One day there won’t be anyone to deliver the mail any more, and then what will the City types do? I heard this prediction more than 20 years ago when I worked behind the bar at one of the pubs here in my rural town. At the time I considered it melodramatic, but now it seems like straight prophecy.
Quite out of sight of central London — and other metropolises — the English countryside is suffering from a terrible immigration problem. These migrants don’t arrive on the back of lorries or in overcrowded boats, but in removal pantechnicons and SUVs, carrying laptops and trailing children.
Unable to afford the space they need for their second or third child in the inner suburbs of their overpriced cities, frightened/brick-rich metropolitans are migrating to the countryside to gazump their way into the housing market.
In our town, 30 miles from the capital, the average house price is 13 times the average national wage. Wherever there’s a pleasant place and housing within spitting distance of a metropolis, locals are being pushed out.
This is not gentrification, but rather social cleansing on a grand scale, and it won’t end well. As that pub-goer foretold all those years ago, able, qualified and dedicated job-holders are being displaced. Ten years ago it was bin men and classroom assistants pushed to the periphery of Home Counties life; now it’s teachers, nurses, physiotherapists. Anyone on an average wage is increasingly unable to afford to live within a reasonable commuting distance of their workplace, meaning our suburban utopias will soon become dystopias of understaffed services.
However, the greater loss is something less material: community. Community is about shared lives, informed by diversity, in age, aptitudes, attitudes, ideology, background. It is about ‘locus’, local people taking part.
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