In 1954 Michael Young, who went on to found the Open University and the School for Social Entrepreneurs, among much else, paid a visit to New Earswick, the village on the outskirts of York established by Joseph Rowntree fifty years earlier. As a result of his visit, Young wrote an article ‘Changing Life in a Village Community.’[1]
The word ‘community’ said Young, ‘is liable to be mixed up in one’s mind with a sort of idealisation of the past.’When people talk of community ‘we wait for the far-away tone of voice – showing that it means a great deal to them but they do not know precisely what.’
Young was well aware of the reforming social vision that lay behind New Earswick:‘Joseph Rowntree wanted to do more than create a model village: he wanted to plant not only trees but people.He wanted to make a community come to life.‘
However, Young recognised that even in the 1950s traditional forms of community life were becoming very much harder to maintain, as new technologies eroded narrow boundaries of place.‘I found that the village is in many ways far less of a community than it was,’ he wrote.Transport and television had made New Earswick more like everywhere else, and there had been a lessening of the sense of ‘its being a place to belong to, a place with an identity all of its own.’
Young asked, ‘can community feeling be preserved when transport, the radio, when really everything that belongs to the contemporary world is breaking down boundaries all the time?’We all belong to the world, ‘the trouble is, the world is too big.It is too big a place for anyone to feel at home in.’
The success of the schools in New Earswick meant that young people left: ‘the result is that the parents whose children have left home are still in New Earswick but half their hearts are elsewhere.’Despite this, Young claimed there was still a sense of community in Earswick.He identified three factors which he believed were necessary for community to exist:
Length of residence
‘Many people have lived there long enough to put down roots.They have not had to change their friends or their grocer and milkman every few years or so.’
A place with a character of its own
New Earswick is distinguishable from its surroundings.‘The way the trees are planted, the way the houses are built, gives it an individual character.’It is a ‘place you can belong to because it is different.’
People who share a common history
Young related how no less than six people told him how long ago ‘old Sam Davis the chemist’ started the first bus service: ‘Their faces lighted up as they recalled the ‘yellow Peril’ as they called it …this shared tradition, the shared knowledge of old experiences, or old stories of experiences handed down, is one of the intangible things which make people feel they belong somewhere.’
Young asked whether a sense of shared history can be created artificially, and how it could have developed from a deliberately established model village.Rowntree’s success, Young believed, was because ‘consciously or unconsciously he knew that people must be allowed to make their own history and create their own community, and he showed his wisdom by not doing everything for them – by allowing for growth and for the free exertion of the people. … he did not for instance set up a village council.He waited for the people to do it themselves.’
Young concluded that the Earswick experiment succeeded and ‘more important – it has worked as a kind of laboratory for town planners to learn something about the sources of community feeling.’
But he said, one key problem remains, that the young move away.That problem could not wholly be overcome, but social housing rules were a factor that exacerbated the problem. . As Young explained, the rules favour an outsider with housing needs, but that meant that the children of the community had no choice but to leave, and who would then look after people when they become old?If the elderly could have their children and grandchildren around them they would not ‘need to depend entirely upon the Trust or the state’
Young concluded that ‘It is not just a question of money: there is something at stake much bigger than that.For old people – or anyone else, for that matter – the worst thing is loneliness.By housing today’s children the Trust would be preventing tomorrow’s loneliness.And they would be helping to keep alive the community spirit so dear to Joseph Rowntree.’
[1] Published in The Listener, 23 September 1954.
