This investigation of rurality is oriented from a fixed point in north-west Hampshire, marked by a signpost that points in four directions to two towns, four villages and two hamlets. Through stories, interviews and reportage gathered over two decades, the book demolishes tired notions of rural England that cast it as a separate realm of existence, whether marooned in a perpetual time-warp, or reduced to a refuge for the retired, wealthy urbanites, extreme nature-lovers, and, more recently, anyone tired of waiting out the pandemic in towns and cities. It poses two simple questions: what does the word rural mean today? What will it mean tomorrow?

The author is an ambivalent native, held captive to the land by an umbilical cord but always on the verge of fleeing home to the city.  Both argument and narrative are propelled by the urgent need to reconsider the concept of ‘countryside’ in the context of the climate emergency and the patent collapse of ecosystems due to intensive farming which has poisoned the land.

She writes from a feminist, postcolonial standpoint that is alert to the slow violence of historical processes taking place over many centuries; enslavement, colonialism, industrialisation, globalisation.  

A challenge to the public to re-consider cricket and its meaning by placing the game in its true social, political and economic context, James was, all too subtly, attempting to counter the game’s orthodox history that, he argued, had played a key role in the formation of national culture. As a consequence, he failed, and the history of cricket in England has retained the same stresses and lineaments as it did a century ago – until now.

In examining recreational rather than professional (first-class) cricket, Different Class does not simply challenge the widely accepted orthodoxy of English cricket, it demonstrates how the values and belief systems at its heart were, under the guise of amateurism, intentionally developed in order to divide the English along class lines at every level of the game.

If the creation of opposing class-based cricket cultures in the North and South of England grew out of this process, the institutional structures developed by those in charge of English cricket continue to discriminate. But, as much as the exclusion of Black and South Asian cricketers from the recreational mainstream is the most obvious example, it is social class that remains the greatest barrier to participation in what used to be the national game.

Although it was never returned to its pre-war occupants and owners, Tyneham would persist through a long and extraordinary afterlife in the English imagination.  It was said that Churchill himself had promised that the villagers would be able to return once the war was over, and that the post-war Labour government was responsible for the betrayal of that pledge. Both the accusation and the sense of grievance would reverberate through many decades after that.

Back in print and  with a brand new introduction, this book explores how Tyneham came to be converted into a symbol of posthumous England, a patriotic community betrayed by the alleged humiliations of post-war national history.  Both celebrated and reviled at the time of its first publication in 1995, The Village that Died for England is indispensable reading for anyone trying to understand where Brexit came from – and where it might be leading us.

Using analysis, interviews and case studies to explain what Matthew and Preston City Councilhave done over the last decade in order to earn Preston the title of Most Improved City, the bookshows how the model can be adapted to fit different local circumstances, as well as demonstratinghow Preston itself adapted economic and democratic experiments in ‘community wealth-building’from elsewhere in the US and Europe.

Preston’s success shows that the ideas of community wealth-building work in practice and have thecapacity to achieve a meaningful transfer of wealth and power back to local communities. A lot ofrecent coverage and references have tended to oversimplify the Preston Model, which is not justabout ‘buying local’ but a comprehensive project, which envisions local and regional discussions andcollaboration adding up to a wholesale transformation of our currently failing economic systems.

In Terraformed, Joy White offers an insider ethnography of Forest Gate – a neighbourhood in Newham, east London – analysing how these issues affect the black youth of today. Connecting the dots between music, politics and the built environment, it centres the lived experiences of black youth who have had it all: huge student debt, invisible homelessness, custodial sentences, electronic tagging, surveillance, arrest, ASBOs, issues with health and well-being, and of course, loss.

Part ethnography, part memoir, Terraformed contextualises the history of Newham and considers how young black lives are affected by racism, neoliberalism and austerity.