David Grandorge: The country way of life

This photo was taken on Dunwich Heath, Suffolk, in 2009. It depicts a mud bank at the edge of a ditch, with reeds beyond and mixed woodland on the horizon. Between these last two layers, obscured by the mist and the light coming into the lens, there is lowland heath covered with heather and gorse.

This lowland heath is a rare habitat, one of the last of its kind on the Suffolk Coast, most of which has been developed for agriculture or been built upon. The National Trust has been the custodian of this protected landscape since 1968. Its purchase was funded by a donation from Heinz, a company that makes processed food.

There are many of these protected and very beautiful landscapes in the UK. Some are quite ordinary, enjoyably banal, and some spectacular, but they are all inevitably pleasurable to inhabit or observe. This sensation of pleasure is probably different for the country-dweller who inhabits this world more frequently and is familiar with the landscape’s flora and fauna and its annual cycles, and for the city-dweller who might think of it as a zone of escape, a retreat to an imagined wilderness.

The country way of life is generally slower, less hectic than that of the city. Country-dwellers are probably more connected to the ‘natural’ world than their city equivalent. Yet, despite their closer proximity to sources of food, they will still most likely travel by car to buy it in a supermarket.

Life in the countryside has always been challenging. It has become more so for some – the seasonal worker from Romania working long hours picking food with little reward, the farmer employing her or him who is concerned about the effects of Brexit and Covid on their ability to recruit other seasonal workers from Romania and, more pressingly, the effects of the ‘new weather’ on their crops. The rising cost of fuel and fertilisers has made farming yet more difficult.

James Lovelock argued in his book The Revenge of Gaia that farming ‘abrades the living tissues of (the earth’s) skin’. Since the 1950s the UK countryside and that of every country in the northern hemisphere and most in the southern hemisphere have been subjected to wholesale industrialisation. The artist Patrick Caulfield described the resulting landscape quality as ‘just like the First World War – all mud and barbed wire’.

At present, 70 per cent of land in the UK is used for arable and dairy farming, most of it in a very intensive manner. Those who govern us have big choices to make about how we use this land in the future. They will have to determine a strategy that addresses growing food without further harming the soil’s health (how much of this can be achieved through organic farming, permaculture or pixel-planting methods?), more considerate animal husbandry, the retention and extension of deciduous woodland, the planting of evergreen trees for building lumber, the retention of wetland, heath and bog and the leaving of some land to become more wild.

 It should lead to a new country way of life.

David Grandorge is a photographer and senior lecturer in architecture at London Met. His fee for this column has been donated to support the publication of new and diverse voices in the AJ