Jumping Up from the Armchair: Beyond the Idyll in Counterurbanisation

Abstract

The rural features centrally within the wide spectrum of experiences that comprise the attempts to ‘escape to the good life’ that are signalled by lifestyle migration (Benson and O’Reilly 2009). More specifically, though, this is a rural framed theoretically as a social construction, informed strongly by social science’s late twentieth century ‘cultural turn’ (Nayak and Jeffrey 2011) and its foregrounding of the role of the socio-cultural realm within everyday life. This perspective — the chapter cautiously labels it a paradigm,¹ such has been its influence within rural studies from the late 1980s — has sought to articulate ‘the fascinating world of social, cultural and moral values which have become associated with rurality, rural spaces and rural life’ (Cloke 2006: 21). It is these cultural values that lifestyle migrants frequently seek to experience (e.g., Benson 2011; Hoey 2005, 2009). However, this chapter argues that understanding the place of the rural within such lifestyle migration must not end with these values; even if it may usefully start with them. Its place is argued to exceed any such socio-cultural framing.

Let us not take the study, the lamp and the ink out of doors, as we used to take wild life — having killed it and placed it in spirits of wine — indoors.

(Edward Thomas 1909/2009: 132)

In the overemphasis of cultural studies on the cultural forces beneath the landscape, it has lost interest in the landscape itself.

(Mitch Rose 2006: 542)