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Village News
We have lived in villages a long time. The village was the first model for communal living. Towns came much later, then cities. Later still came suburbs, neighbourhoods, townships, communes, kibbutzes. But the village has endured. Across England, modernity creeps up to the boundaries of many, breaking the connection the village has with the land. With others, they can be as quiet as the graveyard as their housing is bought up by city ‘weekenders’, or commuters. The ideal chocolate box image many holidaying to our Sceptred Isle have in their minds eye may be true in some cases, but across the country the heartbeat of the real English village is still beating strongly – if you can find it. To this mission our intrepid historian and travel writer Tom Fort willingly gets on his trusty bicycle and covers the length and breadth of England to discover the essence of village life. His journeys will travel over six thousand years of communal existence for the peoples that eventually became the English. Littered between the historical analysis, will be personal memories from Tom of the village life he remembers and enjoys today in rural Oxfordshire.
400 pages, Paperback
Published March 21, 2019
4 people are currently reading
102 people want to read
About the author
Tom Fort
20 books9 followersTom Fort was education at Eton and Balliol Collge, Oxford. On leaving Oxford he went to work as a reporter at the Slough Observer and the Slough Evening Mail before joining the BBC in 1978 where he worked in the BBC Radio newsroom in London for 22 years.
He took early retirement in 2000, just before the publication of his social history of lawns and lawn-mowing, The Grass is Greener.
He took early retirement in 2000, just before the publication of his social history of lawns and lawn-mowing, The Grass is Greener.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
August 17, 2017
enjoyed this journey around different villages around the country to see what the heartbeat was like either strong or in decline, a mixture of social history , geography , literature interlinked to create an interesting book.
July 16, 2020
This is a rather boring collection of descriptions of English villages. Most chapters follow a similar format where Ford describes his visit to the villages, then summarises the work of another book or television programme about the village. The stories all sound the same - “everything was great at some point, but the modern world sucks, and wouldn’t it be great if we could all just go back to subsistence living”.
July 27, 2017
The English countryside has many quintessential images, the patchwork of fields, lanes with high hedges and sleepy villages nestled in between hills and dales. The village or hamlet has been a place of habitation for many hundreds of years in this country, a place that was deeply rooted in the locality, made from the materials that surrounded it and with a strong connection to the landscape. Some outgrew their original layout into towns and a few into cities, but the vast majority have remained as villages.
The role of the village has changed dramatically in the 20th and into the 21st Century; what once was a place where people rarely ventured from and generally lived all their lives, had a busy and purposeful existence, has now become a quaint place for commuters to live and second home owners to visit occasionally. Tom Fort wonders if there is still a life and soul to village life, and decides that the best way to find it is to climb on his faithful bicycle and go and find out for himself. Visiting villages from Foxton in Cambridgeshire to Pitton in Wiltshire, he considers at how village life has evolved and changed over the past 6000 years in our country. He visits the villages where there is still an active community and others where people hardly talk at all.
Fort writes in an amiable way that makes him quite endearing as he travels to all the village that add to the story of rural life. He mixes historical detail with encounters and personal anecdotes of his own village life when he was growing up and now in the village of Sonning Common. Rightly, he has a rant over the way that the homes that they build in villages now days completely lacking in any design and originality and any nod to the local area they are being built in and are just homogenised layouts repackaged by a marketing department to suit. There are no dramatic revelations in here, just a warm nostalgia for the past days with an acknowledgement of the positive and negative progress of life today in the English village. Really enjoyable read.
The role of the village has changed dramatically in the 20th and into the 21st Century; what once was a place where people rarely ventured from and generally lived all their lives, had a busy and purposeful existence, has now become a quaint place for commuters to live and second home owners to visit occasionally. Tom Fort wonders if there is still a life and soul to village life, and decides that the best way to find it is to climb on his faithful bicycle and go and find out for himself. Visiting villages from Foxton in Cambridgeshire to Pitton in Wiltshire, he considers at how village life has evolved and changed over the past 6000 years in our country. He visits the villages where there is still an active community and others where people hardly talk at all.
