Town And Country

by Roger Scruton, Anthony Barnett

In the 1940s, HJ Massingham, documentor of rural England, described the concept of "picturesque" as a "giant worm that had trailed its slime" across the countryside. In the late 1990s the debate was alive as ever with the Countryside Alliance (lead mainly by the pro-hunting lobby) complaining that city dwellers' ignorance was destroying rural traditions. In fact, hunting is a tiny part of the conflicts troubling the countryside. Town And Country brings together leading academics, environmentalists, historians, anthropologists, urban planners, farmers, journalists and politicians to discuss the dilemmas in depth. The 28 essays question many ingrained ideas. The book debunks the image of the farm family, discusses heritage culture and tackles a multitude of issues such as car culture, organic farming, rural housing shortages, animal rights, self-sufficiency, commuter villages, conservation, new towns and lack of public transport. It wonders how long Britain will be able to retain its unique landscape of higgledy-piggledy, misshapen fields before the land is bulldozed into the angular, characterless, industrial-agriculture landscape of other European countries.Town And Country explores countryside issues from all angles, analysing the views of everyone from The Soil Association to The Movement for Middle England. Rather than just highlighting the problems, it suggests solutions. It also points out that though urbanites may have romantic, unrealistic notions of quaint country life, the rural population's view of unfriendly, polluted, greedy city life can be just as stereotyped. --Sarah Champion

399 pages, Hardcover

First published December 7, 1999

About the author

Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C.

In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband.

In 2016 he again published two books, Confessions of A Heretic (a collection of essays) and The Ring of Truth, about Wagner’s Ring cycle, which was widely and favourably reviewed. In 2017 he published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of his philosophy. He also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).