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The Lost Village

Llamas but no locals

Richard Askwith
Ebury Press, 356pp, £18.99,

P.J. Kavanagh

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

P.J. Kavanagh reviews two books which deal with English community

So our Questor comes home and decides he likes his fellow-incomers. He looks across the landscape:

I became aware of something curious. I could sense my village’s soul more vividly here than among its cottages … This mud, this vivid spattering of blood-red hawthorn berries. An unexpected realisation warmed my blood, like a parent’s hand on a young shoulder. This is my village after all.

It is a gentle book, a search for something no longer there, as perhaps it never had been. Real England makes the same sort of journey but is very different. Richard Askwith investigates the decay of ‘community’, Paul Kingsnorth investigates its deliberate destruction. He is a campaigner, against uniformity, against the crushing of what is individual in the interests of profit. He is not strident, he is fair. He always gives the other side of the case, when it is possible to find it; nevertheless he makes you want to hold your hands over your ears.

Take as an example something called ‘Rosewheel’, which has bought up a part of Chinatown at the back of Shaftesbury Avenue in London.

Its website is being ‘currently updated’. I check with Companies House, but Rosewheel has no telephone, fax or email. It was incorporated in 2003, just before it bought the 200-year lease on this building. It appears to have no other projects, no previous history. Its accounts are overdue.

The fear, he is told, is that it will be turned into a vast ‘Chinese shopping centre’ with its own security staff, and only ‘consumers’ will be allowed to enter. Present residents claim that it will include public thoroughfares, which will be shut. Can that be true? It is the kind of enclosure that drove John Clare mad 200 years ago.

The worst example of this worship of the ‘bottom line’, this erasure of individuality, this centralised hatred of difference and variety, is one that happens to affect most of us, the existence of pub-chains. The brewers even outwitted Mrs Thatcher:

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