Britain's rural reaches as places of "profound inequality"

Rebecca Smith, author of Rural:  The Lives of the Working Class Countryside (Harper Collins 2023), published an essay/excerpt in the New York Times this weekend titled "The English Countryside is a Place of Profound Inequality."  Graythwaite is an English manor in Cumbria, in the Lake District, where Smith grew up in a cottage that Here's the gist of it: 

[F]or the landless who work and belong to the British countryside but do not own a piece of it, it’s a place of profound inequality. Damp, cold and underresourced but beautiful.

When I was growing up on Graythwaite, it was still possible to live, work and raise a family in some of the most beautiful parts of England on a working-class wage. That’s less true now. Rural Britain, long a scenic playground for the rich, is in danger of becoming only that, for tourists, second-homers and wealthy retirees.

Hawkshead, about five miles from Graythwaite, is one of the prettiest villages in the Lake District. It used to have two banks, a police station, four pubs, cafes and businesses.

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These days, there are still lots of cafes, but now the police station is apartments, one bank is a gallery, and the other one is a ticket office for a Beatrix Potter attraction. Many of the village homes are vacation rentals or second homes, empty for most of the year, pushing the prices higher for the few homes that do go up for sale. There were always bus trippers, but the streams of tourists at this time of year, its busiest, make it feel a bit like a rural Disneyland.

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In some of the villages around where I grew up, as many as 80 percent of the houses are second homes, according to housing advocates.

Over and over again, people who grew up or made a life there have been forced to make way for others. (In Dinorwig, a former slate-mining town in Wales that is popular with visitors, a schoolteacher told The Guardian that her family was evicted by a landlady who admitted that she could make four times as much by renting their home to tourists.) These visitors spend money in the local shops, but they don’t put children in the school. They don’t become part of the church congregation. A way of life slowly suffocates.

In part, Smith's British story is one of rural gentrification like we're seeing throughout the United States of late.  

Richard Benson's review of Rural in The Guardian last month includes this passage about her book: 

Its strength is Smith’s sharp eye for new examples of urban money breaking up the relationships between local people and their landscapes. Corporations who offset their pollution by planting thousands of trees in inappropriate locations where the saplings will die off anyway; absentee landlords who shorten tenancy agreements so farmers can’t plan long-term improvements of the land; the gentry sacking estate workers and hawking their heritage to the leisure industry. For the roughly 20% of Britons who live in rural areas, such trends debilitate in the same way that gentrification does in cities.