This article is an examination of the value of the ‘open-closed’ settlement model. The model has endured as a helpful point of reference in historical investigations of local rural change in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in particular in the study of property and class relations and their influence on the evolution of settlement form. The article is also a consideration of the significance of the work of a chief architect of the model, the historical geographer and local historian Dennis Mills. The model and the contribution of Mills are discussed in relation to initiatives seeking to develop local history of the twentieth century, including the promotion of engagement with interdisciplinary historiographies.

This article studies the role of property rights in social change using the case study of the small village of Sansomáin in Northern Spain between the years 1509 and 1957. The sources are mainly notary and court records and the focus is on the identity of neighbours as the foundation of civil and political rights during the Old Regime, and its translation into the new constitutional order that emerged after the era of the French Revolution. In the village studied, the failure of the Spanish liberal regime in extending the right of citizenship involved the usurpation of the commons by two foreign owners at the expense of the families residing there.

This article argues that the landscape dominated by olive groves that is now seen as characteristic of southern Spain is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the eighteenth, nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, olives were not an industrial crop, grown on a large scale for the production of oil. Instead, olive trees were largely grown by small peasant farmers and used to produce timber and fodder as well as foodstuffs, forming one component of a diverse peasant economy. This article will analyse the changing role of the olive within the landscape of the Spanish Mediterranean, and explore the process by which production moved towards single crop cultivation by large industrial enterprises.

Although historians have become increasingly sensitive to the contested nature of public health and the limitations of sanitary reform, studies have concentrated on the urban. In focusing on rural Wales in the period from the creation of rural sanitary authorities in 1872 to the end of the nineteenth century, the essay shifts the focus to ask questions about what the rural means in the context of public health. By making connections between ideas about the Welsh landscape, nationhood and health, and the nature of sanitary problems facing rural communities and how rural sanitary practices came to be viewed, the essay shows how enduring representations of rural healthiness masked a ‘long tale of filth, neglect, carelessness and disease’ in rural Wales. The essay demonstrates how a bifurcated view of rural Wales as healthy and unhealthy reflected ideas about nationhood and the nature of rural conditions that rendered sanitary problems less visible when they occurred in a rural environment.

The British co-operative movement is associated mainly with industrial areas. Where consumer co-operatives existed in the countryside they were located in market towns and formed by rural trade unions, especially railwaymen, occasionally quarrymen or farmworkers. Yet the Co-operative Union membership encompassed a significant number of small single village societies founded by paternalistic gentry.

This paper draws on examples in Shropshire, East Yorkshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire, to offer an account and explanation of the never before studied, paternalistic co-operatives. Recruiting estate workers and farm labourers, individual country squires showed themselves capable of using a co-operative ideology and framework, usually associated with the labour movement, to achieve very different and paternalistic goals. The relationship between these paternalistic village societies and the wider co-operative movement, both locally and nationally, is discussed, including the company paternalism of the Co-operative Wholesale Society's own farming operations. A comparison with the ‘Blue co-ops’ of the Lancashire Conservative dominated cotton spinners’ union is also made. The paper concludes that the failure of paternalistic co-operatives was part of the post Great War revival of rural cultural conservatism, linked to the effects of agricultural depression.

This article examines the role of work camp movements in developing rural critiques of urban living in interwar Britain. A variety of work camp movements flourished in Europe during the interwar years, often partly as a reaction against urbanisation, and this paper explores the ways in which three such movements developed the work camp as a means of countering the socialising influences of city life. Yet while all of the interwar British work camps were located in the countryside, they varied in the extent to which they tried to promote rural values and orientations among their trainees. We can see the work camp as a liminal pedagogic space, designed to lead trainees to particular educational outcomes, using techniques and methods that focused on bodily change as well as cognitive development.