The Too-Small Village
By EDWARD HODGKIN
0 N Thursday, September 29th, a Ministry of Health enquiry is to be held in Letcombe Bassett which will bring the controversy over the fate of this small village one stage nearer solution. It is a controversy which has aroused considerable interest all over the country because, whichever way you look at it, Letcombe Bassett is a test case: a test between pure planning and applied common sense or (if you are of that way of thinking) between reaction and progress. But whatever final decision is made in this particular case will have wide repercussions. There are many Letcombe Bassetts in England, and two or three villages near Wantage alone have had warnings that their fate hinges on that of their neighbour. So it is worth while looking back at the origins of the forthcoming enquiry.
The village of Letcombe Bassett lies in a hollow at the foot of the north slopes of the Berkshire downs, about three miles to the east of Wantage. It is the sort of village (and there are quite a number of them in this part of Berkshire) which is distinguished by being undistinguished ; some of its forty-odd houses are beautiful, some, in particular those put up by the Council at the end of the 1914 war, arc hideous ; it has a church and a Wesleyan chapel, a public house and a post office and a shop, four farms and two racing stables ; the village is equipped with electric light, water and telephone ; three times a day, four days a week, buses go into Wantage. How long people have lived in Bassett it is impossible to say, but since the place finds a mention in Domesday Book it is a fair guess that a community had been established there some hundreds of years before the Normans arrived.
When the war ended Bassett, like every other community in the country, found itself in need of new houses. Twelve of its cottages arc condemned under demolition orders and must come down, while another nineteen could be converted to satisfy Ministry standards, though in the process they would shrink to ten homes. So Bassett embarked on its own modest housing programme. Twelve new houses were suggested by the District Council, and the Agricultural Executive Committee asked for five more for agricul- tural workers. No houses of any sort have, however, been built, nor has reconditioning of old houses begun. The trouble is that the Minister of Health will not allow a village to build a house if its drains are deficient, and drains cost money. So Bassett learned eighteen months ago.
At this stage there appeared on the scene a Planning Officer from Reading. Consulted by the clerk of the Wantage Rural District Council, he paid a brief visit to Bassett, as a result of which he despatched to the clerk a lengthy letter in which he set out his opinions about the problem of providing Bassett with drains and houses. His opinion turned out to be unexpectedly radical. Instead of bringing drains to the people, said the planner, move the people to the drains, which are to be found at the neighbouring village of Letcombe Regis, only a little more than a mile down the Wantage road. The arguments advanced in favour of this idea are, first, that "it will be of benefit to Regis to increase the population there." (Why ? Better because bigger ? Or just because any English village would welcome the introduction of a hundred newcomers ?) Then sewer- age problems would be easier, and it would be nicer for everyone to be two miles from Wantage instead of three. To do the Planning Officer justice, he did not propose to make a complete Lidice of the village ; some decaying gentry and what he calls " key men" on the farms would be allowed to remain, but "as a community I think it would be no worse off with eighty or ninety fewer population if, as I believe, there is no community activity there." His tidy imagination conjured up a charming picture of the deserted village for which planned decay is to be the handmaid of planned change.
" Bassett," he says, " would revert to a little group of farms with associated dwellings for stockmen, &c., side by side with a few houses like the Old Rectory and what might be termed, for lack of a better description, cottage retreats.'" The Ministry of Health requires local councils to provide a " proper drainage system " for the new houses they erect, and though this does not necessarily mean main sewerage, it certainly means something better than most of the houses in Bassett can boast of today. The village is as anxious as any official to improve its drainage. It believes that this could be done locally by a sewerage disposal plant near the village, but that, naturally, to be joined to the Regis system would be preferable. This would probably cost about £8,500 or even slightly over £9,000 for connection with Regis. It seems not impossible that to uproot the villagers and transplant them a mile away from their homes would, eventually, involve a considerably higher expenditure than would the provision of proper drains.
Then there is the ?community " question. Until the appearance of a Planning Officer on the scene it had never occurred to Letcombe Bassett that it was not a community. However, a thousand years of self-conscious existence are not enough. " I take it," said the planner, " that a village must be big enough to provide its inhabitants with at least the minimum communal services which are necessary according to modern standards." Since Letcombe Regis passes this test of modernity, while Letcombe Bassett fails, it is interesting to compare the two. To the reactionary eye it would appear that the only difference between them is that Regis is three times as big as Bassett. Regis has a population of 45o to Bassett's 15o ; Regis has three inns 'to Bassett's one, six racing stables to Bassett's two. Communal services ? Regis has an infant school, which the children of Bassett already attend, travelling the distance daily by bus. (Children from both villages over the age of eleven must go to school in Wantage.) Regis also has, it is pointed out, "a lad's club, cricket and football clubs." The younger generation needs first consideration. " I gathered from conversation with two or three people in Bassett," wrote the planner, " that the younger element in the village, e.g. the girls who go to work in Wantage shops, have not perhaps the same attachment to their home village that the older people have, and would perhaps be only too glad to live somewhere where there is more activity." So, ho! for the metropolis of Letcombe Regis, with its glamorous infant school and cricket club, and when the next generation has grown tired of the bright lights of Letcombe Regis, let the planners move the lot of them on to Wantage, or Oxford, or London, or Stevenage or wherever it is gathered that there is more activity to be had.
But the people of Letcombe Bassett don't want to move. They are as hostile to the idea of migration to Regis as the people of Regis are to the thought of a htpdred immigrants from Bassett. They are unimpressed by text-book arguments about " minimum facilities " and " optimum populations " ; they appreciate their own village activities and the gossip at their own inn. It might also be supposed that, at a time when the Government is trying desperately to encourage agriculture, and when the planners of new towns are worried about the difficulty of creating a community feeling in freshly developed areas, there might be a certain hesitancy among planners to recommend the destruction of an ancient agri- cultural community. The fact that there had been no such hesitation is the most frightening aspect of .the whole affair.
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