With its shops dying, a Sussex village is campaigning to return traffic to its centre. Is this the answer to rural revival? Alasdair Palmer reports
WHERE there's muck there's brass. And where there's noise, pollution and traffic, there's money. "You want to know the best thing for any village or small town?" says Professor Malcolm Grant, of Cambridge University, who specialises in town and country planning. "Have Nissan decide to build a big new car factory right next to it."
That, of course, is the last thing people now moving into small villages want to see. Rich people - and they are mostly rich, at least compared to long-time village residents - who purchase a holiday home, a place to retire, or a rural retreat from the pressure of work in the city, are not after noise and pollution. They are buying calm and tranquillity.
"For them," says Prof Grant, "the country is a refuge from work and the pressures of making a living. Its attractions are almost entirely aesthetic. They have nothing to do with economics."
But to the people for whom the village has always been home, the peace which the new residents seek and which they will do everything they can to preserve, usually means only one thing: poverty. A quiet village, by-passed by traffic, is usually a dead one.
The new residents, who may be there only in the evenings or at weekends, do not shop locally. They want their villages to be as free as possible from the noise, pollution and danger posed by cars and trucks. They don't use their own cars in the village. They use them to zip to out-of-town shopping centres and superstores.
That explains the paradox of a village such as Southwater in Sussex (see below): it has grown from 900 people to more than 7,000 in the last 20 years - and yet, economically, the village is dying. The shops, which ought to be booming from the influx of new residents, are going broke.
The conflict between Southwater's long-time residents and its new inhabitants is being replayed in villages all over Britain. Over the last 10 years, about 300 people a day have moved from town to country. That trend is not going to let up - if anything, it will probably increase. The country is being colonised by people who earn their livings, and spend their money, in cities. The effect on people who depend on the village for their livelihood has not been good.
"Rows over traffic-calming measures, or over a by-pass, are essentially symptoms of a fundamental problem," says Prof Grant. "It is that the two groups have basically incompatible goals."
Gregor Hutchins, who works for the Council for the Protection of Rural England, agrees: "If you keep a village in the kind of quiet, pristine state that commuters seeking refuge would like, you cut off any chance for anyone to make a living there. We have to try to persuade people to use local shops. Gorgeous views in tranquil surroundings are wonderful. But you can't make money out of silence, any more than you can eat the view."
You also cannot live in it - unless you can afford a house. Rich people who commute or buy holiday homes push up the price of housing, often beyond the reach of everyone else.
"It can be almost impossible for young families to find places to live in the villages in which they were born and raised," says Jeremy Leggett of Sussex Rural Community Council. "The only way we know of doing it is through housing associations, which then tie the properties up in covenants that ensure they cannot be sold to outsiders. We've just overseen the building of six homes in Coldwaltham, near Pulborough, on that basis."
That is one example of a successful project, albeit on a small scale. Many others fail because the richer residents want to preserve their view, not to have it interrupted or blocked by low-cost housing.
Such cases illustrate the conflict between the rural population and the urban incomers in its sharpest form: the purchasing power of the new migrants is driving out the existing villagers. Hard-headed economists see that as simply the result of economic change and the operation of the free market, like the elimination of blacksmiths.
"But it would be terrible," says Graham Kirkham of the pressure group Rural Action, "if English villages were turned into a sort of extended theme park for rich people, with no real life of their own." Terrible or not, that may be the future. There is no prospect of a jobs bonanza taking place in small villages. Work, the essential means to prosperity, is going to remain concentrated in urban areas.
Prof Grant is not convinced that the transformation of villages into bedroom or retirement communities is necessarily bad. There have been comparable upheavals in the past, the biggest of which being the switch from people living and working on the land to living in cities.
"The fact is that now, many villages have no economic function at all," he says. "They are a monument to a bygone age." Professor Grant believes that the only way to revive villages is to revive their economic role. "But you can't shut down the out-of-town supermarkets. People wanted them when they were built, and they want them and use them today. They are here to stay."
Paradoxically, the one thing that may help villages to revive is the tool that has helped to kill them off: the car. The projections for the next 20 years suggest that the amount of traffic will triple, and may even increase four-fold. Many roads will become permanently clogged, with non-stop traffic jams everywhere, even on the by-passes.
Nipping to the out-of-town shopping centre will no longer be quick or convenient. The easy option will be the old one: walking out to the local village shop.
