‘The field of grain is gone; It's now a Tesco Superstore’: representations of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ within historical and contemporary discourses opposing urban expansion in England

Ideas about the difference between rural and urban areas are woven into the fabric of English society. This paper asks how two different campaigns against urban expansion and rural homebuilding in England – one interwar and one more contemporary (related to the production of the ‘National Planning Policy Framework’ document) – represent the difference between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ and how they use these representations to justify and naturalize their arguments. Utilizing interpretive textual analysis to compare the two periods, we show that, whilst planning has undergone significant paradigm shifts during the period between the two campaigns, in both archives a dominant ‘rural idyll’ is (re)produced and reinforced through the representational themes of beauty, nature, purity, an elite educated class, and a traditional social order. This is strongly contrasted to the representation of the ‘urban sphere’ as an unnatural, ugly, modern, and socially fragmented dystopia. ‘Urban’ areas are therefore constructed as the constitutive ‘Other’ to the rural idyll. In this way, the apparently natural urban characteristics associated with built-up areas are represented as ‘out of place’ within the rural sphere. These representations work to justify the argument that ‘development’ is a threat to the intrinsic characteristics of the countryside and should not be allowed to take place. This rural idyll/urban dystopia binary is argued to continue to have an important influence on shaping policy debate.