The most prominent scourge of the second-homer is the Liberal Democrat MP
Matthew Taylor. He has been asked by Prime Minister Gordon Brown to conduct
an inquiry into the subject. One of his recommendations is expected to be
that the Government should have powers to oppose the purchase of a house by
outsiders who do not intend to make it their main residence. Taylor concedes
that multiple ownership is not the only problem – mere retirement purchases
by wealthy professionals are part of the picture too – but that in certain
areas including the Lake District and the Yorkshire national parks it is
contributing heavily to the growth of the deserted village. In and around
his own Cornish constituency of Truro and St Austell, he says, some villages
are “dark” for most of the year, with less than half of their homes
occupied. It has not happened overnight. In February 2005 he told the
Commons that in the previous five years second-home ownership in his county
had gone up by 40 per cent; some villages on the Lizard pensinsula were down
to 20 per cent occupancy for much of the time. He cited the case of
Manaccan, where there was a massive disparity between the census figures (25
per cent) and those of the parish council (80 per cent).
Yet the owners of second homes in the UK number no more than 350,000, which is
just one per cent of the total housing stock. An organisation formed last
year, called the Second Home Owners Club, argues that they are being
scapegoated for a set of circumstances not of their making. How can they be
held responsible for pushing villages beyond the reach of the local populace
when the number of transactions involving SHOs is such a tiny proportion?
What’s more, claims the club’s founder, Graham Green of Lichfield in
Staffordshire (he has a two-bedroom cottage in North Devon), he and others
like him help to put £1.5 billion into the local economies by spending on
improvements to the properties, using local tradesmen and eating in local
restaurants.
It seems logical to ask whether our yearning for a life in the countryside is
not just because of some imagined loss of innocence, but the response of a
nation forced too hastily into the towns by the industrial revolution and
its present technological successor. And there is no one better to ask than
Ronald Blythe, whose own life spanned most of a century that saw the
countryside move from obsessive postwar productivity and subsidy through the
grain mountains of Europe to set aside and the current climate of
management. Blythe is 85 and is to be found today in the same fold of
Suffolk landscape he has inhabited for the past 30 years. He lives alone in
the secluded house that the painter John Nash had before him.
Yes, he says, there probably has been some kind of collective trauma, with our
species, homo anglicanus, unable to keep pace with the changes. “And yet,
you know, our ancestors hardly knew the names of the flowers and the birds.
Everyone assumes that they were familiar with them and that it is we who
have grown ignorant, but it is rather more the other way round. We’ve got
all this information because of our excellent books and programmes on
natural history. Many of the people who come here buy a little bit of land
and look after it most lovingly. Farmers are becoming conservationists,
putting back hedges and cleaning out ditches that haven’t been touched for
years.”
Just over the county border in Norfolk, in the picking seasons of the past
seven or eight years there have been massive labour migrations from Europe
and beyond. At these times, there are as many as 2,000 Portuguese living in
Thetford, 5,000 Chinese in King’s Lynn. They may not come out to the
villages, yet they inevitably affect village life by putting pressure on the
rental market in the towns close by.
“In a strange way,” says Blythe, “it’s all a development from Saxon times. You
had the Romans here for 400 years, which was an enormous period really. Then
the North Europeans arrived. Human beings are so restless, so resourceful.
They always have been, and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
“Look at the Poles. Peterborough has a great number of them. It’s not like
they are refugees, but brilliant young people moving to where they can make
a living and send money back home. Many of the people living around here are
the descendents of migrants who came down here from Scotland to farm. There
was a sort of £10 train, the equivalent of the £10 fares to Australia, and
they put everything on it, the machinery, the horses, everything. They were
the saving of us here, they were excellent farmers. My old neighbour here,
who died aged 100, he came down on a £10 train.”
The room in which we are speaking is 400 years old. Less than a century ago
there would have been a dozen people coming and going – five labourers, a
couple of servants, the farmer, his wife, their children and animals. It was
a farmhouse, standing in 70 acres on the edge of the village, Wormingford.
Today, of the population of 400, just six work on the land.
“It’s a spiritual thing, certainly,” says Blythe of the appetite for village
life. “It seems like a moral, untainted place to live, somewhere you can
find happiness. It’s odd, isn’t it, because that is so far removed
from the reality of how it was, with people often leading lives of grinding
misery, and physically trapped by an unforgiving community, much like George
Crabbe and Thomas Hardy described it.”
Just as the international power of the City has driven up the top end of
village prices, so the defaulting of poor mortgage risks at the foot of the
US economy will at least temporarily put a brake on the rise. It is, indeed,
a global matter. Here, on the sought-after ground of England, the next wave
of trouble will break not only on the villages themselves but on the bits of
countryside that remain between them. By 2020 there will be three million
more homes, some on the brown sites of existing towns, some on the edges of
smaller communities, and some in brand new villages of their own. This
demand for new building comes partly from the increase in the population and
the length of time we live, but mostly from the breaking up of families and
the exercising of our right to live alone. That’s where we are – passionate
about villages but not wanting other people around. Very English in fact.
And very Utopian. The trouble is that the world’s not getting any bigger,
and it’s all joined up.
Lympstone, Devon
Population: 1,700
