Devolutionary soul - Paul Kingsnorth, author and journalist

Ben Willis, Regeneration & Renewal, 18 July 2008

Kingsnorth: believes deference to capitalism is ruining English communities

What do the privatisation of public streets in Liverpool, the decline of local pubs and the loss of England's ancient orchards have in common? According to Paul Kingsnorth, they are all symptoms of the erosion of English culture and local identity by the forces of corporate globalisation.

An environmentalist, writer and campaigner, Kingsnorth has never been afraid of a fight. Since his early days as a road protester and the publication of his first book on the struggle of communities around the world against globalisation, he has made a career from railing against injustice.

Now, in his recently published second book, Real England: The Battle Against the Bland, Kingsnorth sets his sights closer to home. "Researching my previous book, people told me how market globalisation was impacting on their cultural identity and landscape," Kingsnorth says. "I noticed the same thing here: distinctiveness of place being replaced with this homogenised corporate identity you can see anywhere in the world."

Kingsnorth travelled the country sniffing out stories to illustrate his argument, from fishing villages in Cornwall to East End markets in London. Along the way he met a diverse cast of characters - farmers, shopkeepers, campaigners - all linked by their struggle to preserve a way of life or piece of local identity. The result is a indictment of the extent to which Kingsnorth believes the interests of big business have been allowed to take hold in England.

Some of the book's bitterest vitriol is reserved for the redevelopment taking place under the banner of urban regeneration. "Regeneration sounds like a good thing, and a lot of the people in the places I went to were keen on the idea," Kingsnorth explains. "But often what's done in the name of regeneration gives regeneration a bad name."

One example, he says, is Queen's Market in Newham, east London, where some locals and traders have been fighting a council-led redevelopment plan for the past three years. Initially, the proposed scheme would have seen the old market building knocked down and replaced by an Asda supermarket and flats - and with significantly reduced space for traders.

"Queen's Market is a really vibrant market in a very crappy old building and everyone who ran a stall was really keen on the idea of having it rebuilt," Kingsnorth says. "That kind of community-led regeneration would have been great, but what they got instead was a very top-down, corporate view of regeneration, in which big developers and the local council were effectively going to price the poor local folk out and replace their space with a supermarket and a load of executive flats."

In the face of opposition, Asda pulled out of the scheme and the council and its developer partner St Modwen agreed to revise their plans with more space for traders. However, the fact that it got to the drawing board, Kingsnorth believes, shows how regeneration is often carried out more with the interests of profits in mind than the communities it concerns.

And he notices a similar pattern in other facets of life: pubs and small breweries selling up to developers; locals priced out of buying a house in their home village; small shops shutting because they can't compete with supermarkets. All of them, he says, are symptoms of the same cause.

It's a theme that could be dismissed as nimbyism or nostalgia, but Kingsnorth says it is more than either of these. "The people I spoke to were not saying: 'We don't want development', they were saying: 'You're destroying our community to profit from it and we don't think that's right'. A lot of these developments are not controlled by the community, and the community never gets involved in a serious way."

But, he adds, citizens are also to blame for letting big business ride roughshod over the local and distinct. "There are probably all sorts of reasons for this, but we're lacking in any sense of civic pride and responsibility," Kingsnorth says. "We seem to have allowed ourselves to be transformed into a country of consumers rather than citizens." Or, as his book ominously puts it, we are becoming "citizens of nowhere".

It's a bleak assessment, but Kingsnorth says he sees a glimmer of hope in the growing groundswell of opposition he witnessed among people interviewed for his book. What is stopping this from snowballing into a "battle against the bland", Kingsnorth believes, is that people feel they lack the power to change things. "The Government's been centralising power for some time, so people feel there's no point in voting at a local level because councils have so little power to do anything," he says.

There are a number of policy changes Kingsnorth says could help communities resist unwanted change. One is participatory budgeting, which is being piloted in the UK, that gives communities control over local regeneration funds. Another is a US model of local democracy in which citizens can force a new law on to the statute books if they can prove genuine support for it.

These changes would have to come from the top of government, and Kingsnorth says they won't happen unless people shout for them. "Authorities don't give power away. You have to take it from them. Unless communities agitate for more power, they're not going to get it."

CV HIGHLIGHTS

1993: Arrested during a direct action operation in the Twyford Down road protest.

1994: Gains BA in modern history from Oxford University.

1999: Appointed deputy editor of The Ecologist magazine.

2003: First book, One No, Many Yeses, on the world anti-globalisation movement published.

2008: Real England published.