With Carlsberg closing down its British cask ale breweries and the sturdy, smelly black labrador yielding to the effete and fragrant cockapoo, there may be some truth in the recent inflammatory suggestion that a warm pint with a pet in a village pub is the deranged delusion of entitled Tory scum looking back yearningly to a Golden Age.
Just in time with a bracing corrective comes Simon Jenkins, our most trenchant spokesman for heritage. His latest subject is the village. But this is not a history of vernacular architecture in the manner of Ronald Brunskill, nor a learned study of building materials, because here Alec Clifton-Taylor cannot be surpassed. Instead, Jenkins gives us a macro-history of land use and communities, whose range is boggling or impressive depending on your appetite for the Big View. We travel at pace from Skara Brae, a neolithic settlement on Orkney, perhaps the oldest in Europe, to the King’s whimsical Poundbury, a favourite of Jenkins’s – despite what I would call hamfisted detailing, ignorant pastiche and a complete lack of soul. And we go from pescary rights in the Middle Ages to Clarkson’s Farm.
In between, there is a small diversion to Bicester Village, a hideous designer outlet mall in rural Oxfordshire, which is in truth probably quite close to the contemporary concept of what a village should be. More so than, say, nearby Nuneham Courtenay, where Oliver Goldsmith wrote his epic moan ‘The Deserted Village’. Ill fares the land and so on.
Jenkins’s impressive intellect and fluent prose do not always save him from dogma (there is surely some residual Welsh preacher in his DNA), but this is a thoughtful, convincing and well-argued book, nearer to a polemic or manifesto than a formal history. Born in Cadbury’s model village of Bournville, he has bragging rights about life in ideal communities.
I think it is fair to say that Jenkins truly hates the modern world and sees the traditional village as a way to redress our national hellscape as represented by the Barbican. We read a lot about ‘well-knit’ communities, rather ignoring the fact that many people choose to live in cities because the urban world avoids the necessity of being knitted with anyone. In cities you can be alone. Villages can be claustrophobic. I love the fact that Thomas Hardy and Enid Blyton both lived for a time in suburban Surbiton, close to London.
Nostalgia rather than sodomy may be the authentic English vice. But Jenkins moves beyond sentimentality to make his larger case for the idea of the village. He is fierce about the merits of decentralisation and to my mind the best line in a book that has many is: ‘I have always found it odd that my democratic rights were limited to casting a single vote at intermittent elections for a distant authority.’
Let’s agree that many villages are no longer what they were. Few are enjoying Betjeman’s crumpets at teatime and instead of meeting a lusty artisan in a leather smock so winningly valorised by George Sturt in The Wheelwright’s Shop, you are more likely to find a bungalow with a white Transit in the driveway, a fibrox connection to global porn and Deliveroo dropping off lukewarm chicken tikka masala.
When he was chairman of the National Trust, Jenkins encouraged some haut vulgarisation. Enjoyment of fine buildings was not enough; they needed cosplay by volunteers in mob caps too. This theme-park mentality has led to village life imitating art big time. Bibury, with the fatal gift of beauty, is overrun by Instagram-crazed Chinese tourists who treat it as an uninhabited museum. Everywhere, village economies are pooped. Our own cottage in a tiny Welsh village is a delight for us frazzled urbanites to visit, but misery for those who have to live there and mate in a shallow gene pool. In Suffolk, the reality of Ronald Blythe’s oneiric Akenfield is that its blackcurrants are sent to Suntory in Gloucestershire to be processed into sickly Ribena.
We have a real planning crisis today. The old industrial cities struggle for relevance, while country life is not weavers’ cottages or cruck-framed barns, nor even churches, pubs and pets, but data centres and logistics hubs. However, might that offer fertile ground for social and architectural experiments in new, exhilarating ways of living and, c’mon, let’s leave the past behind? I think so.
There have been precedents for Jenkins’s arguments. Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin’s Art of Building a Home and Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities being obvious examples. But Jenkins’s absolutely correct concern about ‘place’ is very dans le vent: see also Melissa Harrison’s recent The Given World where we read about ‘a field harrowed by fine tilth’. I told you, nostalgia is a vice.
This being a Jenkins book, there is the usual low blow against the despised and rejected Le Corbusier. I suspect the author may not have seen Corb’s beautiful buildings in La Chaux de Fonds or Neuilly-sur-Seine, which are village houses of superlative style and design. Nor does he seem to know that the architect’s ideal home was a primitive rustic cabin.
But enough. The idea of the village has a future: small, self-governing communities housed in beautiful buildings and powered by Rolls-Royce’s small modular nuclear reactors. Why ever not? Like Pascal’s Wager about the existence of Heaven, it might not be true, but what’s the harm in believing? Remember the last line of The Great Gatsby? ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ Sir Simon has both oars in the water.
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