On a damp bank-holiday weekend, most peoples’ thoughts turn to a place in the country.  Whether it means a fortifying yomp up the nearest high fell, a few hours fishing in placid  silence, or just a gentle slide from the lunch table towards afternoon oblivion, the idyll remains more or less intact; a house, a family, a garden, the Great British Countryside.  The reality - fourteen unspeaking hours on an M5 contraflow, plus a further fourteen hours of monsoon rain, plus two days spent swearing at the children and trying to find an emergency plumber - just doesn’t seem to hold quite the same weight. 

Four-fifths of the British population now live in cities; three-quarters of them say they wish they didn’t.  And the estate agents know it. There’s something distinctly pornographic about property brochures, with their hyperventilating adjectives and their damn-the-consequences talk of medieval tithe barns, private coastal paths and georgian rectories. Buy magnificent chickens!  Start an enviable smallholding!  Try a splendid knot-garden!  Plant a well-appointed orchard!  Forget about tubes and commuting and multiculturalism - move to a place where everyone’s white and everyone owns a car!

But not everything in the country is as lovely as it first appears.  We, the four-fifths, revere and sentimentalise our image of rural Britain, but the more we revere it, the more we appear to have stopped thinking of it as important.  The country has become a lifestyle choice, like Agas or riding lessons, but those who actually move there full-time are taken to have slunk away from the city in defeat, or gone for the children, or already shaved the sharper edges off their ambitions.  Nobody actually believes that anything significant goes on in the countryside any more.  The city is where it’s at; the countryside is what you do when you’ve done the really important stuff. 
  
The countryside has become a dream in the same way that childhood has become a dream; a place where everything is pure and nothing is real.  A Liverpool University researcher, Francine Watkins, recently spent three months ‘undercover’ in a village in Oxfordshire and published her findings as a PhD thesis, making the shocking discovery that rural life was not, in fact, idyllic, but full of disturbingly realistic people who - like their urban counterparts - occasionally got divorced or had affairs or turned out to be bigots and homophobes.  But the more we exalt the countryside, the the more we also seem to devalue the two groups of people - the farmers and the key workers - who make any of it possible.
Despite this, the passion for second home ownership continues unabated.  In the most coveted areas of England - Cornwall and the Lake District - nurses, firefighters, teachers and shop workers are being forced to turn down jobs by the lack of affordable accommodation.  In the most picturesque villages, there are now so few locals that the infrastructure has begun to break down, forcing primary schools, shops and health centres to close down in the absence of anyone to either use them or staff them. 

True figures on second home ownership in Britain are frustratingly difficult to obtain.  Estimates for England vary between 166,000 (the Association of Second Home Owners),  242,000 (the Government) and 500,000 (the estate agents).  In truth, it’s probably higher; at present, local authorities are not bound to provide data, and owners do not have to declare the property as a second home unless they want to claim the council tax rebate - which, in many areas, has already been reduced to the minimum legal limit.  Anecdotally, some wards in Cornwall and the Lake District are up to about 70% to 80% second homes; according to the incomplete figures, no declared area of Cornwall is higher than 42%.  In Bude only 5% of houses are officially second homes, and in Padstow, 29% are.

Padstow and Newquay were the focus of particular attention earlier this year when threats were made by an organisation calling itself the CNLA - the Cornish National Liberation Army - against Stein and Jamie Oliver’s operations in the towns, accusing them of driving up local house prices and pushing out the local Cornish.  The CNLA’s threats were a reminder of the 1980s campaign by a Welsh organisation called Meibion Glyndwr who, through a combination of arson and letter-bombing, aimed to drive ‘white settlers’ out of Wales.  

Stein’s influence on Padstow has been profound; he currently owns eight separate businesses in the town, from chip shop to cookery school.  And a recent survey put Padstow as the second most expensive seaside town in Britain, with the average price of a house in the town at £334,385.  Stein refused to comment, but Will Ashworth, Director of Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen Cornwall operation in Newquay, said they were ‘disappointed’ by the threats and pointed out that the restaurant’s  aim was to provide opportunities for local people.

But Padstow and Newquay are not unique.  Average house prices in Cornwall are now £226,852, and prices in most areas have risen by more than 300% in the past 10 years.  In many parts of the county, prices are comparable to central London.  Local wages, on the other hand, are still way below the national average.  

Matthew Taylor, Lib Dem MP for Truro and St Austell, has campaigned heavily on the issue.  ‘It’s starting to cause a degree of local panic among the locals, because many of them can’t see  a way for their children to live nearby.  In my surgery, I’m starting to get doctors, teachers and nurses unable to afford homes.  In some cases, they’ve been offered jobs in the area and been forced to turn them down because they can’t find anywhere to live.’

‘At the moment, it seems the only way to deal with the issue is either to concrete over the whole of Cornwall, or to ring-fence some new housing for local people.’  He suggests closing the loopholes which allow private developers to wriggle out of the statutory committment to provide 25% affordable homes within large developments - and a more creative solution.  ‘Maybe the easiest thing to do is to treat it like four-wheel-drive ownership in London.  That’s now becoming socially unacceptable, and maybe we’ll be able to get to a point where owning a second home in Cornwall is also unacceptable.’  

