Welsh Journals

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6. 'A MILLION ON THE MOVE'?: POPULATION CHANGE AND RURAL WALES Graham Day 'A quiet revolution has begun. The Welshman quits his ancestral hills and the representative of an alien, city culture moves in.' (Jacobs, 1972, p.l) For rural Wales, the 1970s and early 1980s were in some respects a considerable success story. It shared in what has been called the 'spectacular renaissance' of rural areas throughout Britain (Lash and Urry, 1987). Nevertheless, it remains possible to see rural Wales as having a deeply troubled future, since the transformation in the nature of 'rural' society responsible for these developments is by no means completed, and there are some ominous aspects to contemporary change. Indeed, there has been growing public discussion and concern about the 'crisis' facing the Welsh countryside, especially with regard to the impact of large-scale population movement (for example, Osmond, 1987; Carter, 1988). This chapter is intended to examine the reasons behind recent migration, and to indicate some of its likely consequences. ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION AND POPULATION MOVEMENTS During the last 10 to 20 years rural Britain as a whole has seen a reversal of the previous long-established trend to depopulation, the number of rural residents increasing by some eight per cent between 1971 and 1981, whereas the total British population has stagnated (growing only by 0.6%). This phenomenon is quite general, occurring also in many other Western European countries and in North America, leading to considerable discussion of the causes of a new phase of 'counter-urbanization'. The underlying pattern has been one of 'decentralization', involving sizeable movements out of the larger urban