AN UNINTENDED COMMUNITY IN THE WELSH HINTERLAND Networks, Lifestyles, Relationships David Frost 2 An Unintended Community in the Welsh Hinterland - Networks, Lifestyles, Relationships Starting in the late 1970s, not long after I joined the urban exodus that saw significant inward migration to rural Wales, I kept a file of notes and observations on the situation and experiences of those around me who had moved to West Wales. Thirty years on, at the turn of the millennium, I made a summary and in this paper I discuss the main social trends that I identified at the time, adding additional and more recent material. Migration and social networks My earliest observation was that the migrants had come from many different, overwhelmingly urban, places and I pondered the reasons why they had moved to Wales; and whether, having assembled themselves in the hinterlands of Machynlleth, Aberystwyth, Tregaron, Aberaeron and Cardigan, they had become a community, albeit a loose-knit and spatially dispersed one. One reason for their migration seemed to be the persistence of the rural idyll, a romantic yearning for an idealised countryside, which I examined in my article for the Organic Grower Magazine, “Mud on the Tracks” (2016). Part of the rural idyll is the notion of community, and many writers have contrasted the community life of rural society with the supposedly atomised life of urban society. My search of the literature on rural communities led me to the conclusion however, that our 1970s migration to West Wales was a variant of what sociologists call intentional communities, which are also known as utopian communities. According to cultural anthropologist Susan Love Brown, people turn away from their existing communities when they face difficulties in making the human connections necessary to sustain them or when the rules and understandings that once served them well no longer apply. They turn, “toward intentional community with an eye toward setting things right in a more intimate setting.” (Brown, 2002 p. 6). Elements of this description applied to many of the 1970s West Wales migrants as I discussed in ‘New Farmers, New Growers’ (2014) and ‘Mud on the tracks’ (2016) but only a minority of the early members deliberately intended to form a community. In some cases they may have wanted to live and work communally but they knew nothing of those others who were making simultaneous decisions. The West Wales migrants, I decided, would be better described as an unintended community. Most theories of why migrants moved from urban to rural areas in the 1970s point to the importance of structural reasons. They identify pull factors such as the rural idyll, the dream of self-sufficiency and the lure of inexpensive land and property. They also speak of this counter-urban movement in terms of push factors like the rejection of materialism, careerism and the bourgeois life-styles of urban life and the dissatisfaction with housing costs, traffic congestion and lengthy commutes to work. As well as these structural reasons I wanted to understand how migrants’ individual agency had brought them to West Wales, why urbanites had reacted to these structural forces and what personal reasons and decisions had brought them to this location at this particular time. I struggled with these questions until reflections on my own experience and my personal conjuncture in 1976 (the year I moved from London to West Wales) led 3 to an appreciation of the role of social networks in migrant flows. In social network theory individuals are embedded in a network of social relationships and interactions and to examine the role of social networks in the West Wales case and to supplement my own knowledge and records, this paper draws on Nicholas Ford’s 1982 PhD thesis, “Consciousness and Lifestyle: Alternative Developments in the Culture and Economy of Rural Dyfed” (Ford, 1982) and the 2014 Ceredigion Museum exhibition “Towards the West, a Varied Crowd” curated by Jez Danks (Amgueddfa Ceredigion Museum, 2015). When, in 2014, I compared the list of respondents interviewed by Ford with the list of contributors interviewed for the Ceredigion Museum exhibition, I found that despite the time interval, 48 of the 57 contributors to the exhibition had been among the 100 migrants to West Wales interviewed by Ford more than 30 years earlier. Ford’s interviewees were selected (primarily though not exclusively) from the membership list supplied by the West Wales Soil Association whereas the contributors to the Ceredigion Museum exhibition were selected members of Danks’ social network. Although the geographical areas covered by the two populations are not coterminous, there is considerable overlap. Ford’s interviewees were primarily from the south Ceredigion area of Tregaron, Lampeter, Llandyssul and Crymych whereas more of the exhibition contributors were from further north, from Machynlleth and Aberystwyth, from the scattered Ceredigion villages of Mynydd Bach and extending south to Lampeter and Tregaron. Ford’s