Fort writes in an amiable way that makes him quite endearing as he travels to all the village that add to the story of rural life. He mixes historical detail with encounters and personal anecdotes of his own village life when he was growing up and now in the village of Sonning Common. Rightly, he has a rant over the way that the homes that they build in villages now days completely lacking in any design and originality and any nod to the local area they are being built in and are just homogenised layouts repackaged by a marketing department to suit. There are no dramatic revelations in here, just a warm nostalgia for the past days with an acknowledgement of the positive and negative progress of life today in the English village. Really enjoyable read.
June 10, 2020
What makes the English village so unique? Why does have have such a romanticised image in the minds of so many people (including me, although I’m not even a citizen of the UK)? And is it really dead?
In The Village News, Tom Fort visits twenty-two villages in England and declares that the village isn’t dead, it’s just adapted to modern times. He goes back to his childhood village of Twyford, Berkshire, he visits picturesque villages such as Bibury (in Cotswold) and Troutbeck (in Lake District). He looks at the importance of sporting areas, whether you can plan a village, how writers have affected villages, and “the curse of the quaint”, all the while bringing us through the histories of the various villages that he visits. We even get to hear about Miss Read and her Fairacre series!
(Note to self: Cottage on the Green by Rowland Parker sounds interesting too, though it’s apparently long out of stock)
Speaking of Miss Read, I’ve got to disagree with Fort that she doesn’t deal with the darker side of life. She does talk about darker issues such as domestic abuse (the Coggs family), about tumultuous relationships and adultery, and even the impact of unstable family lives on children. She has a light hand with these, but she doesn’t avoid the topic entirely.
I liked the point that what makes a village isn’t a certain way of life, such as having been living there for several generations, or having to be living off the land, or using outdoor toilets and old-fashioned lamps. A village is a community of people and if they remain a community that’s tied together, rather than a group of people that live in the same place, then the village lives even if the lifestyle of the villagers bear no resemblance to those that lived there centuries ago.
Overall, this was a lovely and insightful book about the history of the English village and how it is adapting to the modern world. I hope someone has written something similar about villages around the world because I would love to read about how the rural community in various countries are adapting (or not) to the changes in the past few decades.
This review was first posted at Eustea Reads
In The Village News, Tom Fort visits twenty-two villages in England and declares that the village isn’t dead, it’s just adapted to modern times. He goes back to his childhood village of Twyford, Berkshire, he visits picturesque villages such as Bibury (in Cotswold) and Troutbeck (in Lake District). He looks at the importance of sporting areas, whether you can plan a village, how writers have affected villages, and “the curse of the quaint”, all the while bringing us through the histories of the various villages that he visits. We even get to hear about Miss Read and her Fairacre series!
(Note to self: Cottage on the Green by Rowland Parker sounds interesting too, though it’s apparently long out of stock)
Speaking of Miss Read, I’ve got to disagree with Fort that she doesn’t deal with the darker side of life. She does talk about darker issues such as domestic abuse (the Coggs family), about tumultuous relationships and adultery, and even the impact of unstable family lives on children. She has a light hand with these, but she doesn’t avoid the topic entirely.
I liked the point that what makes a village isn’t a certain way of life, such as having been living there for several generations, or having to be living off the land, or using outdoor toilets and old-fashioned lamps. A village is a community of people and if they remain a community that’s tied together, rather than a group of people that live in the same place, then the village lives even if the lifestyle of the villagers bear no resemblance to those that lived there centuries ago.
Overall, this was a lovely and insightful book about the history of the English village and how it is adapting to the modern world. I hope someone has written something similar about villages around the world because I would love to read about how the rural community in various countries are adapting (or not) to the changes in the past few decades.
This review was first posted at Eustea Reads
April 4, 2024
It’s nice to learn more about English villages and how some are thriving, but more often than not they aren’t yet they are a foundational element to England. Some of the chapters got long winded and personal and clearly had the authors interests at play (ie if a village had a cricket team) which didn’t bother me, just something to note. would probably give 3.5 really. My only actual gripe was while there were some northern villages, this was incredibly southern focused
April 25, 2019
The first chapter is set in Twyford, Berkshire, which is where Fort grew up and where I lived before we moved to Newbury. There’s another local interest chapter about a village close to Reading, too.
