1. Belonging, rural identity, ‘red brick’ architecture and prejudice:
Examining the
way residents talk about the rural nature
of their area to the exclusion of Polish
Migrants
Nathan Kerrigan

2. Rural communities (definitions)
Bifurcation of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’
Cloke’s (1977) index of ‘rurality’
‘Village of the mind’ (Pahl 1966)
Rural identity as an imagery concept which draws reference to ‘peaceful’ and ‘tranquil’ environments.
‘happy, healthy and problem-free images of rural life safely nestling with both a close social community and a contiguous natural environment‘ (Cloke and Milbourne 1992: 359)
Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory – a more imaginative/creative conceptualisation
Traditionally the most popular way to define rural identity has been to dichotomise 'the rural' with 'the urban' by juxtaposing the two forms of space. The ‘rural’ has been typified by features like kinship, locality, familiarity and understanding, whereas the ‘urban’ is characterised by alienation and depersonalisation (Donnenneyer 2007). Such well-held beliefs about the differences between these two forms of space have given rise to a rural-urban continuum, where some agencies such as the Department for Food and Agriculture have attempted to delineate the countryside from the city.
Cloke’s (1977) index of ‘rurality’, based upon the analysis of multiple socio-economic indicators, provides insights into these characteristics and is considered to be indicative of the countryside. In such an index, ‘rurality’ is defined by a ‘series of distinct variables, including population, migration, land use and remoteness, which are measured to establish the extent to which an area is inclined towards the rural or urban pole’.
However, despite such attempts to obtain an objective, measurable reality of rural identity - remote areas with strong sense of community cohesion – is best understood as a countryside narrative which exists more as a subjective construct.
Rural identity is an imagery concept which draws reference to ‘peaceful’ and ‘tranquil’ environments.. Chakraborti ascertains such idyllic connections surround many aspects of rural life and that this is captured in the term the 'rural idyll', defined by Cloke and Milbourne (1992: 359) as ‘happy, healthy and problem-free images of rural life safely nestling with both a close social community and a contiguous natural environment'.
Make note to Giddens’ structuration analysis.

3. A globalised countryside
We live in a multi-ethnic, globally located, internationally aligned, nationally devolved social world.
Time-space distanciation (Giddens 1984) - economic restructuring, political reordering, trans and international companies and organisations, multiculture, continuing migrations, technological communications, cheap air travel
Processes of social change – a primary concern for the countryside
‘Your Countryside, your Choice’ (Kingsnorth 2005)
‘The Lost Village’ (Askwith 2007)
According to Giddens (1991: 14), the period of late-modernity is characterised by globalisation which has had an impact on social change at an unprecedented level. Places are becoming tied together by time-space compression through developments in technology and the increased transnational movement of people (Giddens 1984; Massey 1994). This is best captured by Bauman (2000: 11): 'the advent of cellular telephones may well serve as a symbolic “last blow” delivered to the dependency on space; and so, consequentially, the distance and exoticism of faraway lands become immediately accessible’.
Social change is of primary concern in the countryside. Kingsnorth (2005: 12) in the report Your Countryside, Your Choice, articulates social change has brought
‘the remorseless expansion of housing, industry, traffic, road building and airport construction, combined with the steady decline of traditional farming’.
Askwith’s (2007: 6-7) book The Lost Village asserts a similar discourse where he recollects a verse from a Philip Larkin poem on seeing the changes that has happened in his village while being away: -
I thought it would be my last time/The sense that, beyond town/There would always be farms and fields/Where the village clouts could climb/Such trees as were not cut down....The truth of Larkin’s words had suddenly struck me. It – this village – wasn’t going to last [...] the ` actual village – that miniature, self-contained eco system in which past and present were all tangled up, and people, building and vegetation shared on reasonably coherent collective story- that the village had passed away long ago [...] Perhaps, I had assumed that, somewhere in the background of my life, there would always be, not just one village, but a whole network of many thousand villages, each with its own story and its own families and its own unique landscapes and memories and its own peculiar way of saying and doing things. In short I had imagined a rural England and had blithely gone through life (eagerly embracing the modern wherever I found it) under the impression it would always be there, like a great rock, with the past clinging to it like lichen. Now when I turned to look at it, it was gone
I have quoted from Askwith and Kingnorth because they both tap into common preconceptions in people’s narratives that are somewhat based on myth of what rural life and belie the often harsh realities of rural living. Nevertheless, it is these common preconceptions of rural life which produce concern and anxiety regarding social and spatial change and the loss of rural community. These anxieties about social and spatial change and the urbanisation of the countryside do not only imbue a sense of loss about rural community but they produce a sense of fear. These fears give rise to actions and practices used to protect and maintain rural identity.

