A realist approach is developed to enable a detailed interpretation of the process of village appraisals at the national and local level, focusing upon the wider national structures and the ways these are shaped by the distinctive characteristics of individual localities and the people and groups who live there. This study focuses on the county of Northamptonshire, which has a long history of self-help and where village appraisals have been taken up with particular enthusiasm.;Given the shift towards local governance in the past two decades, and a growing emphasis on individual and community responsibility and procedures such as the village appraisal which mobilize local skills and resources and empower rural communities from the structures of government, the study involves a detailed investigation of the relationships which currently exist between the statutory authorities and local communities with specific reference to the village appraisal. Further research using participant observation of over 30 steering group meetings in three case-study villages, supported by a survey of over 300 households and 40 interviews with parish councillors and steering group members, gave detailed insights into the means by which local people were availed of the opportunity to participate in the village appraisal process and to shape its content and structure.;The key conclusions indicate that significant tensions are evident in the attitudes of local government agencies, particularly in how they might participate in the village appraisal process and what forms that participation should take. At the local level, the notion of participation, seen as an integral part of rural life, is shown as illusory with most villages and villagers choosing not to become involved. As a result most appraisals are conducted by small elites within the village, often with the token involvement of the population through a questionnaire survey.

This thesis examines a previously neglected aspect of agrarian social and economic history: the work of rural labouring women in nineteenth-century England. The subject is approached firstly through a thorough investigation of a variety of contemporary printed sources: parliamentary papers, census figures, journal articles, books and pamphlet literature. The general pattern of female employment emanating from this analysis suggests a continuity and in some sectors, an increase in rural women’s work opportunities and wages until the 1840s. Thereafter, the sense of decline in women’s economic participation is shown to pervade the printed literature. This ‘official’ model of change forms the background to an in-depth analysis of women’s work at a local level. A three county inquiry - in the East Riding of Yorkshire, Norfolk and Bedfordshire - constitutes the main body of the thesis. These counties all lay in arable-dominated eastern England, but the types and amount of work available to women varied significantly. The sexual division of work and wages, the importance of the family economy, the role of ideology and the significance of the lifecycle are all considered using farm and estate accounts, local newspapers, census enumerators books and autobiographical material. The concepts of work and earnings are used throughout in a broad sense to encompass the whole range of tasks women undertook in the formal and informal economies of the nineteenth-century countryside. However the nature of the surviving sources means that women’s paid employment in the formal economy of nineteenth-century rural England forms the main focus of the thesis. Women’s employment patterns are shown to differ according to the nature of the agricultural system, the method of hiring labour, the crops grown, and the proximity to industry in the three counties. Contrasts in female employment patterns, both between different counties and within the same county are uncovered. In conclusion, it is argued that archival sources also indicate continuity and perhaps a rise in women’s work and earnings opportunities in the period c.1790-1840. In the mid Victorian era the general pattern of women’s work shows a considerable decline from the early nineteenth century trend, and in the period c. 1870-1900, this decline continues. However archival research shows this pattern was not universal and the contradictions and complexities in women’s employment over the nineteenth century are discussed

Although there has been a surge of interest in a geographical approach to the study of children, there is a pro-urban bias in much childhood research. Childhood is seemingly assumed to be an entirely metropolitan experience; there is a paucity of research on rural childhoods. Few studies have investigated girls’ use of outdoor environments, particularly those beyond urban settings. The dominance of pro-urban and ‘malestream’ research tends to hide the experiences of girls living in rural areas. This thesis explores difference and diversity in the lifestyles of 10-15 year olds growing up in South Northamptonshire, employing a multi-stranded methodology including: a questionnaire survey of children; in-depth discussion work with girls centred on child-taken photographs and videos, and interviews with mothers. To try to get close to the lifeworlds of young people, wherever possible their voices are included in the text. The study area represents one type of rural experience - that of an affluent, commuter-dependent area. The theoretical constructs of liminality and habitus are used to help make sense of the use and social ownership of space. A series of factors is shown to interact in various ways to produce complex geographies. Contingency effects of gender, age and location create a multitude of rural lifestyles; there is no universal ‘country childhood’. Girls use and value recreational space in a myriad of ways. Young people often have to share their play spaces, and anxiety, tension and conflict between rival groups is commonplace. Girls and their mothers express concern about stranger-danger, gangs and traffic hazards, and this limits the spatial freedom of some girls. Mothers, deeming the private car the only safe form of transport, determine the spaces in which their daughters spend their leisure time. Rather than providing greater spatial freedom, the rural offers parents more control over their children’s use of public space

Patterns and processes of migration and housing market restructuring in the English countryside have attracted considerable attention over recent years. In contrast to many earlier studies which have failed to examine the way in which these processes are interrelated, this research focuses upon the former local authority sector of the rural housing market in order to explore the key connections between housing market restructuring, migration and rural social change. A realist approach is developed to explore the relationship between households moving through this increasingly important sector of the housing market and wider social and economic structures. This study focuses on the District of South Northamptonshire, an accessible rural district located between principal metropolitan centres where the housing market has been transformed by rapid population growth and high rates of council house sales over recent decades. Analysis is undertaken of the way in which local responses to national housing policy over earlier decades produced a stock of over 4,500 local authority dwellings in the District. Sale of these dwellings under the Right To Buy clauses within the Housing Act (1980) and subsequent resale by tenant-purchasers is a key aspect of the post-1980 restructuring of the housing market and is presenting a unique housing opportunity to increasing numbers of homebuyers in a market characterised by extremely high houseprices and a highly constrained supply of owner-occupied housing. Analysis is based on detailed information relating to 800 households derived from interviews with purchasers of resold dwellings and local authority housing records. The impact of these changes is examined at a variety of spatial scales from the national context, to the impact on individual settlements. Throughout the research findings are related to contemporary debates about rural housing policy and ‘social’ housing provision; social theory and the study of housing, migration and social change in the countryside; and the implications for future related studies