| Warter...living in an estate village |
WarterUnit 1: Warter, an East Yorkshire estate village
A. What is an estate village?
No two villages are identical. Some are large, others are small, some have shops, others have none, some have a pub, church and a school, many do not, in some the buildings are of stone or timber and thatch yet in others they are built of brick and slate. Some villages are expanding rapidly with lots of new housing, others are declining or unchanging with few or no houses built in the past 50 years. In some villages the houses are clustered around a church or village green, in others the houses are spread over a wide area.
Choose two villages that you know and list the ways in which they are different from each other. Can you suggest reasons why they are different? Some of these reasons will relate to the physical character of the area - is it flat or hilly, is there a good building stone available, was there water power, coal or minerals that led to the growth of industry or was the area purely agricultural? Other reasons will relate to location - is the village near a large town or city, is it near the sea or cut off in an isolated valley?
There are many reasons why villages differ but one of the most important concerns the ownership of the land and houses. In the Victorian period writers called settlements where there were many owners occupying their own property open villages and those where the land and houses were largely in the hands of just one or two landowners, they called close or closed villages. There were, of course, many villages between these two extremes. Closed villages could be further subdivided between those where the main landowner was non-resident and those where the main landowner lived in the village or nearby. The latter are known as estate villages.
In this History Footsteps programme we are going to look at the particular character of the estate village of Warter but before we begin it would help if you looked at your village today so that you can compare it with Warter a hundred years ago.
What is your village like today? [If you live in a town or city, then look at a nearby village.] To help you, you can click here to see some questions you might ask. What was your village like a hundred years ago? This is not so easy to answer but in this unit we make suggestions of sources to help you. Large villages that today have shops, workshops, a petrol station, a church, chapels, a school, more than one pub and lots of new houses are likely to have been open villages in the Victorian period. Small villages that today have, at the most, a church, a school, one shop, maybe a pub and a handful of new houses are likely to have been closed villages. The past is echoed in the present.
Look at the aerial photographs of two East Yorkshire villages taken in the 1970s. Which do you think is the open village and which the closed estate village? Give reasons for your answer.
