The Census of April 1881 revealed an England which was a firmly urban and industrial nation. Although the number of 'urban' dwellers had exceeded the rural for the first time thirty years earlier it was not until the 1870s and 1880s that the population was firmly urban and living in large and mostly 'modern' towns. We do not know in any detail what the Census of April 2011 will reveal but what is certain is the England remains an urban, although no longer an industrial nation. However the proportion of the population living in rural areas is now greater than at any time since 1911. These simple facts chart the great demographic changes in England in the last 150 years. However, as many observers have noted, the English imagination has never lost its enthusiasm for the rural. This lecture will look at that enthusiasm not as one simple unchanging set of ideas but as a complex web of the popular and the elite; the political right and left and the culturally the progressive and the reactionary. By bringing some of these aspects into relationship with one another the lecture will explore the continuing fascination with the rural as a central part of the popular ideas of the past.

This is the 2011 Joint Royal Historical Society/Gresham College Annual Lecture.

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