I have been in discussion with a Chinese colleague about
attitudes to cities, suburbs and villages in our two countries. We have talked about Sheffield and Shanghai,
London and Beijing, the shikumen of
Chinese cities and working class housing in the industrial north of England, villages
in the Peak District and in the Chinese provinces. We have talked about the role of the elite,
both in culture and in economic structures.
We have contrasted the more organic development of urbanisation and the
economy in England with the discontinuities of Chinese history – not just the
1949 transformation, the Cultural Revolution, and the development of capitalism
under Deng Xiaoping but also the earlier historic shocks to the system with the
replacement of one dynasty by another.
This has led me to consider what might be seen as archetypal
English cities, suburbs, villages or towns.
I obviously acknowledge that there are significant differences between
England’s various regions, dependent in part on local economic foundations and
activities. But I have alighted on one
particular small town that I would put forward as an exemplar of what such a
settlement in England is today – at its best.
So my example is not necessarily ‘typical’: it is more like an
‘ideal-type’ as developed by the sociologist Max Weber. But this is a real town, so I will briefly
describe it as it is, rather than for what it represents.
I was in Ledbury earlier this month, repeating visits that I
make several times a year. Many people,
told which county it is in, mistakenly hear Hertfordshire in place of the
correct Herefordshire: one letter of difference goes with over 100 miles of
separation and a shift from the suburban Home Counties around London to the
rural fringe of England as one approaches Wales. Ledbury actually has a direct train service
to London – around 5 (rather slow) trains each way a day along a very beautiful
line through Malvern, Worcester, Evesham, the Cotswolds, and Oxford. But it is not a place that features strongly
in most people’s mental maps of England, nor on their satnavs (the M50 passes a
few miles to the south).
The town had just under 10,000 inhabitants at the time of
the 2011 census, having grown rather rapidly in the previous couple of decades
to fill in the space up to the bypass built in the 1990s. There seems to me now a danger that it will
grow across the road that currently circumscribes the town. A recent threat of the construction of an
out-of-town supermarket has been thwarted by local activists. One distinctive feature of Ledbury, resulting
from the compactness of the town, is that every able-bodied resident can walk
to the main shopping street in less than 15 minutes.
So what is it about Ledbury that makes it such an exemplar
of an English small town? Clearly a lot
of its employment lies in servicing the surrounding area – with shops,
agricultural suppliers, pubs and restaurants.
But there is also a variety of small-scale industrial employment in
light engineering, various manufactured products, and in agricultural
processing (a jam factory, and a few miles down the road, a cider works). November 2016 data show that the unemployment
rate in Ledbury (as in Herefordshire as a whole) is well below the national average. But some of the local activities have
resulted in recent immigration – particularly from Lithuania and Poland for
work related to agriculture. In my view
this has actually brought some welcome diversity to what was until recently a
very white English town. Walk through
the Market Place and up the Homend (its continuation) on a Saturday morning and
one will now hear various Eastern European languages, and find products more
commonly seen in Vilnius, Warsaw or Wroclaw for sale at a market stall.
Which brings us to the variety of shops in the town – a
choice of butchers and greengrocers, two bookshops, a cider shop (perhaps
inevitable here), more than one ironmongers, a gunsmith. And a number of market stalls under the
medieval market hall on a Saturday.
Tesco’s is there but tucked away near the station at the northern end of
the town. And for those prepared to go
from shop to shop everything sold in the supermarket is also available in the town
centre. Mention of the butchers needs
supplementing with a comment on the range of meat in a window a couple of weeks
ago – including venison, pheasant, partridge and rabbit as well as the more
everyday cuts of lamb, beef, pork and chicken.
Although not so well known, Ledbury rightly attracts its
share of tourists – both as day visitors and to stay. They probably help support the two bookshops,
and they certainly frequent the design and craft shops in the town. And the cafés in the cobbled Church Lane (a
path that often appears as a calendar illustration), as well as the Feathers
Hotel (a magnificent half-timbered Elizabethan structure) must depend on
visitors for a significant proportion of their trade – although when I occasionally
eat in the Feathers I find that there are numbers of local residents dining
there as well.
And there are educational and cultural attractions to the
town. The poet John Masefield was born
here, as was Elizabeth Barrett Browning – and hence the town has created an
annual poetry festival. The secondary school is also named after Masefield.
This may all sound as if I am trying to ‘sell’ Ledbury. But I am not being employed by any public
relations consultant for that purpose.
Whilst Ledbury today seems to me an excellent place to live and to
visit, there are clearly risks for the future of the town as a balanced organic
whole – as also for similar places throughout England.
That balance of economic activities could shift, in
particular away from what is still a strong local agricultural base and towards
the increased importance of tourism. Any
future restriction, post-Brexit, on the recruitment of Eastern European labour,
could weaken the more intensive aspects of the agricultural sector –
particularly given the fact that there isn’t a local pool of unemployment to be
mopped up. And while tourism and visitor
activities today complement locally-orientated service demand, were tourism to
grow too rapidly it could lead to the supplanting of shops serving everyday
needs. That could also result from
successful planning applications to construct more town-edge retail facilities
(particularly supermarkets). Further
urban growth beyond the by-pass could encourage more car use which the town
centre could not cope with.
The British planning system does not give any agency strong
enough powers to guard against these various eventualities. Some of these forces lie with private sector
interests, others with the weak responsibilities of the local council. That is a contrast with China. When I have asked my Chinese colleague about
why various things are happening in small towns and villages across China her
answer is always the same – “the government is making it happen.”
Will Ledbury still be a place that I would recommend in ten
years time to foreign scholars or visitors as an archetypal English small
town? I don’t know, but I hope so.
