Yesterday, not really knowing where to begin with my research and desperately needing to leave my house, I headed off to the Tate Britain. Although not completely useful it at least set me on the right track. I have worked out that I am more interested in the PERCEPTIONS that we have about the countryside, the way its inhabitants DEFINE and PROJECT their identity, and what forms this takes.
I read an interesting piece courtesy the Museum of English Rural Life which attempts to tell the story of the 20th Century countryside through artefacts. [Ref. Onkar Kular- whose exhibition I Cling to Virtue blew my mind at the V&A last week] Rather than going down the usual plough wheels and farm machinery route however, they've chosen to exhibit some icons of the countryside that have transcended rural into mainstream culture. Examples are: 
The barbour jacket, "something that began as required wear for your average hunt follower, is now to be found being sported by Lily Allen and the like."
The Land Rover: "which first appeared in 1948 as a general purpose farming vehicle but which subsequently managed to mutate into a fashionable vehicle of choice for the metropolitan elite."
...and the Aga, "which emanated from Sweden and was brought to this country in the 1920s. By the 1950s it had become indelibly associated with the farmhouse kitchen and from thence it became not only a style icon but a potent class symbol of the second half of the twentieth century."
I liked this statement best: "If the right Landrover or the right Aga come along with the right story, we’ll collect them." ...so I'll be making the trip down to this collection in Reading quite soon I think.
As well as this, my flatmate studies media, and happened to have a book entitled British Culture, which contains an essay entitled Rurality and English Culture by Alun Howkins. Convenient eh? From this essay, I've drawn out several of his key observations about how the British relate to ideals of rural life:
- The perception that rural life is in decline has rallied communities around a 'stirring and practically based image of threatened belonging'.
- Images of pastoral beauty have been ingrained in our national sense of identity chiefly by war propaganda. Posters and official war songs including 'There'll Always be England' and 'Bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover', and the deliberate icon of the war memorial on the village green were used to rally England under a collective National ideology.
- Rural Britain is at the heart of an idealised vision of 'real' England. The countryside has certain aesthetic specifications: Rolling hills interspersed with woodland, hedgerows lining fields. "even more importantly its ideal social structure is village with its green, pub and church clustered together. Ideal architecture stone or half-timbered topped with thatch."
- "Aesthetics, ruralistic impulse and urban decline created our image of the 'real' England: “...even before the first World War, this ideal landscape had ceased to be an exact geographical location and had become instead a set of features by which rural beauty was defined. The bringing together, before the Great War, of an elite view of urban and rural decline, a ruralist impulse, and an aesthetic of the southern created an ideal of the countryside which, all too often and too easily become 'real' England.”
So the set of criteria for which we base our vision of the countryside- the 'heart of true England' is fabricated upon a set of upper-class aesthetics and lifestyle ideologies. I like the idea that there is a formula of British Countryside.
If the image of the real Britain is false, then is a community's collective identity just imagined too?