Research, media, policy and public attention have traditionally tended to focus on exploring the reasons for, extent of and responses to urban poverty, and particularly poverty experienced in the UK's biggest cities (Pacione, 2004). In contrast to other countries, such as the USA (Shucksmith and Schafft, 2012; Tickamyer et al, 2017), poverty in the UK has been widely viewed as primarily an urban phenomenon, associated with concentrations of poor housing, unemployment and social problems, with rural areas viewed in contrasting terms as idyllic and affluent (see, for example, Cloke et al, 2000a; 2000b; Milbourne, 2014). Indeed, Pacione (2004) argues that when the term ‘rural disadvantage’ entered policy debates in the UK in the 1970s, it suffered from a serious lack of credibility, with many arguing it was a contradiction in terms (McLaughlin, 1991). Popular perceptions of rural areas and rural society at the time were generally characterised by images of an unchanging, comparatively affluent environment where the policy priority was the protection of the rural way of life. By contrast, deprivation was viewed as an urban phenomenon, characterised by highly visible poor housing, unemployment and dereliction (Woodward, 1996).

In addition to its urban focus, research on poverty has more often than not tended to take a fairly static and statistical data-focused approach, rather than being grounded in, or even incorporating, more qualitative studies of individuals’ and households’ lived experiences of low income (that is, limited monetary resources measured against a national level) alongside other factors such as poor health, low educational attainment, social isolation, precarious housing situations and cultural marginalisation (Lister, 2004; Milbourne, 2014; Milbourne and Coulson, 2020).

May et al (2020) noted that the focus on urban poverty remains (see also Williams and Doyle, 2016), with rural poverty tending to receive far less attention among UK academics and policy makers than urban poverty. Having said that, there has been an increasing recognition, in research terms at least, that some rural dwellers may suffer from similar challenges to those experienced in deprived urban neighbourhoods, including poor employment situations and a lack of appropriate and affordable housing, but that there are additional and specifically rural factors which may – often in combination – exacerbate the experience of poverty and exclusion in rural places.