Plus ça change? 90 years in the Welsh Countryside

In the ninety years since the foundation of the CPRW in 1928, rural Wales has changed substantially, yet it is far from fanciful to draw parallels between the challenges that concerned the organization in its early days and those facing the Welsh countryside today, or to see continuities in the underlying vulnerability of rural Wales to policies and projects formulated outside the region.

The establishment of the CPRW followed that of its elder sister, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, two years earlier, which had been largely motivated by the spectre of urban encroachment – a topic that CPRW’s second chairman, Clough Williams-Ellis wrote about passionately in his influential book, England and the Octopus. Unsurprisingly, issues of ribbon
development and unregulated advertising also preoccupied early CPRW members. However, for much of rural Wales the problem was a different form of urbanization – not the unchecked expansion of suburbs into the countryside, but the desertion of the land by rural people.