Vanishing England
How do we define ourselves in time and space? A new book England In Particular suggests it is the commonplace, the local and the distinctive that tells us where we are. Pat Thomas reviews
Look around you. Local distinctiveness is everywhere. Buildings, plants, food and landscapes are the elements that give a place character, that give people a sense of place and make us happy to return home from work or from our travels abroad. Local distinctiveness is essentially about places and our relationship with them. It is as much about the commonplace as the rare; the everyday as the endangered, and the ordinary as the spectacular.
The charity Common Ground has been exploring and developing the concept and the result is the group’s Campaign for Local Distinctiveness and a joyful book, England in Particular, which brings to life those distinctive local characteristics that together make England so English. Although it is a celebration of England, similar volumes could easily be written about anywhere else in the world.
Every place is its own living museum, dynamic and filled with tributes to its own uniqueness. As uniformity and monoculture threaten to engulf us all, it’s worth asking some questions: How has it happened that we can stand in many high streets, factories, fields or forests and feel we could be anywhere? Why does MacDonald’s force upon our high streets an idea born in corporate strategy meetings thousands of miles away? Why are we planting the same trees everywhere? Why does the pursuit of standards now result in standardisation? Such questions inevitably trigger other questions: Why are only mountains ‘beautiful’ landscapes, and big and old buildings worthy of care and attention? Things need not be conventionally rare, picturesque or spectacular to be special. There is value and local meaning to be found in trees, beach huts, natterjack toads and village greens. God, as they say, is in the details.
Fingerposts
Before 1964, when the Worboys Committee demanded their replacement by standardised signs, fingerposts varied considerably from place to place. This particularity lingers here and there. The oldest may offer quarters and eighths as well as whole miles left to travel. West Yorkshire, Dorset and north Berkshire have some fingerposts with grid references; the Ministry of Transport commissioned them in 1930 as an experiment.
Wartime saw a general removal of all signs to confuse the enemy (and the visitor – a rural sport still practised, together with the realigning of swivelling metal signs). Somerset has retained about twelve hundred cast-iron fingerposts, usually round white posts with a pyramid-shaped finial bearing ‘SCC’ on its four faces.
Forty-two different sorts of road sign were counted in Devon in 1988, which included six kinds of finial — pyramid, ring-shaped, pear-shaped, onionshaped, acorn and crown. Lively representations of hands, some with the attitude of the ‘ferocious flying glove’ (a character coined by The Beatles), point the way in some places. Even as they become more rare, the Department of Transport has commented that ‘the wide variety of surviving regional and local designs helps to reinforce local distinctiveness, maintaining a sense of continuity in a rapidly changing environment’.
Exmoor ponies
Exmoor, an exposed area of wild, high moorland on the border of Devon and Somerset, faces the winds of the Atlantic, which bring penetrating rain, snow and cold as well as hot, sunny days. In this rugged environment the Exmoor pony persists as one of the world’s most ancient breeds, somehow surviving man’s predations and interferences. The ponies are small, with double-thickness coats that keep out the cold and wet. They are consistent in colour and marking – shades of brown with darker points and characteristic pale muzzle and eye surrounds. They are round, with extensive and efficient digestive systems carried on strong legs and feet that work well in wet and rocky conditions.
They do not simply excite us as ‘wild’ creatures, they are, in some sense, the place itself. Full of stamina and strength, their lives were intertwined with those who made their living on the moor. They have been used for shepherding, driving, riding, agriculture and postal delivery. But their future lies in finding new roles. For instance by conserving grassland habitat, such as the Sussex Downs and Askham Bog in Yorkshire. Exmoors are very good at eating the tough herbage – tor grass, thistles, invasive scrub – that crowds out delicate wildflowers. There is a positive symmetry in one highly endangered creature building its own survival on the saving of others.
Beach Huts
Along parts of the coast, rag-tag gatherings of railway carriages, boats that have ‘dunsailin’, fishing huts and shacks link the land and the sea. Yorkshire, Cornwall, Essex and Devon all have their beach-hut fraternities. Ranks of beach huts tend to be municipally owned and standardised, always in demand for hire by the season or the day. Where privately owned, rigidity of plot size and restrictive bylaws have not stifled the imagination. The variety and richness of decks and shutters, gable ends and roof lines, stilts and varnish make for seaside splendour even in winter. The sadness is that these days they have become real estate. ‘Werere’ or ‘Lazy Days’ may change hands for £140,000, even where the threat of rising sea levels is almost palpable and insecurity is only a storm away.
Hedges
‘If we never win a Test match again, we shall still have the world’s finest hedges!’, Edmund Blunden exclaimed in 1935. ‘Their white and red may, their bramble-roses, their wild-apple bloom, their honeysuckles, their traveller’s joy, have been the spring of the year to most of us more inseparably than any other aspect of the season.’ Sad to say, since 1950, more than half of our hedgerows have been ripped out – condemned as old-fashioned relics that shaded crops, sheltered vermin, wasted space and got in the way of farm machinery. For years the government paid farmers to bulldoze them out of existence. At last, in 1997, the Hedgerows Regulations made it illegal to remove most countryside hedgerows without planning permission. But hedges continue to be lost through neglect, and bad management.
Dew ponds
The earth’s eyes, these fine, saucer-shaped ponds were built on the tops of chalk hills, in defiance of local hydrology. With great skill and ingenuity, land famed for its drainage was made to hold water. There is an art to making dew ponds. As late as the 1930s, small teams of professional men would still travel distances to mend and re-line, or dig new dew ponds above the spring lines on chalk and limestone uplands, where sheep and cattle needed water.
