Vibrant Communities

Even in Canary Wharf wealthy bankers hang evocative paintings of the countryside without realising how life is being sucked out of small rural communities.  As a family we once cycled through that part of Lincolnshire where a string of spring-line settlements mark the junction of the well-drained limestone soils with the rich peaty loams.  Each of these ancient settlements – Dunston, Sopwick, Ashby de la Launde and Digby – has its church and market square.  These have been home to generations of farmers from at least the time of the Danish Invasion.  I was shocked to find that what had once been proud and cohesive communities had most obviously had the stuffing knocked out of them by the success of agro-business.  Many of the farmyards had been turned into self-storage units; the church yards were (after a thousand years) ill cared for; a village store had been turned into a video store, and a village hall into a furniture store.  A large paper sign read “Save our Schools.”

All that was more than fifteen years ago.  It’s got worse.  According to the National Housing Federation 62 small village schools were closed between 2004 and 2008, with a further 200 estimated to close in the next five years.

It is ironic that while ever more upwardly mobile families pine to live in villages so that their children can attend such small schools (two miles from my office one of the most popular primary schools is in the village of Swainswick with just 62 pupils), these are the very people who, with the ample cash resources from the sale of their London homes, have priced the locals out of the property market.  In far too many instances English villages are mothballed for ten months of the year in preparation for transitory summer visitors.  Others have become semi-cheap dormitories within a car ride of a town.  Village shops, petrol stations, pubs and churches are closing in record numbers and “if schools close, community in many rural areas (areas which provided the space and challenge to yesterday’s Huckleberry Finns) would be wiped out,” reported the Housing Federation.

Who is to blame?  It’s not us, a spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said disclaiming any responsibility (01/09/09) for, “rural schools are central to the village life of communities, which is why we had made it a statutory requirement for Councils to presume that rural schools should stay open.”  Which sounds fine but, given nobody’s overall responsibility for the maintenance of strong communities, it is often that same Department that forces the closure of small schools strictly on financial criteria.

Small is indeed beautiful, but that is only the beginning of why small is important.  Learning to survive in small, highly-interdependent communities, is the best possible education for ultimately living in much larger communities – it is rather like a stack of Russian dolls, each nesting in the one above.  Calling his 1960’s critique of modern life “Small is Beautiful,” Fritz Schumacher gave it its explosive subtitle; “economics as if people mattered.”  That is why vibrant rural communities are essential to our national life – they are where children grow strong.

See Actions 3 and 4 of the Briefing Paper

This article is tagged: Community, small is beautiful, villages.