RURAL THE LIVES OF THE WORKING CLASS COUNTRYSIDE
REBECCA SMITH
William Collins, 256pp, £18.99
Rebecca Smith spent her early childhood in a tied cottage on the Cumbrian estate where her father worked as a forester; now that cottage is an expensive holiday let. In Rural, she examines the social upheavals that have changed the British landscape and those who work in it over the last half century. As Mathew Lyons, praising a ‘thoughtful’ study in the Literary Review puts it, she asks big questions of modern rural life: ‘Who is the countryside for? What do we mean when we talk about ownership of land? Who gets to decide what is best for the land and those whose livings are tied up in it? For whose benefit is the landscape worked?’
The big question: who is the countryside for?
In the , Richard Benson, another writer with
