So you’ve had enough of the smog, the pneumatic drills, the helicopters, the sirens, and you want to scurry away for a weekend in the countryside. You’ve never been there before, and you’ve no idea what it’s like, but you recently heard someone mention the Lake District. So you do what any moderately resourceful person would do: you have a quick look on the internet, you go into a library and ask an assistant what books are available, you look at a few maps and guides, and two weeks later you end up in Ambleside. A glorious amphitheatre of crags and mountains surrounds this Lakeland town, the buildings are quaint, and if you step out into the hills you’re sure to be impressed by the views. Although the chances are you’ll come back enchanted, exhilarated and revived, you may equally have slipped on a cowpat, fallen into a ravine and been drenched in a thunderstorm. It is, to be fair, not everyone’s idea of a holiday.
Yet while it remains your prerogative to not want to venture outside the suburbs of our cities, providers are being punished for choices made in the supply pool. Until residents of the countryside can do a better job of attracting target minorities from the cities – for members of victim groups to have to find out about the holiday destination themselves is, we’re told, almost proof of a kind of institutional discrimination – it will be assumed they are bigots. We were alerted to this earlier in the year when the Lake District National Park decided to scrap its voluntary rangers (their remit: to guide interested people around the Lakes) because the majority of visitors were middle-aged middle-class white people and they were failing to draw members of ethnic minority communities. Perhaps the fallacy is obvious: ethnic minorities might not be choosing to go and take up the voluntary service.
Now, however, the Countryside Agency, has found that ethnic minorities and disabled people and city dwellers do want to go to the countryside but can’t be sure if it is a ‘welcoming’ place. I’m sceptical of how desperate the respondents in the survey were to go to the countryside, but it’s nevertheless worth examining the assumptions involved in the notion of ‘welcoming’.
There is, undoubtedly, a long history of mutual suspicion between town and country, but whenever I’ve been into the Cotswolds or the Lakes or anywhere else, I’ve always thought the locals pleasant enough. There are those who love them, who idealise the cud chewing farmers and ruddy Constablesque haywains. In my experience, some say a jovial hello as you pass them on a footpath, some look suspiciously at you and grunt as you go into their shops, and others start firing at you as you cross their land; but personally I don’t see why it matters if they’re nice or not. Must you be ‘accepted’ or 'celebrated' by everyone everywhere you go?
What about ethnic diversity, though; surely it’s significant that the composition of the population in the countryside is overwhelmingly white? Well, quite apart from the fact that this misses the point (why should skin colour matter unless you’re willing to accept the obverse, that for a Welsh farmer travelling into London, Lewisham would be a pretty unattractive prospect?), the distribution of ethnic groups in Britain results from historical agglomerations. Pakistanis, Indians and Afro-Caribbeans have tended to settle in cities like London, Birmingham, Leeds and Newcastle. This is not the fault of the rural (by no means dominantly middle-class) whites; it does, however, go some way towards exposing the pettiness of criticising countryside tourist brochures that don’t show a sufficient number of ethnically diverse people on the front cover. I mean, what are they supposed to do – sham it up by putting a Somali on a tractor in Devon just to make the point?
There is, however, a concession to be made. You do have to accept that the topography is fundamentally disablist (this useful term was recently coined by Demos to explain how everything in our society – and now we can add nature too – is set against disabled people). It doesn’t take long to come to this conclusion: there are no handrails in the Pennines, no brail signs on the Pembrokeshire coastal path, no wheelchair ramps on Ben Nevis, and bird song evidently discriminates against deaf people, which means that rambling and ornithology, to mention but two countryside pursuits, should be banned. And imagine being out on the moors as an obese one-legged ninety-five year-old single parent lesbian with chronic agoraphobia?
Excuse my sarcasm, but there is a dire need for some common sense thinking. What would diversity festivals in Snowdonia, gay pride marches through the East Anglian fells, single mothers’ day in the Cairngorms, or banners on the top of mountains saying Scafell welcomes paraplegics actually achieve? What would be the point? When you’re strolling through the Yorkshire Dales, what matters more, the beauty of the scene or a sign telling you you’re welcome? Sheep would probably crap it on anyway.
The Countryside Agency, a government quango, spent £360,000 on this report. Fortunately, both Labour and Conservative MP’s have objected to the waste of taxpayers’ money by a public body. But nothing will change until someone deletes it from the pantheon of rubbish bodies that exists in this country to come up with rubbish and pointless research.
Comments (2)
The scheme to encourage minorities to go to the countryside looks ludicrous until one realises its true purpose, which is to employ people to run the scheme.
Posted by simoncv | July 14, 2005 7:25 PM
Posted on July 14, 2005 19:25
The biggest problem for city dwellers in the countryside is the lack of indoors. Until they cover the lack district with a great big roof, we will not be able to attract city dwellers to the countryside.
Posted by EU-Serf | July 13, 2005 6:49 PM
Posted on July 13, 2005 18:49