VILLAGES ARE dying. They are thriving. How can both statements be true? Here is an answer from one South Lincolnshire village in the harvest time of 2009.

The shops, the post office, the bakery, the school are long gone. Our village pub, supposedly the hub of the community according to some romantics, closed last year. It is most unlikely to see beer pulled again. The village day begins with a procession of vehicles on the commute to work in Bourne or London and other towns, of course. Is there nothing left?

As a parish clerk, I am, naturally, bombarded with guff. A lot of it is fully signed up to the idea of desperate rural problems, which are supposedly symbolised by these vanished village services. Our regional development bodies and rural affairs forums peddle nonsense concepts such as “rural centred development” and raise the straw man of the “sustainable” or self-contained village of two generations ago. Nobody at village level pays lip service to these ideas any more. They go straight in the bin. The concepts seem to persist purely and only in the heads of officialdom.

The truth is that village life has never been more complete. From the painful years of decline – and the bitterness that went with it – people are flocking to the village out of choice. The place is becoming a delightful outdoor retirement home for oldies and a drawbridge for overanxious parents too. And what about the born and bred villagers? A handful exist, if the truth be told. We look up to them, but they are so few. Residents, both new and long established, enjoy a pretty much non-stop calendar of village events that goes on throughout the year and a bewildering array of voluntary groups to support them and make them happen. Over fifties, Templars Dining Club, village cinema club, sales of work, summer fetes, open gardens, live concerts, travelling players, coffee mornings - you name it. We had the 1960s legend Julie Felix do a live gig in the church just two weeks ago. She got a standing ovation. Everyone is accounted for. If you want to shut the door on the world completely (as some people do), you’d be better off in a city centre flat or an anonymous suburb.

Everyone, that is, except the young adult. They are the real losers in the new village game. They want out, but have no way of getting back in again. Affordable housing? There isn’t any. It’s just a slogan. They don’t mean to provide any. They are not serious. Which is just as well, because there would probably be a NIMBY outbreak if they did make a start in this direction, so smug and middle class have some villagers become. So, am I saying that things are rose-tinted sweet? I am not. Rather, the real problems we face, the casualisation of work and the impossibility of getting housed are the same problems you might face in Hackney or Moss Side, not that the professional countryside advocates would ever have the courage or the decency to put it in quite that way.

Make no mistake, these are the finest hours of village life, not just in one generation, but compared with the wretched years after the Napoleonic wars or the permanent rural depression brought about by the advent of refrigerated ships which lasted (with brief interludes of prosperous carnage) from the collapse of Victorian high farming to the post-Second Word War era, when we kept villages on a never ending drip drip of subsidy. And quite right too. Not that we need the subsidies any more, but still they come. We live in buildings knocked together from small damp homes where large families lived many-to-a-bedroom and we choose to forget it. The very thought is outside our comfort zone, as the saying goes. Or more likely, us village residents live in newer houses built on the cottage vegetable plots, allotments and orchards of the dead generations. And we choose to forget that too.

We forget because it suits us to forget. We live in a golden age of village life compared with anything that has gone before or anything that our grandchildren will suffer. Open the glossy pages of Country Life, the house journal of rural plutocrats. There it is, in the edition dated July 29th 2009, our village has come second nationally in the Country Life village competition. Yippee! Well done. And take that you snots from the Cotswolds. South Lincolnshire is the new Chipping Camden. Only we are newer and keener and hungrier than you.

So there is a part of the answer. There is a huge loyalty to the village. You belong. You may live a life that looks well beyond the boundaries of old. The internet and the CallConnect bus bring the world to the village far more effectively than the Primitive Methodist Circuit and the Red Lion that went before us. We have crime, but less of it. But are we typical? Some larger villages may have knots of disaffected youth or possibly environmental problems of which we know nothing. But the nay-sayers ignore the evidence. Be honest. Where would you sooner live, if all else were equal (which it never is, of course)? If you are over 50 and getting a bit fussy about noise and disturbance; if you like the wide world, but not all the time; if you value the joys of the natural world and thank goodness that we only get the tame bits of it, then you will answer: the village; the South Lincolnshire village every time.

Brynley Heaven

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Brynley Heaven lives at Aslackby, near Bourne, where he serves as a parish councillor. He is also parish clerk for Folkingham and edits the Sleaford and district Civic Trust newsletter and in past times, he has chaired local authority planning and housing committees as an elected councillor in London. He writes regularly on issues of interest in this part of South Lincolnshire with a particular concern for land management, planning, left wing movements and neglected topics.