Clive Aslet.
Villages of Britain: the 500 villages that made the countryside.
Bloomsbury. 2010
In Clive Aslet’s compendium of five hundred English, Welsh and Scottish villages,
each one has been chosen to put a single aspect of rural Britain under the spotlight:
a country poet, a way of building, an agricultural innovation, a horrible death,
a rare survival, or an exceptional person or event.
Whether delving into the ancient commercial origins of St Michael’s Mount, revealing Aldermaston’s role in the development of motoring (Britain’s first garage opened there in 1920), or savouring ‘the joy of Islay malt’ in Bowmore, Aslet revels in local history and anecdote, but also explores the villages as they are today. He celebrates the vital, evolving nature of the village rather than the popular perception of unchanging rural idyll; and he sees his book as a survey of the British village ‘at a cusp’, looking forward to a renaissance of village life as technology allows people to work where they live once more.