot sales and taking part in the village’s party to celebrate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Of course it has also engendered some challenging reactions, notably the village collectively voting to burn down a billboard, erected by Grizedale Arts, along with the image it was displaying.
What is remarkable about Grizedale is that these knotty problems define the organisation’s practice, they are honest about the complexities of the rural environment and with that open eyed honesty, create dynamic engagements.
We adopted an ideology that saw the rural context as complex, contrary, inspiring, relevant to the wider world and potentially useful – a contributor. This may sound simplistic, but the evidence was all around us; the rural idyll was there to perform a role for an urban notion of rural life, fantasy of what life could be like (Sutherland 2009: p. 41).
With tongue in cheek they identify themselves as being of the cultural margins ‘and there is no shortage of them in the UK’ Sutherland notes (Griffin 2009: p. 133). Finally then we return to the margins, where this study has remained rooted throughout, there is so much to explore in this rich non-metropolitan terrain. Grizedale’s ambition to see the rural with new eyes, as both a complex site and a cultural contributor, would seem to exemplify the aims of this book and point the way towards new ways of rethinking the rural.
1 It also has connections with urban areas, for example there is a strong Morris-dancing tradition in Blackheath in London, which dates back to times when Blackheath was a rural village. Cities also host Morris and folk dancing festivals where various groups come together and dance in competition with each other.
2 Beacon is a site specific exhibition that has taken place at various locations around Lincolnshire on an annual basis since 2004, see Plowman (2006).