January 16, 2021
A very solid piece of work and a good conception: combining a collection of village surveys, mostly based around books inspired by those villages, with a more general analysis of the health of villages in the early 21st Century.
The dead hand of the volume house builders is firmly identified as a major cause of problems in villages: their dreary standardised house types and their almost thuggish dominance of a very complex planning system.
That villages are no longer dominated by residents working on the land is a fact of life; only about 100,000 people work full time in agriculture and this figure has changed little in 20 years. The mechanisation and industrial nature of modern farming is here to stay, in most places at least.
But villages remain popular and, except where almost certainly too rigid conservation policies prevent it, are growing. Some are healthier than others and the ability to house young families is rightly identified as crucial to vitality.
Tom Fort’s selected villages frequently sadden him, often as a result of the impact of earlier fame but also from the absence of an active cricket or other sports team. And how good it is that he explores them by bike and is fascinated by the crucial work of parish councils.
The dead hand of the volume house builders is firmly identified as a major cause of problems in villages: their dreary standardised house types and their almost thuggish dominance of a very complex planning system.
That villages are no longer dominated by residents working on the land is a fact of life; only about 100,000 people work full time in agriculture and this figure has changed little in 20 years. The mechanisation and industrial nature of modern farming is here to stay, in most places at least.
But villages remain popular and, except where almost certainly too rigid conservation policies prevent it, are growing. Some are healthier than others and the ability to house young families is rightly identified as crucial to vitality.
Tom Fort’s selected villages frequently sadden him, often as a result of the impact of earlier fame but also from the absence of an active cricket or other sports team. And how good it is that he explores them by bike and is fascinated by the crucial work of parish councils.
October 11, 2022
It took a bit of time for me to get up to speed with this book, but I truly enjoyed it. I'm interested in how communities are developed and this book covered that in abundance, using a personable and friendly tone that now makes me want to field trips to all the villages mentioned.
Mainly read at work on break
Mainly read at work on break
March 19, 2024
Some enjoyable accounts of history, which kept a good narrative thread going through the book. Not quite sure he knew what he was defining as a village even though he is clearly keen to preserve it. Occasionally spoiled by the odd smug political reference which displays typical BBC ignorance that anyone might think differently, hence 3* not 4.
November 29, 2022
A disappointingly dull read on what should be such a fascinating subject. It's like an undergrad essay that just goes on and on and on. Or the local beige bank manager turns his hand to writing. No snap, no crackle, no pop.
January 2, 2018
Really interesting especially when the village was one I knew. A book to dip in an out of.
April 1, 2019
Informative, entertaining and cuts through the myths and the nonsense to provide some useful insight.
April 8, 2019
Excellent read !
May 18, 2020
Preferred the author's book on the A303 but decent enough read about the history of villages and the challenges they face especially from property developers
July 18, 2024
4.75 Stars
March 22, 2025
A map to get a better idea of where these villages are would be good.
Will there be similar books for Wales and Scotland? Probably a job for some other authors?
I will definitely search for some of Tom Fort's other books,
Will there be similar books for Wales and Scotland? Probably a job for some other authors?
I will definitely search for some of Tom Fort's other books,
September 11, 2019
Another holiday pickup, which turned out to be a very entertaining read. But it was crying out for a map to locate the villages as he talked about them. His chosen villages reveal how much as changed, but it does get a bit repetitive as he ticks off the features (missing or in place) for with one.
May 11, 2020
Interesting on the range and selection of villages Tom Fort visits, with lots of research and reading based on many of those (the bibliography is vast) this teaches the layperson - like me - who might enjoy a day wandering rural Britain but also those with a curiosity for planning matters, of improvement and it is right when we see how there is, if not a decay, than a blandness that can be said to be pervading our communities traditionally found in the countryside and it’s a shame. From this book I’d definitely seek to visit a few, if the sporadic bus services ran or even existed at all.
Read
May 15, 2018John REad - I read first couple of chapters and enjoyed - might get it again to read remainder
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 2, 2018
Superb book. Beautifully researched and beautifully written. I love this man's work
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews