Industrial+redundancy

The large clay fields, deep-ditched and drained, are now farmed as part of a neighbouring estate. Linstead Magna Hall is occupied by two parents, and a son, and his grandmother. Father and son motor in to work in the new factory at Halesworth. Granny looks after a very pretty old-fashioned front garden. The countryside has changed. Even at Linstead, whose name implies that flax was grown here by its first cultivators before the coming of the Normans, and whose heavy fields would anyway turn over only for a very tough plough-team (however mechanised), the land is still fully productive. In 1971, when so much industrial redundancy was causing so much anxiety all over Britain, it is some consolation that the severities endured by our Victorian forebears meant that in the Suffolk countryside automation and the attendant unpeopling of the landscape can hardly go much further. How far the separate planning policies of the two county authorities are modifying the main economic effects, and whether any of those policies have a hope of surviving the impending reorganisation of local government, are controversial matters. They may one day warrant a book entitled The Twentieth-Century Remaking of the Suffolk Landscape.

//The Suffolk Landscape//, Norman Scarfe, Hodder & Staughton (1972)