ABSTRACT
J. B. Priestley famously summed up his English Journey by dividing the nation into three Englands – 'Old England the country of cathedrals and minsters and manor houses and innes, of Parson and Squire; guide-books and quaint highways and byeways'. Priestley's second England faced divergent development paths after 1918, with stagnation and decay in the north and rapid modernisation in the South. Yet just as the prosperous, southern part of his second England had been transformed into the urban core of his third England, so rural areas accessible from the South East and West Midlands experienced a similarly dramatic transformation into the third England's suburban hinterland and leisure/tourism periphery. Depression in Britain's staple industries, and the areas they dominated, was mirrored by that of British agriculture and most rural areas. Rural and coastal Britain demonstrated a more complex geographical pattern of prosperity than their urban counterpart.