Chris Wood, Cornishman, Vice President of the National Association of Estate Agents, and local estate agent, believes that, ‘In some areas, there are very few real Cornish people left now.  In some of the coastal towns in winter, it’s got to the point where it’s like, the last one out, please turn out the lights.  There is a real issue here; I think government and society as a whole needs to begin examining whether home ownership is a right, or whether it’s just having a home that should be a right.  It wasn’t that long ago that people were happy to have a good quality council house on a reasonable rent for the whole of their lives, but the right-to-buy scheme means those houses just don’t exist any more.’

‘This will change Cornwall in the long term.  Local people will move out, the affluent will move in part-time and then they’ll begin to realise that there’s no-one there to service their needs, to run the shops or staff the health centre or teach at the primary school.  And no-one really knows what happens then.’  

But isn’t this just another Cornish complaint in an endless list of complaints?  The Cornish always seem to be moaning about something, but the economy’s booming, tourism has never been so healthy, and most weekends you can’t get near the county because of all those flocking southwards.  Woods laughs.  ‘Yes, the Cornish do have a good grumble from time to time, but they’re a proud people, they’re proud of who they are, what they are and what they’ve got, and they work very hard to protect that.  They feel threatened by those who don’t understand that, and who don’t protect it.’

And what of his own role, a Cornishman flogging off Cornish homes?  Again, he laughs.  ‘Generally, I’m selling property for local people, and I’m legally bound to get the best prices I can for them.  What that means in practice is that I get great pleasure from squeezing every last drop of blood out of those buyers, especially if they’re not the types we’re particularly fond of.’

The buyers themselves remain unrepentant, claiming that it is local authorities who are to blame for failing to provide sufficient cheap housing in rural areas.  A spokesman for the Second Home Owners’ Club (www.second-homes.org) suggests that, ‘Second homes are a symptom, not a cause. The rise in second homes was part of a reaction to the economic decline in rural areas - the loss of fishing, shipbuilding, crafts, and other industries.  If second home owners hadn’t come into those areas and restored many of the buildings, then they would just have become derelict.’

‘Second home owners tend to move into the quaint, historic and picturesque houses in a village - houses which are too small and unsuitable anyway for young local families.’  But by doing so, they remove much of the available housing.  ‘Yes, but it’s no longer realistic to expect that everyone should be able to live within ten minutes of where they grew up.  No-one expects that in the cities, so why should they expect it in rural areas?’  

‘People can’t have it both ways.  Second home owners sink all their money into their second home because it’s in an area they love.  They choose to spend all their spare time there, though it would be just as easy to take their money out of the country and move to Spain or France.  They may not be welcomed in those areas, but they do care passionately about them, and they do put money into them through paying for fuel or groceries or building work or council tax.’

Kate Tregunner is 34, and a medical lab assistant at Treliske Hospital in Cornwall.  She came originally from the small village of Grampound, moved to Truro for work and has been looking for somewhere permanent to live ever since.  She earns slightly less than £15,000, and £15,000 is the minimum earnings threshold for affordable housing in the area. Other workers in her position have been told not to bother even filling in the forms.  She can’t live with her parents or afford to rent a flat privately, so at present she is renting a room in a house nearby.  The local council isn’t able to house her because there isn’t enough housing stock to accommodate anyone but the homeless, the disabled and the old.  

At times, Tregunner sounds close to despair.  ‘I can’t agree with what the CNLA represent, or what they’re trying to do.  I work in a hospital and I realise exactly what the consequences of those kind of threats would be, but I do recognise how frustrating it is. There’s a couple of internet sites which say, ‘If you want cheap housing in Cornwall, get a tent,’ and they’re right.’  

She does not blame second-homers in particular, but is sure they contribute to the issue.  ‘To be honest, the second-homers are in a different bracket.  The kind of houses they’re buying are way out of reach of most Cornish people, but they do push the prices up.  There are some villages like Porthleven where 80% of the houses are second homes.  In winter, they’re completely dead.’

‘The whole situation keeps me awake at night, and it just makes me sad; I just don’t see any solution, except perhaps moving abroad, and I don’t want to do that.  I’m 34, I work really hard, I try my very best to provide a good service, but anyone in a full-time job in this situation would question why they were carrying on doing it.  We - the lab assistants, the ward clerks, the carers, the cleaners, the Tesco workers, all the people who make this area work and keep it going - none of us can get on the lists for affordable housing because we don’t earn enough.  We just seem to be the lowest priority.  I work all hours, but I don’t know what I’m doing it for any more.’  She pauses.  ‘It’s difficult to talk about it, because it’s very emotional.’

So maybe it isn’t the countryside that needs its head examined.  Maybe it’s us, the urban population, with our insidious dreams of innocence and a swift killing on the property market.  The situation isn’t all bad by any means.  But in some parts of Britain, it’s unquestionably desperate.