London was the centre of the art world. Now it’s the English countryside

Where would you start looking if you wanted to find the heart and soul of British culture? Is there somewhere you can pinpoint, like the source of a great river? “That’s easy!” I used to think, considering these questions. “The city is where art gets made.” From the Italian city-states that birthed the Renaissance to the metropolises of Paris, Berlin and Vienna from which Modernism emerged, dynamic urban environments have provided the settings for important cultural vibe shifts.

The same is true of Britain, isn’t it? Elizabethan theatre flourished in playhouses on the fringes of the capital. Four centuries later, the Young British Artists flocked to empty warehouses in the East End.

A symbiosis between art and cities makes sense. To thrive, significant new art requires certain conditions: the circulation of stimulating ideas; proximity to ever-shifting entertainments; networks of like-minded creative types on the lookout for inspiration. These things are commonplace in cities.

Yet, to deny that culture can also coalesce in the countryside would reflect terrible metropolitan bias, as I realised while visiting Tate Britain’s enthralling new double exhibition devoted to the 20th-century artists Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun, both of whom had a profound sensitivity to the British landscape. Towards the end of his life, Burra depicted rural locations that he believed were menaced by modernity. After the war, Colquhoun settled in Cornwall and produced visionary paintings inspired by topographical features such as standing stones.

Both were products of their times. A generation earlier, the British avant-garde – led by Wyndham Lewis and his fellow Vorticists – had been an urban affair. But hankering after rural spots gradually became de rigueur for progressive artists. (The same period witnessed the British folk-song revival associated with the musician Cecil Sharp.)

In 1907, the artist Eric Gill settled in the Sussex village of Ditchling. A little later, the Bloomsbury set began congregating at Charleston, a few miles to the east. In the 1930s, Paul Nash lived in Dorset, in the coastal town of Swanage, where he cavorted with fellow artist Eileen Agar (the pair became known as the “seaside surrealists”), and painted Event on the Downs (1934), with its mysterious face-off between a tree stump, a cloud, and a levitating tennis ball. By the end of that decade, Ben Nicholson had moved to the Cornish enclave of St Ives.

In 1945, the exiled “degenerate” German artist Kurt Schwitters ended up in Cumbria (following in the footsteps of the artist and writer John Ruskin, who lived in the Lake District from 1872 until his death). During the 1970s, Henry Moore – who for decades had been collecting pleasing pebbles and flints, which he often used as a starting point for new work – made a series of dramatic prints depicting Stonehenge.

It isn’t only aspects of British modernism: various earlier cultural moments could be considered rural phenomena too. Romanticism wouldn’t have happened without a newfound interest in awe-inspiring native mountain scenery: swathes of the country, once written off as desolate wilderness, were now “sublime”. Several artists from the British Isles responded to this fascination for rugged landscapes, including, famously, JMW Turner – who was struck by Snowdonia during a trip to north Wales in 1798 – but also Francis Danby and John Martin, and, of course, James Ward, whose colossal, 14ft-wide Goredale Scar (exhibited 1815), an epic, primordial vision of limestone cliffs in Yorkshire, dominates Tate Britain.

And what was the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement if not a reaction against the Industrial Revolution? Perhaps, like an ancient chalk figure cut into a hill, the spirit of British culture should be located far beyond the city’s gates.

That said, we shouldn’t romanticise the countryside as a bucolic paradise where artists perpetually work and play. The truth is that rural settings aren’t especially conducive to generating culture; country people aren’t known for embracing change or new ideas.

Still, according to Adam Sutherland, the longstanding director of Grizedale Arts (an arts organisation based in a valley in the Lake District), every so often something of lasting cultural importance “blows up” in the countryside – and these “little explosions”, as he put it to me recently, are “all interconnected”, and even represent “a kind of rural movement”.

Are we witnessing another rural “explosion” today? I suspect so. Signs of a so-called “rural renaissance” have been evident for a while – since the success of Jez Butterworth’s rambunctious 2009 play Jerusalem, which was set in the middle of nowhere in Wiltshire, and debuted shortly after the artist Sarah Lucas (the most gifted – and urban – of the YBAs) had swapped Shoreditch for Suffolk. More recently, the BBC’s brilliant “mockumentary sitcom” This Country, which shone a light on everyday ennui in a Cotswolds village, ran for three series between 2017 and 2020.

During the pandemic, people moved out of cities in droves, and “gorpcore” – an outerwear fashion trend associated with hiking – became a thing; judging by the footwear sported in my patch of east London, it’s still going strong. Nature writing by the likes of Olivia Laing and Robert Macfarlane, whose latest best-seller, Is a River Alive?, was published last month, remains popular.

Within visual art, too, there’s been a “turn” towards the rural. In 2021, two artists, Matthew Shaw and Lally MacBeth (whose study of enchanting folk customs, The Lost Folk, will be published by Faber & Faber next week), set up Stone Club (membership: £7), as “a place for stone enthusiasts to congregate”.

Next month, the finale of the National Gallery’s bicentenary celebrations – a “day-long spectacular” in Trafalgar Square orchestrated by the artist Jeremy Deller – will involve hundreds of participants including Boss Morris, a troupe of “progressive” Morris dancers. A few years ago, this would have prompted sniggers. But Boss Morris have performed at Glastonbury and the Brits.

What is motivating this interest in non-urban modes? The root cause may be economic. Thanks to sky-high rents, younger artists can no longer afford to be in the capital. Many are clustering instead in seaside towns where a relationship with the natural world is more pronounced. Is St Leonards the new St Ives?

Since there isn’t much of an art market in these places, they’re also finding other ways to work, e.g., by creating art that’s useful, and embedding themselves in local communities. Rural art is as much a mind-set as a cultural product.

Above all, though, the rural renaissance is surely a reaction to the Digital Age, and a call-to-arms for those of us who are sick of staring endlessly at screens. Back to the land!