Welsh Journals

3. 'THERE'S SO MANY STRANGERS IN THE ( VILLAGE NOW': MARGINALIZATION AND CHANGE IN 1990s WELSH RURAL LIFE-STYLES Paul Cloke, Mark Goodwin and Paul Milbourne INTRODUCTION: RESEARCHING RURAL LIFE-STYLES In this paper we summarize the findings of a research project carried out between 1990 and 1994 in four areas of rural Wales. The research was part of a wider programme which was designed to paint a picture of what rural life was like in 1990 and to place that picture in the context of changing opportu- nities in rural areas. In particular it was undertaken in a context whereby rural areas were widely recognized as locations where deprivation exists 2 but at the same time such recognition was only partly being translated into policy mech- anisms with which to address these issues. Here we should acknowledge not only the impacts of an 'enterprise economy' government through the 1980s on development agencies in Wales (see Howe, 1993), but also that particular meanings are increasingly being attached to 'rurality' and 'rural life', espe- cially in the ways in which the rural is represented in popular culture through advertising, literature, art and the media (see Cloke, 1995; Halfacree, 1993; Gruffudd, 1994a). There is a strong sense in which rurality is represented and reproduced in these various discourses as the space of idyll-ized living a happy, healthy, problem-free existence where a close-knit community and closeness to nature and landscape are somehow an organic benefit to living standards and life- styles. Such an idyll draws firmly from a mythological view of rural history, and is reproduced through the contemporary processes of advertising and selling of places (Gruffudd, 1994b; Matless, 1994). It has also permitted delib- erate filtering out of poverty issues in the language and images which are used to promote recent government attitudes, such that if rural areas are the 'natural' repositories of idyll-ized living, then how can poverty exist there? Equally, if adventitious populations move into rural areas on the basis of an idyll-ized