ABSTRACT
The civic gospel pursued by many Nonconformists on provincial town councils very much put urban development roads, gas works, tramways and the like above preservation of the relics of the barbarous past. Urbanization had captured the soul of Britain in the nineteenth century and it was eating up the country in the early twentieth century by the endless extension of its suburban tentacles. Suburbanism, complained R. C. K. Ensor in 1903, had displaced the native culture of the land the folk song with the rubbish of the London music-halls. The language of convenience and comfort that was often used to warrant modernization and often decried as selfish and philistine by preservationists was in this idiom warranted as pious and dutiful. While agriculture is a human activity, it is also traditionally seen as a human activity in harmony with nature, and one could reasonably imagine that traditional Christian doctrine would only support a reasonably non-invasive agriculture that kept this balance.
