[This is an excerpt of an original manuscript of a book review published by Taylor & Francis in Cultural and Social History. The full review is available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2024.2357418].
New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain, edited by Linda M. Ross, Katrina Navickas, Ben Anderson, and Matthew Kelly, Oxford, Oxford University Press and the British Academy, 2023, 320pp., £83.00 (hardback), ISBN 9780197267455
This new collection is “about the compact between government, state, and citizen in rural life and rural landscapes in the middle decades of the 20th century” (1). A rebalancing of modernity, which has tended to be more strongly associated with the urban; the collection takes as its subjects the power stations, quarries, national parks, farms, etc., and people that were essential rural elements of modernity’s conception. The production of a conference held around the reference point of Nan Fairbrother’s New Lives, New Landscapes (1970), the collection offers a critical reassessment of the rural modernity that Fairbrother sought to capture in situ.
[...] the chapters within the collection are all well-rounded and stimulating responses to the material and conceptual challenges posed by histories of rural modernity. The book will be of value to those historians of Britain concerned with the middle decades of the last century and those interested to learn how productions of modernity became intertwined, during that time, with the places and peoples of rural Britain.
Comments