Have you seen Channel 4's Love Thy Neighbour? The idea is that one of 12 families will win a £300,000 cottage in the idyllic village of Grassington in the Yorkshire Dales, the winner being chosen by a vote by the village itself.
The first programme, which aired on Saturday, featured, inevitably, a black couple and their adorable young children, chosen by the programme makers, no doubt, because the population of Grassington appears to be 100% white. I squirmed in my seat.
People who live in London are habituated to hearing every kind of language on the street. Opposite us, we now have the Pimlico Mas Bazar, a halal butchers and grocers, which attracts a clientele of elegantly dressed men in embroidered caps and heavily veiled women. Its vegetables could have done duty on a medieval battlefield, judging from the number of spikes-even the children of the owners won't admit to eating them. But experiences that seem normal to us would be exotic in the countryside.
I suspect that the families participating in the series have underestimated the challenge of swapping urban amenities for rural seclusion. Whoever wins, I fear the cottage will be on the market again within a year.
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21 of the greatest craftspeople working in Britain today, as chosen by the nation's best designers and architectsWe've persuaded some of the most celebrated names from our Country Life Top 100 to name the craftspeople they have in their own personal little black books.
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The garden created by a forgotten genius of the 1920s, rescued from 'a sorry state of neglect to a level of quality it has not known for over 50 years'George Dillistone’s original Arts-and-Crafts design at Knowle House, East Sussex, has been lovingly restored and updated with contemporary planting. George Plumptre tells more; photography by Clive Nichols.