overall aim was ‘to explore the human consciousness and lifestyle dimension of the contemporary ecological crisis’ which he defined as a resource crisis and a crisis of environmental degradation. His research consisted of a field study of migrants to Wales who were developing what he called a ‘Back to the Land’ or ‘Self-sufficient Lifestyle’. Ford undertook interviews in south Ceredigion and explored the background and origins of changes in lifestyle, the ideas behind these changes and the ways they were translated into practice. His sample of 100 households comprised relatively young families living on small-holdings, who had arrived in West Wales between 1973 and 1977. Nearly half the households had moved to West Wales from South East England with just under a quarter from London. Nearly a fifth came from the Midlands with the remainder from other areas of England, from Wales, from abroad and from ‘all over the place’. Very few of his interviewees had any prior knowledge of West Wales beyond limited personal experiences. Ford found that the main push factor influencing people to move was disaffection with consumer society. The pull-factors were the appeal of an alternative lifestyle in retirement, positive encounters with alternative ideologies, childhood influences and drug experiences. The particular attraction of West Wales was the cheap price of property and for some, the opportunity to join established alternative life-style projects. For the 2014 Ceredigion Museum exhibition, Danks asked 57 contributors to the exhibition, all of whom were circa-1970s migrants, to provide short written answers to the questions, “what were you doing before you moved to West Wales?” and, what were the “Reasons/circumstances of your move?” My initial examination of the answers undertaken for the exhibition (Amgueddfa 4 Ceredigion Museum, 2015) showed that the largest group, almost half of all the contributors, moved to West Wales in the 1970s from London and the South- East of England. The remainder moved from other areas of England with a smaller number who had moved from elsewhere in Wales, from Northern Ireland or had been travelling. Prior to their move, the majority of Ceredigion Museum exhibition contributors (forty percent) had been in education. Of these, half were school leavers or students and the other half had been teachers, lecturers or researchers. The next two largest groups had either been involved in the arts or craftwork (18%) in various retail or catering occupations (12%) or in professional work (11%). Only a small number (7%) had previously been involved in farming or gardening. The most frequently given reasons for moving to West Wales were to farm, to grow vegetables, to be self-sufficient, to move from the city to the countryside and to change their lifestyle. Over sixty percent of the contributors recalled such reasons for their move in the 1970s. Of the rest just over ten percent came to study or to teach (mainly at the two local universities) or moved for work reasons. My subsequent further analysis of the Ceredigion Museum exhibition contributors’ answers showed that 19 of the respondents (40%) had moved with a group of friends, indicating that many people moved not as individuals but as members of a friendship network. Here it is important to note that at the time when they moved to West Wales, the overwhelming majority of migrants were young adults. Significantly, a large group said that they moved to West Wales intending to become students. This group either dropped out of their studies or stayed in the area after graduation. Other contributors said they had moved back to the area of Wales in which they had been born; or to the area they had visited as a child; or to join relatives who lived locally, some others moved to take up a job, or to buy a farm. The analysis is shown in the Appendix. The role of universities and colleges in establishing networks is apparent in the comments from Ceredigion Museum exhibition contributors who didn’t move to become students themselves, but rather came to join friends and acquaintances who had already moved to West Wales to study. Although without further investigation there is little evidence to support the hypothesis, it is probable that Lampeter University rather than Aberystwyth, played a role in attracting some of the earliest migrants to West Wales – those who arrived in the very early 1970s and the 1960si. What seems clear is that the earlier in-migrants tended to be those who Ford (1982) labeled as ‘drifters’, and were labeled ‘hippies’ by the local receiving community, as I described in ‘Nobody’s People’ (2018a). Ford also found that a number of his respondents who arrived between 1973 and 1977 had moved to join established groups. My hypothesis is that these groups were attracted to the Lampeter area because of its appeal which in the words of one smallholder interviewed by Ford, related back to “the dream of the hippies in London in the 1960s to go out to Shetland or Wales…” (Ford, 1982 p.