4. The enduring appeal of rural community
Tangential but connected discourse of social change and the enduring nature of ‘rurality’
‘county grounds, warm beer, green suburbs...and old maids cycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’ (John Mayor, cited in Garland and Rowe 2001: 121).
Fantasies of late-modern rural spaces ever more potent as they appear to be different to those ‘organic’ rural communities of the past
People will extend considerable efforts in actualising ‘rurality’
An exclusive and exclusionary rural community
As the potential threats to rural identity intensify so does the importance of a notion of rural community that depicts a desirable way of life. This can be seen in the way the former UK Prime Minister, Jon Mayor chose to use George Orwell’s description of British rural life as to refer to its quintessential nature: -
References to idealised and romantic notions of ‘invincible green suburbs’, ‘warm beer’ and maids cycling through morning mist can be interpreted as alluding to the idea that as worries about the potential threats and the irretrievable loss of rural identity grow so too does the appeal of rural community (Bauman 2001). These worries are themselves part of a broader late-modern social insecurity. They are worries about the loss of particular types of idealised communities
This fantasy of place, social ties and belonging is a potent one then, and has become ever more potent as the rural communities of late-modernity appear as very different to those organic, rural ones of the past. In this context, as rural community has come to matter more – it becomes a form of social retreat as well as a site of sociality. Clarke (2009: 35) argues that this sociality is not necessarily about the nostalgia of the golden age per se, but is more about a wanting better, and more transparent, social relations that go beyond the ‘alienated, calculating and mediated’ forms of being together that appear to characterise 21st-century social bonds. Thus, in late-modernity a traditional rural community is ever more sought after, but something contemporary society is not willing to provide (Bauman 2001).
people actively in search of community tend to be committed to its visibility and to making it visible and expend effort and imagination into this task. For instance, in contemporary rural contexts visible community tends to be actualised by the self-conscious community-creating efforts of ‘busy’ individuals, social organisations, local events, the church and so forth. Give example of how people talked about the local area.
It is important to note that the construction of rural community has the ability to silence internal dissent and difference and its inevitable boundary production which give rise to its highly problematic constant excluding and including dynamic. For me it is the appeal of community that remains crucial to keep in mind when talking about inclusion/exclusion. We cannot simply dismiss the search for and construction of community as parochial, inward looking, reactionary and defensive practices –as these may all be part of exclusive and exclusionary rural community-making processes too – as Jock Young (2007: 128) puts it ‘the building of community, its invention, becomes that of a narrative which celebrates and embraces one side and vilifies and excludes on the other’.

5. The research setting
‘Brickington’ - a small, but developing rural town
Consists of seven settlements – Historic town centre, Albury, 19th Century industrial expansion, Bay, the Commons, the Marsh, and the Vale.
Experiencing significant social & spatial growth
Brickington consisted of seven settlements. The historic town centre, Albury, the 19th century expansion, the Commons, Bay, the Vale and the Marsh. While the former three areas made up the centre of town, the latter four were placed on the peripheral. The town bounded by open green space which made Brickington aesthetically rural in character.
The decision to use Brickington as the research setting was due to recent social and spatial chance in the area. Brickington has, historically, consisted of local rural amenities – a butcher, a green grocer, a shoe maker and son – but from the late 1970s onwards new industry – such as technology and lighting companies – began arriving in the town. Green belt policy was relaxed for housing developments and the town started to grow. In the 1980s a Waitrose store opened and became a focal point for future development. The expansion of Brickington continued into the 1990s and 2000s and has seen an increase in housing developments in the town, with another 1500 homes expected to be built by Give nod to Polish migrant being housed and population influx.

