Seeing the best in Britain

In this anniversary issue, Simon Jenkins considers what COUNTRY LIFE does each week and why it matters so much.

- 

COUNTRY LIFE is Britain's one serious magazine that is relentlessly happy. Each week, my hand hovers over the heap of pessimism and gloom lying on my doormat. Irresistibly, it moves to a glimmer of light in the darkness, to a reminder that there is still beauty to be found in Britain's natural and manmade environment. If ever I had to put the British Isles on the property market, I would smother it in copies of COUNTRY LIFE.

One hundred and twenty-five years is a good span of history. Memory is dead, but recognition still alive. Much of Britain at the turn of the 20th century would be familiar today. Suburbs were heaving with commuters. Schools and hospitals were proliferating and houses and businesses humming with electric power. Hypermobility was coming of age. Above all, an overwhelmingly urban population was discovering Octavia Hill's 'life-enhancing virtues of pure earth, clean air, and blue sky'.

The magazine founded by Edward Hudson in 1897 was intended to aid that discovery. Initially, it was upper-crust assistance. Hudson was no farmer or forester. He took a gentleman's delight in the joys of the country, his obituary recording that ‘all his life he searched for beauty, for himself and for his beloved COUNTRY LIFE'. But Hudson was also a Liberal. He saw rural Britain not only as a rich playground for the emergent middle class, but suffering from the effects of industry, with its agriculture in desperate need of support.