Smith said: “I am so delighted that William Collins is publishing Rural. I was really keen to tell not just my own family’s story but those of other families too who, like us, grew up in rural areas in tied housing—homes that weren’t their own. Public services in rural areas are neglected so that living in nearby towns is the only sensible option for most people. Hence, the market for new (and existing) housing is entirely focused on buyers or renters who have substantial incomes, no children and are able to look after themselves. At the centre of the book is something core to Smith’s own experience: as rural villages transform into playgrounds for the rich and second homes proliferate, those who for generations have shaped – and been shaped by – the countryside are priced out. What is it is like, then, to belong to the countryside but be forced out and unable to return? Melding the voices of past and present through interviews, her own travels, and lives captured in historical archived documents, Smith explores the precarity of working-class rural life, from the Highland Clearances to the building and deconstruction of industrial settlements, the coronavirus pandemic and the rise of Airbnb. The story presented is honest and at times hopeful rather than bleak, and she does not romanticise working-class histories. Rather, Smith centres the deep connections and roots to the land felt by rural communities through the perspectives of those who have created it, her rich, astute descriptions bringing landscapes and histories to life. The author grew up on a country estate where her Dad was the forester and she tells of the divide between 'the big house' where they were allowed to go for a Christmas party once a year but otherwise kept their distance.

She then tours around the northern parts of the UK to look at some of the industries that provide work and income for the local residents and what happens to their communities when those industries change or leave. It could be a picture of my three (now grown) children. It stirred a deep well of familiar, complex, yearning and contradictory feelings. Rural has a wider scope to examine a broad, though not exhaustive, range of rural occupations and their histories, exploring mining, forestry, millwork, tourism and tenant farming, among others. The countryside is no timeless idyll. Rich in history, it is not a museum but a “working environment”. In the jobs that have survived to this day, accommodation and continuous employment is often precarious, vulnerable to the whims of landlords (including organisations like the National Trust), shifting land practices, and the exponential growth of holiday lets and second homes.Work in the countryside ties you, soul and salary, to the land. But often those who labour in nature have the least control over what happens there.

The politics of land ownership and rural economics are complex and Smith deserves credit for grappling with some of this territory within an accessible and thought-provoking narrative. There’s much to enjoy in Rural’The Herald - A vital, questing book about the often misunderstood past, hard present-day, and possible futures of rural life in the UK' The message is as clear as it was in those outrageous-but-true stories of Lord such-and-such moving whole villages because they spoiled the view: you can create the countryside, but you cannot live here, retire, return or raise your children here — and if you do manage that, they cannot come home.

Rebecca grew up in tied cottages on country estates — homes that come with a job, where you are tied, body, soul and salary, to your landlord. Her father was a forester and one of their homes, on the Graythwaite Estate in Cumbria, was a single-storey lodge with a turret. It was rumoured to have had the first floor removed, like the top from a Victoria sponge, as it spoilt the view of a previous incumbent of The Big House. The point is that we have (collectively) chosen to kill the former economic structure. People have no idea what a working rural economy would look because the countryside is just a vehicle for expressing other obsessions of rural idylls or environmental havens or whatever. Why are the lives of rural working people so marginalised in mainstream culture? Smith points out British literature’s fascination with the ‘Big House’. Think of Austen’s Pemberley, du Maurier’s Manderley and Waugh’s Brideshead. For Smith, the grand pile “represented a space that was not for me” with a “repelling forcefield around it”. Meanwhile, working class experiences are often viewed as simplistically urban. Barry Hines, author of A Kestrel for a Knave (1968), noted his readers’ surprise at his young hawk-trainer protagonist’s access to nature in his South Yorkshire mining town: “Many people still have a vision of the north filled with ‘dark satanic mills’ […] and not a blade of grass in sight […] In the village where I lived, the miners walked to work across the meadows, with sky larks singing overhead”. As Smith states, ‘we need preservation and progress, environment and economy, locals and incomers.’

Revelatory’ THE SCOTSMAN ‘Eye-opening and persuasive’ SUNDAY TIMES ‘Brilliant … I loved it’ KIT DE WAAL ‘Thoughtful, moving, honest’ CAL FLYN Work in the countryside ties you, soul and salary, to the land. But often those who labour in nature have the least control over what happens there. It's heart warming and hopeful to hear about the community land ownership projects in Assynt and Eigg and let's hope it becomes more prolific across the country. Beautifully observed, these are the stories of professions and communities that often go overlooked. Smith shows the precarity for those whose lives are entangled in the natural landscape. And she traces how these rural working-class worlds have changed. As industry has transformed - mines closing, country estates shrinking, farmers struggling to make profit on a pint of milk, holiday lets increasing so relentlessly that local people can no longer live where they were born - we are led to question the legacy of the countryside in all our lives. Too often, the lives of rural people have been overlooked or else romanticised, especially by writers. Not here ... Warm, astute and sincere'Rural shows that this attitude has only consolidated over subsequent years. Smith suspects her upbringing confers a kind of “class ambiguity”. Descriptions of her childhood proximity to lakes, gardens and treehouses lead others to assume that her family was wealthy or well-connected. She has been blithely invited to shooting parties. In an episode of the recent documentary series Grayson Perry’s Full English, the only rural dweller and Cumbrian representative the artist sceptically interviews while questing for the “northern soul”, is Lord Inglewood of Hutton-in-the-Forest. With fast Internet access and regular deliveries they won’t need any ordinary people to man local shops and services and they will be wealthy enough to happily pay extra for a plumber or car mechanic to come from the nearest town. The blurb for Rebecca Smith’s Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside sells it as a call to arms for the countryside’s abused, exploited and forgotten working classes, and its most memorable passages resound with all the get-off-our-land fury of a gamekeeper’s shotgun. I found the history, both of rural life and of her family fascinating and there are some astounding facts and statistics. I was less enamoured with how she tried to weave in her current family situation and felt the book would have been better without that. Smith is uniquely positioned to harvest the stories of rural and ex-rural working-class communities and turn them into something approaching magic. Rural ascends to beauty because it manages something more than simple reportage … This book is tender, glowing, vitally important stories whispered into an ear’Kirstin Innes, Press and Journal -