6. Research Question
The following question this presentation seeks to address is: -
How do long-term residents talk about the rural nature
of their area to the exclusion of Polish
Migrants

7. Methods & Methodology
Ethnography of communication (Johnstone & Marcellino 2010)
semi-structured interviews with 26 residents, 18 ‘born & bred’ or long-term residents, and 8 Polish migrants
Access to participants
‘snowballing’
Alternative approach and gatekeepers
The final sample of participants which comprise of twenty-six residents
Discourse analysis ((Jorgensen & Phillips 2002)
EOC is a social scientific approach to studying the way communities talk and speak about their culture and how such values/beliefs/customs are represented in speech. Each community has its own cultural values and these are linked to judgments of situational appropriateness in their talk. Local cultural patterns and norms, identities can be analysed and interpreted through the way local people talk about their cultural context. Speaking is one among other symbolic resources which are allocated and distributed in social situations according to distinctive culture patterns, and which can be used exclusive and exclusionary.
My initial means of accessing residents was through 'snowball’ sampling (Burgess 1982). ‘Snowball’ sampling is the possibility of accessing residents where each person interviewed passed onto me another person (Burgess 1982; Foster 1999). My early engagement with the debates on identity and social change had suggested that people tend to be suspicious, and perhaps even fearful, of difference (e.g. Neal 2009; Steventon 2001). Thus the advantages of ‘snowball’ sampling meant that it would minimise any distress or nervousness within my participants (Arksey and Knight 1999).
‘Snowball’ sampling, however, offered little in the way of recruiting participants, thus I needed another means of accessing the residents of Brickington. After interviewing Jane she was able to put me in touch with Ellie. Although my intention was to interview Ellie, she had thought Jane wanted her to help me in the recruitment process. Ellie was keen in helping me in terms of finding future participants for the study and this provided access to seven more participants.
The final sample of participants which comprise of twenty-six residents ranging in age from late-teens to early-eighties and varied household types including: six minority ethnic individuals, three wealthy retirees, ten people who had moved from London, and seven born and bred residents

8. Analysis
How long-term residents/’born & bred’ residents talk about the impact of social change on rural identity.
Fear of Polish migrants
How long-term residents/’born & bred’ residents talk about local ‘red brick’ architecture producing belonging, and how this constructs and maintains rural identity against social change.
How Polish migrants talk about their experiences of belonging and exclusion in the wider rural community.

9. Local talk about social change: Fear of Polish migrants
‘64,000 houses are being built, the local shops have been replaced by bigger shops and all the overspill from London, the foreigners, the people who don’t know how to live in the country’ (Margaret) ‘this is going to sound awful – but, as so far as English speaking people are concerned; but, the Polish, the Eastern Bloc countries are concerned, they’re a different race, you know, and so I think there is a sense of difference. But again, I haven’t had that circumstance the people I know are friendly and they work hard and, as I’ve said, the Polish people I do know in the town tend to keep themselves to themselves’ (Steven)
One of the primary factors of social change that has caused feelings of loss of local rural identity in Brickington is, what Chakraborti (2007: 17) calls, the emergence of a ‘plurality of rurality’. Along with the expansion of geopolitical borders (the European Union), car use and cheap air travel there has been an increase in the transnational movement of people. Consequentially, as globalisation ties time-space (Giddens 1984) together people, unrecognised to ‘traditional’ rural spaces, can now freely come and go as they please; meaning, there is greater plurality in the voices and lived realities being expressed and heard in the countryside (De Lima 2008).
In the context of Brickington, a sense of fear arose from the influx of Eastern European migrants following the expansion of the European Union expansion in 2005 in the town. Make note that Margaret blames erosion of local identity on the Polish. Steven’s focus on the Polish having a different ‘race’ and culture which is not traditional of the rural identity of the area. Also the idea that the Polish residents ‘keep themselves to themselves’ suggests a naturalisation from local rural life; they are welcome but they self-exclude. Make nod that this is a specific local problem, but a global one rearticulated.

