Category: Interpreting Rurality

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/countryside/9125653/Feudal-row-over-cottage-holiday-homes.html

This article in the Telegraph raises some interesting questions about the ownership of rural communities.  The three cottages in this Derbyshire village are “owned” in a legal sense by the Duke of Devonshire, but the community have come together to oppose plans to turn them into luxury cottages, arguing that for generations they have been homes for local estate workers.  Once the leases expire, the freehold owner has every right to use the buildings as he wishes, subject to planning permission, and could let the cottages to anyone he sees fit.  If these were not being turned into holiday cottages, the likelihood of a rural worker being able to afford an open market rent, or worse a purchase price, is negligable. In opposing the planning permission and raising a petition against the Estate, local people are effectively asking the landowner to give up income to which he is entitled in order to preserve “their” community as they see it.

The interesting issue here is that there is big difference in the monetary values placed on the cottages. For local workers, the value of the cottages is determined by their income and the convenience of living on the estate but for tourists or rural in-migrants, their higher incomes combined with their perceptions of an idyllic place to visit or live confers a much higher value on the buildings.  As the freehold owner, the Estate can sell or lease to the highest bidder but the outcome is that people from outside of this rural community, drawn to it by picture-postcard imagery, are dictating the changing dynamics of that community.  One wonders whether this rural idyll will be so idyllic if the community is divided and rural workers are displaced by decisions of this nature?