The Observer’s trip to the quiet Essex village of Radwinter in 1985 was a return: in 1965 the magazine had reported on a prize-winning scrapbook prepared by the local Women’s Institute on village life that had apparently ‘caught the attention of the Queen’. Some 900-odd years previously, Radwinter had also featured in the Domesday Book. What had changed, and what had stayed the same?
The village looked much as it had in 1965 (if not 1086), a Jam and Jerusalem scene, with the discreet addition of ‘a few more television aerials, some bungalows for the elderly… a go-ahead young rector.’ But below the tranquil surface, demographic change had altered its fabric irrevocably, just as the picturesque facades of thatched farmworkers cottages were preserved while their insides were ‘gutted to make individual family homes’.
Half Radwinter’s population had arrived in the 10 years since the arrival of the M11 in 1975: commuters, willing to make the 90-minute daily journey to London in return for the promise of peace, or ‘a cottage, an acre of ground and a wife playing at The Good Life with a few chickens’, according to stockbroker Keith Wardley.
But their longed-for rural idyll was under threat: the village’s primary concern in 1965, and still in 1985, was the promised, or threatened, development of nearby Stansted Airport. The 1965 ladies knew which side they were on, declaring, ‘The prospect is far from agreeable,’ but as a 1985 public inquiry delved into the detail, it was older residents who were more positive, optimistic of jobs for locals. There was little nostalgia among them for a lost arcadia: Cyril Richardson, 75, remembered 21-hour days labouring as a farm hand for £1 a week with six month lay-offs in the winter and no dole; George Hall started work in the fields aged nine, and Violet Turpin remembered her whole family gleaning scraps of corn in the fields after harvest to make ends meet.’ They call them the good old days,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘But I don’t think so.’
