Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 304

This volume is an important historical contribution to the under-examined question of how the British countryside became electrified. Earlier scholarship has considered rural issues alongside a dominant urban focus and through debates over electricity’s landscape and environmental impacts. Here, rural life is centre stage. With roots in a project led by the late Alun Howkins and a 2013 conference, the book forms part of Routledge’s Rural Worlds series and is edited by leading rural historians Paul Brassley, Jeremy Burchardt, and Karen Sayer. Twelve individual contributors include some leading scholars in rural, energy and environmental history. While varied in approach and regional focus, collectively they demonstrate the complexity of this energy transition in Britain and beyond, examining themes of rural modernity and agency, regional and national difference, the intersection of technological change and everyday lives, and the role of institutions in expanding networks.

Difficulties shared across case studies include mutually reinforcing high costs and low demand in sparsely populated areas, and (for users) the inconvenience of electricity compared with trusted sources of heat and power. Enthusiasm for electric lighting was a widespread exception. Breakthroughs are shown to have been as much political as technical. Alongside the National Grid, developed from 1926, emerging national and regional governance bodies – especially post-war nationalization of electricity supply – provided policy direction and economies to aid rural distribution and consumer take-up by the 1950s and ’60s. The international studies also suggest the significance of state support.

The first of three sections (the ‘progress of electrification’) explores technical and political challenges. Karl Ditt’s chapter, translated from German, surveys rural electrification in England from the 1880s to the eve of the Second World War. Early tensions between local authority and private undertakings ensured fragmented supply areas and inhibited coordinated action. John Sheail brings his lucid analysis of policy debates to conflicts over the impacts of electricity infrastructure on salmon rivers and rural landscapes in Britain. Protests from the 1920s onwards, he argues, spawned protections that helped form the basis of current environmental legislation. Scotland and Wales are distinct here despite their similar mix of coal in the south and hydro resources to the north. In Richard Moore-Colyer’s study of the lesser-known case of Wales (revised from an earlier article), communities’ distinct cultural identities, and attachments to established farming and domestic energy-use practices, proved resistant to electricity industry visions of ‘efficiency’. The awkward persistence of rural practices is a theme taken up in several later chapters. By contrast, rural electrification appears a relatively straightforward process in David Fleetwood’s account of the Scottish Highlands. 1940s social policy underpinned the state-sponsored harnessing of rivers to bring the benefits of electricity to remote homes and industry. Paul Brassley’s in-depth examination of halting electrification in England’s farms, with a case study of remote south-west England, shows that farmers’ use of oil and gas equipment persisted until the post-war regional electricity boards brought economies of scale.

The second section (‘effects of electrification’) delves deeper into everyday priorities in contrasting visions of ‘lived experience’ in post-war rural Britain. Karen Sayer’s rich study of post-war rural homes, drawing on farming publications and personal memoirs, shows how pre-existing energy sources retained a currency that frustrated electricity industry attempts to shape modernity in its own image. Despite electricity promotions targeting the rural ‘housewife’, the latest Calor Gas stove or solid fuel Rayburn represented alternative modernities. Rural agency takes a different form in Rosemary Shirley’s visual analysis of Women’s Institute village scrapbooks from the 1960s. For Shirley, these sources reveal an embrace of electrical life, whether signalled by ‘early adopters’ of the deep freeze, by fields given over to frozen pea production, or by the acceptance of new infrastructure. A scrapbook representation of pylons – part of the Grid’s contested modernity in Sheail’s chapter – suggests that the interweaving of modernity and tradition was now integral to rural life.

In the third section (‘comparisons across space and time’), rural electrification proved challenging even for two turn-of-the-century pioneers of hydroelectricity. Carin Martiin highlights Sweden’s distinctively rural setting for early electrification, developed by groups such as mill owners and farmers, rather than radiating out from urban areas. But here too supplies were fragmented and take-up partial; the wood stove remained ‘the heart of the house’. Sweden’s welfare state, Martiin hints, was ultimately crucial to rural electrification in the 1950s and ’60s. Ruth Sandwell’s engaging discussion of Canada is also a story of gradual, uneven development across its provinces, despite strong and still dominant hydroelectric resources (with a slow incorporation of coal, oil and nuclear sources of generation only from the 1960s). In contrast to its current soaring levels of per capita electricity consumption, up to the 1950s Canada’s mostly rural population resisted electric equipment, with cultures of domestic life shaped by seasonal labour patterns and cheap or freely available wood fuel. Martyn Warren’s interesting comparative case of rural broadband shows a changed world of communications giants, EU regulations, and a vocal rural middle class. But similarities to electrification include broadband’s difficulties as a network more suited to lucrative urban areas, echoes of debates over the role of the state and public finance, and uneven service levels that fall short of democratic entitlements to universal provision: a ‘mutating digital divide’ forged by rapidly changing technologies.

This volume is a thought-provoking exploration of interactions of technology, politics and everyday life that have transformed the countryside over the past 140 years. It would be good to see more scrutiny of the frequent early twentieth-century claim that electricity would stem Britain’s rural depopulation. And there is, inevitably, some repetition of key technical and political developments across the chapters, but these are framed by nuanced interpretative approaches drawing on diverse sources, from industry records to farm surveys and oral histories. With its strong thematic discussions in the editors’ introduction and conclusion (and a helpful index), this is highly recommended for scholars and students of rural societies, of energy transitions and of inter-relationships between technology and culture.