Small towns have a place in our hearts, but how long can they survive?
Switzerland needs you. Or more precisely, the tiny Alpine community of Albinen needs you, badly enough that it’s offering £19,000 a head to anyone prepared to move into town and stay there.
Its chief attraction is said to be lots of lovely fresh air; and if that sounds suspiciously like admitting it doesn’t have all that many attractions, therein perhaps lies the problem. Young people are leaving Albinen, shrinking its population to that of a modest hamlet, and not coming back.
And that’s a problem not confined to Switzerland. Small towns and villages all over Britain, from the sleepy shires to post-industrial towns, are now struggling to keep their footing in a world where youth, energy and prosperity are draining away to the city. A million young people have moved out of small communities over the past 30 years, according to the new thinktank Centre for Towns.
These are the rapidly ageing towns whose young people leave for university and don’t return, except at Christmas when they venture into the pubs they used to drink in, and feel half nostalgic, half uncomfortable. One unforeseen consequence of expanding higher education, with almost half of teenagers now going away to university, is that so many get a taste of city life and never look back.
Thanks to their rapidly ageing populations, it’s small towns that will bear the brunt of rising demand for expensive health and social care, just as they are grappling with the painful consequences of economic change. Their factories are closing, high-street shops being replaced by vast warehouses where the only work is picking and packing goods for invisible online customers. All that talk in the budget about investing in driverless cars and tech startups feels as
remote as the moon from low-skilled towns where automation is more likely to cost jobs than bring them.
The cruel irony of small towns’ tendency to support Brexit, meanwhile, is that it may only accelerate their decline. And by the time that becomes painfully obvious – when the jobs disappear overseas and the wage packets shrivel – the populist quacks who peddled Brexit as a miracle cure for whatever ails you will doubtless have long since skipped town, blaming everyone
It will be conventional politicians who have to pick up the pieces. And while initiatives like Centre for Towns don’t have all the answers, at least they are thinking far enough ahead to ask the right questions about what, apart from a sackful of Swiss francs, could make small-town life attractive again.
A few years ago, the Economist caused uproar with an article suggesting some rust-belt towns – places with stagnating economies and rapidly dwindling populations – were beyond saving and should just be left to die out, like those eerie California ghost towns abandoned when the gold
But that’s an inhumane response to communities that have simply found themselves on the wrong side of geography. Small towns occupy a powerful place in British hearts and imaginations, and they have a right to survive. All they need now is a reason to exist.
November 24th 2017 / Gaby Hinsliff / The Guardian