10. Local talk about rural identity: ‘Red brick’ architecture, plants & belonging
‘Looking at the buildings that were once here and reading about the red brick that was manufactured in the town, and the old quarry tiles, that sort of thing. That’s what made Brickington unique. (Deborah)
‘I love my town. For some people Brickington is just another developing town but, for me, it’s wonderful. The old historical town centre, lined with traditional red brick housing and the church and the cobbled pavements, it makes you feel a sense of attachment…it just makes me feel happier. (Julie)
Fields and plants
The spring is a wonderful time of year in Brickington. The fields are bursting to life with new flowers, plants and trees. This is what really provides me with a sense of Brickingtonness. (Jane)
Amit and Rapport (2002: 60) have argued that ‘community identity is conceptualised first and foremost by reference to what is held in common by its members rather than in terms of oppositional categories between insiders and outsiders. What matters most is what ‘we’ share, not the boundary dividing ‘us’ from ‘them’ (Amit and Rapport 2002: 60). There is some of this shared experience going on in the construction of Brickington identity; drawn from the collective ways some residents’ associations of stereotypical features of rural life (i.e. fields, red brick building and thatched cottages) were used to fix the town with a rural rather than urban identity.
Such shared experience of community created symbolic boundaries. These symbolic boundaries of Brickington identity were produced by the ‘ongoing togetherness of beings and things’ (Cloke and Jones 2001: 651); in other words, the way some residents spoke about the local character of the Historic Town Centre and surrounding area, and the affective and emotional feelings the area had on them. Many of the residents interviewed identified the importance of this ‘red brick’ character, and it is this what some residents zoomed in on when describing Brickington identity. This can be seen in the quotations on the screen.
Both Deborah and Julie’s accounts demonstrate an affinity to Brickington defined and valued through a discourse of ‘red brick’ architecture. The spatial entity of red brick buildings works as a symbol of attachment and belonging. Consider for example Julie’s description of the historical town centre as ‘wonderful’. Julie talks about the beauty of the red brick housing and the church providing her with a sense of attachment. In these accounts it is the spatial entities that are directly selected and drawn on to describe and construct Brickington identity. In other words, for Julie it is the view of traditional buildings which are appreciated and sought as a reminder of what life in Brickington is supposed to be.
There was also a sense of time coming through the accounts of some residents interviewed regarding the rural nature of Brickington identity. This was mainly measured by the seasons and how these make the landscape alter. Jane, for instance, talks about plants and the return and growing of plants in the springtime in Brickington: -
The citing of plants, fields and trees in this way to construct a particular rural identity is not surprising – there is of course a long history of trees and plants signifying spaces and the rural way of life, and its complex relationship between the social (people) and the spatial (trees and plants) - as Mabey (2007: 152) suggests: ‘plants are part of what makes a locality, differentiates it, makes an amorphous site into place, a territory, an address’. Cloke and Jones (2001) highlight that trees and plants not only makes the place, but is a marker of the temporal dimension of a place which people engage with over time. Brickington identity, therefore, becomes a performed identity, performed by things and people, and the way residents mark and map it through what they do, through the recursiveness of their experiences such as the sights of the fields as they walk in and around the town.
These use of spatial symbols articulated by the residents in the quotations above in constructing their rural identity reflect a wider ‘cultural politics’ (Harvey 1996: 320) of the town, one that Harvey (1996: 320) refers to as a reflection of an ‘institutionalised locus of social power’. Brickington’s rural identity, therefore, is not the two-dimensional conceptualisation of community identity that Amit and Rapport (2002) would have us believe. True, Brickington identity is constructed by the shared experiences of those residents with longer-standing in the town, but such shared social collectivities reinforced oppositional boundaries. And this can be seen in the way Polish residents talked about their experiences of living within Brickington’s ‘idyll’.

