The Death of Rural England

"The Death of Rural England is a much more recent book. It is written by Alun Howkins, a historian who has officially retired, but is still actively writing. Its subtitle, The Social History of the Countryside Since 1900, again gives away what the book is about. The book summarises all the 20th-century changes that we’ve been talking about. If The Making of the English Landscape looks at the countryside from the beginning of human history in England, what The Death of Rural England is doing is looking at the changes to the countryside that we are familiar with. His title, The Death of Rural England , implicitly poses the question that I alluded to before, of whether a rural society remains as something different from urban society any more. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter As a historian, I don’t do prophecy. As someone who just happens to live in the countryside, what I think is happening is a polarisation between the countryside of production (agri-business) and the countryside which people live in and use for leisure. But rural England has a long tradition of surprising us: that’s why predicting what’s going to happen is a mug’s game that I’m not going to play."