Want to understand modern Britain? Look towards its villages

A stylised, brightly coloured scene shows a group of 19th‑century men, women, and children standing in a pastoral landscape. Some hold farm tools or baskets of apples, others sip tea, and an older woman knits beside them. In front of the group, a table holds a modern blue radio emitting musical notes, a teacup, and a small bird, with a dog resting underneath.

Published: April 3, 2026 at 3:30 PM

Save

This year we celebrate 75 years of The Archers. Now, I confess I haven’t listened to the series for a while – not since the riveting plot 10 years back about coercive control, with Rob Titchener and Helen Archer. But, if any show on radio or TV is iconic, it’s The Archers, the story of an English village over time, “an everyday story of country folk”, (though now billed as “a contemporary drama in a rural setting”).

Ad

The characters – the Grundys, the Archers, the Pargetters – and the places – Grey Gables, Brookfield Farm, the Bull, St Stephen’s church – have become so real that in 1981 their history was published in Ambridge: An English Village Through the Ages, with photos, maps, court rolls, Tudor wills, even an Æthelstan charter! All fiction, of course, but perfectly realised.

The world’s longest-running radio serial was born out of the Second World War. Its first pilot episodes were broadcast in May 1950 and the series started properly on New Year’s Day 1951, in a snowbound world of austerity and rationing. It was originally created by a veteran of the wartime Ministry of Information, Godfrey Baseley. Based on Cutnall Green and Inkberrow in Worcestershire, the series was driven by the Reithian ideal of ‘inform, educate and entertain’. But it was also designed to reflect reality, conceived as a means of disseminating information to farmers and smallholders to help increase productivity in the era of rationing and food shortages. Originally produced with collaborative input from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, it has had a farming consultant ever since.

It was an instant hit. Its regular 9 million listeners peaked in 1955 at 20 million, when Grace Archer died in a barn fire. At its heart was a simple idea: that the village is the quintessential microcosm of English life, the imagined community to which we all dream of belonging. England is a village!

We’ve had villages since the Roman period. There were free communities, but most were of dependent peasants. Life was hard, even when not in the grip of plague and famine. The bulk of England’s population was rural; only in the 18th century did the massive shift begin towards towns and cities. By the 19th century we start to view the village with nostalgia – Victorian records like the famous Warwickshire Photographic Survey chronicled an already disappearing way of life.

Since 1945, the past has accelerated away from us at an ever faster rate. In 1969, in his landmark Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, Ronald Blythe offered an uncompromisingly realistic portrait detailing the end of the old English village, with interviews that are already records for the historian. But the idea was still potent; in 2010 we made our TV series (Michael Wood’s Story of England) on Kibworth, Leicestershire, inspired by the great WG Hoskins who suggested that the whole history of the country could be told through one village. Kibworth was that for our time.

And now time has moved on again. In Ambridge, big farms have replaced smallholders; Grey Gables is a spa hotel. But the myth still endures. And maybe not just a myth. What The Archers shows is that the village still stands for the idea of community, a word more and more in use now as we search for our commonality. A place of 500 or a thousand people, where everyone knows each other, and each other’s business, but who always help out in an emergency; a place where we can still feel connected and hold that dream of a harmonious vision of society.

In reality, of course, the English village has always been shaped by inequality and class conflict. Still today less than 1 per cent of the population owns half the land; a third is still owned by the aristocracy and gentry. Some of us may fret about migrants, but the village always had its newcomers – Frisians, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Danes, Normans, Huguenots, Africans, West Indians, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis. That is who we are. And today that changing sense of community is being augmented by a huge wave of local historians researching families, farms and places, injecting new energy into the historiography of the village – even though, as is the case for most of us these days, our village is now inside the city.

Hoskins is still right: the whole story can be told in any one place. And now in 2025 if we were to look for a real Ambridge, why not choose somewhere like Handsworth, near Birmingham, home of the Lunar Society of Matthew Boulton and the scientific and social revolutionaries of the 18th century; of Lord Bill Morris of the TUC; of Stevie Winwood, Benjamin Zephaniah and Joan Armatrading. Now wouldn’t that be fun? And how revealing about us, at this new moment in our ever-changing story.

Ad

This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

Authors

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester

Ad

Ad

Loading...

Ad

Loading...