Social Provision in Rural Wiltshire

Social Provision in Rural Wiltshire was first published in 1952. The original blurb reads:

“Outside Wiltshire, Dr Bracey’s book will be welcomed as an example of a new technique applied to the solution of an urgent rural problem. The problem, briefly, is whether our ancient market centres and administrative boundaries are still the effective centres and boundaries of everyday rural life, and, if not, what are. It is a problem upon which many people are ready to generalize, but Dr Bracey sheds new and clearer light on the problem by taking a typical English rural county and studying it in detail. Not only does he demonstrate, with maps, the many overlapping categories of official division (Parish Councils, Petty Sessional Divisions, etc.); he maps the county according to bus services, shopping centres, banking areas, nursing associations, National Farmers’ Unions, Women’s Institutes, British Legion, Boy Scouts, etc., etc., and from all these items he builds, by sound statistical methods, a concept of “median areas” that correspond to the realities of today.

In addition, he makes a still closer study of one typical village and of the professional, social and commercial services it provides.

Dr Bracey is a member of the Reconstruction Research Group of Bristol University, and his investigation has the support of the Planning Department of Wiltshire County Council.

Within the county this book will be of immediate local interest in every parish; elsewhere, it will serve as an example and guide to all students of similar problems.”

Today it can be read in its historical context.

Howard E. Bracey (1905 –1996) had an international reputation as a rural sociologist, from his work with the European Society for Rural Sociology and the International Committee for Cooperation in Rural Sociology. He was English editor of the European journal Sociologia Ruralis for a number of years and his published works following this one include English Rural Life (1959), Industry and the Countryside (1963), Neighbours (1964) and In Retirement (1966). He went on to become Research Fellow in Rural Sociology with the status of Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Bristol.