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New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain

Online ISBN:
9780191997457
Print ISBN:
9780197267455
Publisher:
British Academy
Book

New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain

Linda M Ross (ed.),
Linda M Ross
(ed.)
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Katrina Navickas (ed.),
Katrina Navickas
(ed.)
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Matthew Kelly (ed.),
Matthew Kelly
(ed.)
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
25 May 2023
Online ISBN:
9780191997457
Print ISBN:
9780197267455
Publisher:
British Academy

Abstract

This book is about the compact between government, state and citizen in rural life and rural landscapes in the middle decades of the twentieth century. A new rights-based political agenda, intensified by the Second World War, radically transformed the British public’s expectations of government, rendering it responsible for delivering a wide range of public goods and services. A dirigiste state nationalised industries and imposed planning regimes in order to deliver clean water and electricity, radio and television, housing and transport, and spaces for leisure to Britain’s entire population. Such changes are usually associated with urban modernity, but, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, these expectations equally applied to the same rural places in which the new infrastructure would be situated. Every time someone plugged in an electrical appliance, ran a bath in their indoor bathroom, or travelled to work on a train or in a car along a new motorway, they made use of national networks largely constructed in the countryside. Reservoirs, power stations, television and radio-transmitter masts, electricity and telephone pylons, as well as local authority housing and new or improved roads, had a transformative effect on rural landscapes. So did state-subsidised agricultural intensification, wider public access to the countryside, and environmentally protective measures, including landscape designations such as National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Sites of Special Scientific Interests. The accumulative effect of these new landscapes was a distinct, but little understood, rural modernity.

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