Interpreting Rurality

Gary Bosworth is a Reader in Enterprise and Rural Economies at the University of Lincoln. He has published widely on issues affecting the rural economy including counterurbanisation, structural and cyclical economic changes, home-working, neo-endogenous development approaches, and the growth of rural tourism.Peter Somerville is Professor of Social Policy and Head of the Policy Studies Research Centre at the University of Lincoln. He has published widely on housing, community (including rural community, community enterprise, and community policing), cooperatives, equalities, homelessness, participation and social theory.

• 1. Introduction and official/statistical definitions Part 1 Material Rurality 2. Challenging Western perceptions: a case study of rural Zambia 3. Economic approaches to the rural 4. The potential for rural co-operatives in the UK 5. Rural parishes and community organisation Part 2 Represented Rurality 6. English historical perspectives on rurality: viewing the country from the city 7. Pits, pylons and posts: writing under the English rural idyll 8. A place for grazing livestock in defining rurality? 9. A case study in the literary construction of the rural idyll: the English Farm 10. Horncastle brass band: revising the banding myth from the edges of rurality Part 3 Contested Rurality 11. Dairy farming and the fight for ownership of the concept ‘rural’ 12. Contested attitudes towards wildlife in Britain 13. Changing social relations in the English countryside: the case of housing 14. Rural crime and policing 15. Gypsies and Travellers in modern rural England Part 4 Consumed Rurality 16. Capitalising on rurality: Tourism micro-businesses in rural tourism destinations 17. Ageing in rural communities: from ‘idyll’ to ‘exclusion’? 18. The rural public house: cultural icon or social hub? Part 5 Conclusions 19. Interrogating rural coherence