11. Polish residents’ talk of feelings of exclusion
‘The people of the town think that we are here to do them over and steal their jobs and because there has been an increase of us that we’re making opportunities for these new businesses, such as Costa to come in. But we’re not. We’re here to live but getting looked on with suspicion is a lot different to the British rural life I was expecting’ (Jerzy) ‘There is a lot of scaremongering going around that we’re here to take jobs, or that we’re lazy. This makes me feel awkward when in and around the town. Local residents perceive me as some kind of alien. Rural life can be so isolating.’ (Rafael)
While the wider literature agrees that all newcomers to rural spaces are excluded, as you can see from the quotations on the screen the experiences of social exclusion were worsened for Polish migrants (and indeed any minority ethnic group) on the grounds of their obvious differences that separated them from the norms of rurality, and because social exclusion operated more ardently against minority ethnic individuals
Such feelings of exclusion are institutionalised. Much of the literature has conceptualised exclusion in the British countryside to be based on overt racism. The difference is the relationship between intention and outcome. Whereas in overt racism there must be pernicious intention to incite racist practices where, for instance, the perpetrator of a racist hate crime intends to physically or verbal abuse the victim, institutional racism is taken to exist irrespective of the intentions or motivations of the individual/community to provoke social equality. In this instance, unwitting prejudice can arise because of taken-for-granted beliefs, norms, values and customs which due to being routinely enacted through local residents talk about their local identity. Such customs, values, beliefs, therefore, produce unwitting prejudice as a result of Polish migrants’ unfamiliarity of the dominant culture.

12. Discussion: an exclusive rural community
A rhetoric of insiders & outsiders; of internal danger & external threat.
Local residents’ descriptors of architecture & plants to construct rural identity – Goffmansque (1966) theatre
‘Afraid and anxious individuals’ & ‘peg communities’
Protecting rural identity by marking out difference
What is drawn out and demonstrated in the data cited above is a rhetoric of an anxious community – marked by explicit symbolism of boundaries; of discourses around insiders and outsiders; of external threat and internal danger. Local talk about architecture and plants in the construction of rural identity can be seen as a type of Goffmanesque (1999 – originally published in 1956) theatre – a management and public demonstration of the ‘best narrative’ of Brickington life. This is not to say that such best narratives did not exist in Brickington but rather to suggest that the local discourse of residents tend to create them (Neal and Walters 2006). Such desires to recreate this best suited narrative of what Brickington life is supposed to be like, however, tended to produce a rural community which was exclusive and excluding.
This fear of difference reflects a view of Brickington that closely resemble Bauman’s (2001: 15) notion of ‘afraid and anxious individuals’, where the insecurities and fears of imagined external threats among long-term residents have resulted in a ‘drawbridge’ mentality which is systematically and institutionally suspicious of newcomers. The findings, therefore, suggest that while long-term residents’ concerns about newcomers moving in and disrupting local life may be ‘imagined’, the changes happening in the town were a reality and so were collectively shared amongst those residents with greater sense of attachment to Brickington identity. Thus, this fearful mentality about newcomers formed what Bauman (2001: 15) calls a ‘peg community’: ‘an imagined community identity that offers collective insurance against individually confronted uncertainties’. The construction of such communities may not be discursively known, but their existence is rooted in the practical knowledges of long- term residents who are tacitly aware that others share the same concerns and feel the same about safeguarding their way of life.
It makes sense, in this context, to see talk about local rural identity work in an iterative and recursive way in Brickington, where the need for identity to maintain ontological certainty is brought about because of the marking out of difference.

13. Concluding remarks
‘Rurality’ is defined by a dialectical relationship between the social and the spatial.
Paradoxical discourses about social change and the maintenance of rural identity
‘Born & bred’/long-term residents construct rural identity through their talk.
Rural communities are exclusive and exclusionary.

14. Contact Dr Nathan Kerrigan
Centre for Research in Psychology, Behaviour and Achievement
@Nathan_Kerrigan
References available on request