5 - Regenerating Rural Life

Summary

This chapter looks at the projects that the Elmhirsts instigated on their estate to promote agricultural and industrial revival and democratic participation. It positions Dartington amid the many interwar rural reform ventures with which it cross-pollinated, from the New Deal in America and Sriniketan in India to Rolf Gardiner’s Springhead and government smallholding schemes in Britain. Dorothy and Leonard’s philosophy of rural regeneration – attempting to combine ‘microscopic’ support for community life with the ‘macroscopic’ approach that was international in its outlook – prefigured and helped shape the phenomenon central to the later twentieth century. The sociologist Roland Robertson calls this ‘glocalisation’: a process by which local community is reconfigured, and even strengthened, by global forces. The gradual migration of the Elmhirsts’ vision of Dartington – from a self-governing, holistically integrated collective to an outpost of centralised social planning – dovetailed effectively into plans for national reconstruction during and after the Second World War.