THE AWAKENED VILLAGE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 262, 4 November 1932, Page 6

THE AWAKENED VILLAGE.

In twenty English counties a rural community council is now established, livinjr down its unattractive name and usually contriving to reflect some credit on its sponsors (says "The Times"). It consists of representatives of the various county agencies engaged in public work for the countryside, statutory and voluntary alike, with a view to consultation, co-ordina-tion, and the .possibilities of team work, each constituent member retaining complete freedom. Sucli a project would, one imagines, have had short shrift twenty years ago. But after the war the organisations of the countryside, with the women's institutes in the forefront, displayed an energy and purpose till then unknown. The villages were awake and astir, and when the idea was mooted certain county councils in the south agreed to see ■what these uncovenanted services were good for. If the quest be started at the centre of England, in Derbyshire is found a council that lias won a place for itself arul gathered together the entire regiment of initials which nowadays stand for this, that and the other society. The county council, the education authority, the agricultural committee are represented, with their principal officers as ex-officio members, as also are the three universities whose spheres of influence extend to the county, and some thirty bodies, educational, religious, artistic, benevolent. Th 6 council serves as county agency for the playing fields movement, the Society for the Preservation of Rural England, and the youth hostels movement. Its work is divided among appropriate committees. One result ofi the new team work can readily be tested by anyone who motors or tramps through Derbyshire. Ho can go from Ashbourne in the south northwards over the hills as far as Kinderscout "without being assailed by ugly advertisements or obnoxiously painted filling stations. A livery of sober green has "been adopted by the once offensive petrol pumps. Wiring for light and power i 3 going forward, but the routcing is so contrived that you arc seldom aware of poles and pylons, and in the neighbourhood of villages the -wires are carried underground where desirable. In this matter of protecting the countryside from defacement . . . there is a by-law for dealing with offenders who throw litter about or uproot -wild plants; it is supplemented by council literature, and on holidays by council wardens— as in several other council areas. In Kent two hundred and fifty village wardens- have been formed to serve as the eyes of their districts. <It is not too much 'to say that in every one of its twenty areas the community council is coming forward as custodian of its own domain.