🏪 Fewer services
When a village has too few customers, shops, pubs, post offices and primary schools can close. Once they have gone, residents must travel to a bigger town for food, banking and school.
Changing Rural Environments » Rural Change in a Developed Country
What you'll learn this session
Study time: 30 minutes
Edexcel spec: 5.2b Factors leading to rural change in a named developed country
- Why rural areas change, using the United Kingdom as the named developed country
- Rural isolation: what it is and what it does to villages
- The decline in farm employment and why it happened
- Tourist pressures: the good and the bad for rural communities
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Unlock This CourseRural change in the United Kingdom
Rural areas are never fixed. Jobs, services and the number of people can all change over time. The spec asks you to know the factors leading to rural change in a named developed country. In this lesson the named country is the United Kingdom (UK). Three factors are covered here: rural isolation, the decline in farm employment and tourist pressures. The other factors on the spec list come in the next lesson.
A developed country is one with a high income and many services. The UK fits this well. Most people live in towns and cities, yet a large part of the land is still countryside.
Key terms:
- Rural change: a change in the jobs, people, services or land use of a countryside area.
- Rural isolation: when a rural community is far from services, jobs and other settlements, and is hard to reach.
- Farm employment: the number of people who work on farms.
- Mechanisation: using machines to do work that people or animals once did.
- Tourist pressure: the strain put on a place, and the changes made to it, by large numbers of visitors.
Factor 1: rural isolation
Many villages in the UK are a long way from towns. Isolation gets worse when services close, because people have to travel further for the things they need.
🚗 Reliance on cars
Bus services in the countryside are often infrequent, and some routes have been cut because few people use them. People who cannot drive, such as teenagers and many older residents, can feel cut off.
Rural isolation also affects communication. Remote areas, such as parts of the Scottish Highlands and Wales, have often had slower broadband and a weaker mobile signal than towns. This makes it harder to run a business or work from home.
The result: isolation can push people to leave. Young adults move to towns for jobs, university and a social life. With fewer young people, the population ages and services lose even more customers. This is a cycle that makes the village weaker over time.
Factor 2: decline in farm employment
Farming used to be one of the biggest employers in the countryside, with many more workers than today. Now it employs only a small percentage of UK workers, roughly 1 or 2 out of every 100. Farms are still important for producing food and looking after the land, but they need far fewer people.
🚜 Mechanisation
Tractors, combine harvesters and milking machines let one worker do the job of many. A modern combine harvester can harvest a field much faster than a team of people with hand tools.
💰 Bigger farms, tight profits
Small farms can struggle to make a profit when prices for their products are low. Many have joined together or been sold to larger farms. Fewer farms means fewer farm jobs.
When farm jobs fall, local families lose their income. If there are no other jobs close by, people move away. Farm workers' cottages may be sold as homes or holiday lets, and the village population changes.
Factor 3: tourist pressures
Many UK rural areas are popular with visitors. National parks such as the Lake District, and coastlines such as Cornwall, attract millions of visits a year. Tourism can change a rural area a great deal, for better and for worse.
✅ Benefits
Visitors spend money in local cafes, pubs, shops and hotels. This creates jobs and can keep services open. Tourism can also give farmers extra income from camping, bed and breakfast or farm shops.
❌ Problems
Busy roads and full car parks cause traffic jams. Footpaths wear away where many people walk, and litter can harm wildlife. Many tourist jobs are seasonal, so work is not steady all year.
Another pressure is housing. In popular places, some houses are bought as holiday homes or second homes, and stand empty for much of the year. House prices go up, so local people on low wages cannot afford to buy. This is well known in parts of Cornwall and the Lake District. When many houses are empty in winter, the village can feel quiet, and the school or shop may lose customers.
Linking the three factors
The factors often work together. Fewer farm jobs push young people out, isolation makes life hard for those left behind, and tourism may bring jobs but also higher house prices. Examiners like answers that link causes in this way.
Common mistakes
- Writing about a country that is not named. Always say the United Kingdom, or a named place in it.
- Saying farming has disappeared. It has not. Farms still produce lots of food, but with far fewer workers.
- Saying tourism is only good or only bad. Give both sides.
- Mixing in suburbanisation or counter-urbanisation. Those come in the next lesson.
Exam-style question
(a) Explain how the decline in farm employment has led to rural change in a named developed country you have studied. [3 marks]
(b) Describe two problems that tourist pressures can cause in a rural area. [2 marks]
Model answer
(a) In the UK, machines such as combine harvesters now do work that many people once did, so farms need fewer workers (1). Fewer farm jobs means local families lose income, and young people leave the village to find work elsewhere (1). This makes the population older, and services such as the village shop and school lose customers and may close (1).
(b) Traffic jams and crowded car parks happen when many visitors arrive by car (1). House prices rise when homes are bought as holiday homes, so local people cannot afford to live there (1).
Exam tip
In a 3-mark "explain" question, write a chain of linked points: cause, then effect, then result. Use words like "so", "which means" and "this leads to" to show the links.