Popular conceptions of rurality are not accidental, nor are they natural representations of fact. Rather they are evolving social constructs, based in part on received remembrance of a past, and in equal part on antipathy to the dual opposite of the urban set against idealisations of the rural. The media – literature, painting, film, TV, radio and newspapers – have all transmitted and reinforced these idealisations. Rural spaces and places have a number of associated visual images that have popular resonance amongst both residents and tourists. A recent book of photographs by Somerville (2001) is one of many to grace coffee tables and show ‘myriad treasures: from the woodland villages of rural Surrey and the historic resonance of “Shakespeare Country”, to the hidden valleys of Wales and the rugged grandeur of the Scottish Highlands’. Similarly, lids on boxes of chocolates celebrate the historic, the rustic and the quaint, regularly reproducing images such as Constable's Hay Wain (1821) that brush out the reality of rural impoverishment, whether in 19th-century or contemporary expression. As observed by Bryan MacGregor, such images are ‘much nearer to the jolly village green on the pantomime stage than reality’ (MacGregor, 1976: 524).

Such constructs are powerful because they shape views not only on what the countryside is actually like, but also on what it should be like. The move from observation to the normative is also a move that engages the political sphere and this chapter begins with an exploration of how different actors have shaped, and are empowered and constrained by, the rural idylls.

The romantic myth

A myth, in a sociological sense, refers to a set of ideas and images that have currency in a particular period, and which are commonly transmitted from one generation to the next. As they are transmitted, they are also transmuted: some elements are lost and there are progressive accretions. The core of the myth is, however, fixed and may be factual or may be imaginary – ‘mythical’, in the common figurative use. This section looks at the respective cores of Britain's rural myths – or rural idylls as they are commonly known – and critiques their constituents. In doing so, it aims to draw out important symbols that shape understandings of, and responses to, the rural housing question.