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Rural Modernity in Britain argues that the rural areas of Britain were impacted by modernisation just as much - if not more - than urban and suburban areas.
In 1970, the Architectural Press published New Lives, New Landscapes, Nan Fairbrother's optimistic account of how the British landscape was materially transformed in the post-war decades. Reservoirs, power stations, television and radio-transmitter masts, electricity and telephone pylons, as well as local authority housing and new or improved roads, produced a new rurality. So too did state-subsidised agricultural intensification, wider public access to the countryside, and environmentally protective measures. These included landscape designations such as National Parks, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Sites of Special Scientific Interest. Central to Fairbrother's approach was the concomitant transformation in how British people interacted with these new landscapes in an age of increased mobility. This new edited collection of essays, New Lives, New Landscapes Revisited: Rural Modernity in Britain brings a fresh historical perspective to bear on Fairbrother's concerns. It examines how the changing relationship between government, state, and citizen gave rise to a distinct rural modernity during the middle decades of the twentieth century.
It is now almost impossible to conceive of life in western Europe, either in the towns or the countryside, without a reliable mains electricity supply. By 1938, two-thirds of rural dwellings had been connected to a centrally generated supply, but the majority of farms in Britain were not linked to the mains until sometime between 1950 and 1970. Given the significance of electricity for modern life, the difficulties of supplying it to isolated communities, and the parallels with current discussions over the provision of high-speed broadband connections, it is surprising that until now there has been little academic discussion of this vast and protracted undertaking. This book fills that gap. It is divided into three parts. The first, on the progress of electrification, explores the timing and extent of electrification in rural England, Wales and Scotland; the second examines the effects of electrification on rural life and the rural landscape; and the third makes comparisons over space and time, looking at electrification in Canada and Sweden and comparing electrification with the current problems of rural broadband.
Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long before the success of the communist revolution. In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.
Choi examines how global Christian networks facilitated the flow of ideas, people and material culture, shaping gendered modernity in Korea.
Through the lens of the everyday, this book explores ‘the countryside’ as an inhabited and practised realm with lived rhythms and routines. It relocates the topography of everyday life from its habitually urban focus, out into the English countryside. The rural is often portrayed as existing outside of modernity, or as its passive victim. Here, the rural is recast as an active and complex site of modernity, a shift which contributes alternative ways of thinking the rural and a new perspective on the everyday. In each chapter, pieces of visual culture - including scrapbooks, art works, adverts, photographs and films - are presented as tools of analysis which articulate how aspects of the everyday might operate differently in non-metropolitan places. The book features new readings of the work of significant artists and photographers, such as Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, Stephen Willats, Anna Fox, Andrew Cross, Tony Ray Jones and Homer Sykes, seen through this rural lens, together with analysis of visually fascinating archival materials including early Shell Guides and rarely seen scrapbooks made by the Women’s Institute. Combining everyday life, rural modernity and visual cultures, this book is able to uncover new and different stories about the English countryside and contribute significantly to current thinking on everyday life, rural geographies and visual cultures.
Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation – and self-organisation – that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways. Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.
Rural Scotland is a charged landscape, alive with history, soaked in myth and often rather sublime. For those of us living an urban existence, the countryside is a retreat for refuge and decompression, but it is also a place where infrastructures strain to reach and in which livings must be made. The countryside is resistant to easy explanation and is thus vulnerable to stereotyping. The nine building stories told in this book show how rural households and communities define themselves, and the role architecture plays in this. Illustrated with beautiful photography and drawings, the projects, from affordable housing on the islands to exquisite renovations of traditional agricultural stock, and all recognised by the Saltire Society's Housing Design Awards, are visually rich both in themselves and the contexts in which they sit.
This book is the first transnational history of rambling and mountaineering. Focussing on the critical turn-of-the-century era, it offers new insights into alpine development, attitudes to danger, cultures of time, internationalism and domesticity in the outdoors. It charts an emerging group of mass tourist activities, and argues that these thousands of walkers and climbers can only be understood within the context of the urban cultures from which most of them came. In doing so, it offers a fresh perspective on the relationship of alpinists and countryside enthusiasts to the modern world. Instead of an escape from or rejection of modernity, it finds that upland trampers and climbers contested what it meant to be modern, used those modern identities to make political claims on rural space and rural people, and sought to define what a more modern future society should be like.