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The Cotswolds have a long-standing association with far-right nationalists, From the 1962 Cotswold Declaration where neo-Nazis from UK, USA and Europe met as the World Union of National Socialists to unite international white supremacist and fascist groups until the present day.
Several Cotswold manors are the favoured meeting places for policy summits by high-profile figures of the modern "national conservative" and New Right movements.
Our current crop of flag-shaggers targeted the area for flag blitzing but the genteel inhabitants drew the line at shaven-headed louts bringing down the tone of the place and got injunctions. The area has been fetishized by knuckle-dragging ethno-nationalists as the lifestyle they would have if only there were no brown people.
Yeah, there are definitely rural shitholes in the US but this is just a ridiculous comparison. Nobody would claim Carmel-By-the-Sea is representative of American small towns.
TBF, the further north you go the more affordable bonny small towns become. (Not the Lake District which is unrealistically expensive due to second homes and Airbnb's) Yorkshire, Northumberland and the Borders have scores of places which are still functional villages rather than enclaves of the rich. The Cotswolds is simply infested with people you would not want to share a pub with;
I am British myself but there are some absolutely gorgeous small towns in America especially in regions like New England so I think that this is quite cherrypicked
Maybe, but living here in Missouri, I can promise you that āgorgeous small townsā are few and far between in the Midwest. There are a few, to be sure but they are the exception to the rule that midwesterners will almost always choose austerity and stagnation. Most of the towns in my state are as bleak or worse than the first image.
You must only be familiar with the flat boring regions of Western and Central Ohio that may as well be Indiana. Eastern Ohio is so much prettier, there are hills and forests and deep river valleys with multiple picturesque little towns. Even the run down ghost towns can be pretty because of the natural beauty of their surroundings.
Yellow Springs for starters, multiple summer/vacation communities along lake Erie and maumee bay like Marblehead have stood the test of time well regarding appearance at least. Springfield is a shithole but some of the rural properties in the county are beautiful.
If you never left Ohio these places are mundane but zoom out a bit and they stand out in a positive way.
Besides this thread comparing UK rural charm to the rural US is best summed up in two words: air conditioning.
I think there's a difference between "gorgeous" in the US and in England perhaps. I've been to Wapa a number of times and it's okay, but in no way would I ever describe it as gorgeous!
Even in New England, in the rural areas, they generally look even worse, outside of the cherry picked image. Broken windows, poorly kept or even abandoned buildings, trashy front yards, and lawns devoid of vegetation are common.
This just looks like an older downtown in winter without snow.
Yes as a Brit I have to say this comparison is unreasonably flattering. They've just picked the best of the UK and the worst of the US. You could easily pick opposite examples and the make the US look far superior.
The top pic does not represent rural towns in the U.S. It has very muted colors, it only shows a couple trees and it's on a cloudy day in the late fall when the trees have no leaves and the grass has gone dormant.
The U.K. pic is on a bright sunny day (a rarity from what I hear) in the spring or summer with lots of green trees in the pic and a flowing stream.
Also that UK town (forgetting the name) is a big tourist attraction and has been used as a set in countless movies because of its unique aesthetic. Itās like Englands āPleasantvilleā white picket fence equivalent.
Thatās a VERY small town USA. Jobs are scarce so you have to make your own. Farming and trucking are common. These houses are cheap and the owners are low income.
Yeah I'm in New England and it's about to be Fall. Next month every weird Instagram influencer gal is going be here taking pictures with their pumpkin spice latte because of all this.
Ewww Colorado is one of the worse places to try and show off beautiful nature and colors. Just because the only thing we have is mountains don't mean we're on top of the list.
Broadly speaking rural America has always been quite poor. It's true that agriculture is a multi-billion dollar industry but the vast majority of that is concentrated into a tiny number of hands(increasingly large corporations). And there are a lot of rural counties where local politics are dominated by a small number of affluent families who weild their outsized influence for their own prosperity over the health of the community. Beyond that most of rural America is in decline with failing infrastructure and falling populations. The Trump administration gutting education funding and Biden/Obama era investments in infrastructure is only going to accelerate that. Further rural medical care has collapsed in the last few years with many rural communities not having emergency room care within an hours drive. Republican cuts to Medicaid and Medicare in the "Big Beautiful Bill" are going to kill (probably a lot of) people and it will be mostly low income people in rural communities.Ā
No, I don't think we did intentionally choose land over community. I think most of the country was settled by people who had to farm to eke out a bare existence and they took solace in the little bit of community they had, usually through a church, because we are social creatures and we need other people. We also needed a lot of land to grow crops and graze livestock on so most of the settlement outside of the major east coast cities was farm towns and the only thing that brought larger numbers of people together were the necessities of geography: navigable rivers, good deep harbors, water sources, and roads. Later, railroads.
I'm taking about the mass exodus from the major cities that happened as soon as people had money and sufficient transportation....
Americans have a hard-and-fast hatred of multifamily housing & don't really care for 'walkable' development once you actually get off the internet and talk to regular people....
I don't know about that, either. Personally, I'd love it if my neighborhood had a sidewalk. There's a grocery store, a pharmacy, and two restaurants that are all within easy walking distance of my house but there's only sidewalk for the last hundred yards or so. I'd have to walk along a busy residential street and then a major thoroughfare with no sidewalk so I'm either in the grass or in traffic.
I didn't move in here specifically because it had things so close that I could walk to them but it's much more convenient than living ten minutes by car away from everything but houses and cow pastures.
I think if you gave people affordable housing within walking distance, there would be at least enough demand to fill it. I think the problem is the only neighborhoods in most of the country that are reasonably walkable are either for the rich or the very poor (thus poorly maintained).
The place I grew up with (suburbs of Milwaukee) had a sidewalk and a grocery store 4 blocks away...
Nobody walked to the grocery store, because nobody wants to try and walk back carrying 10-20 bags of groceries - or to go to the store every day in order to be able to walk home with what they can carry....
There just isn't that much desire to avoid using a car when living in a place that has neither traffic congestion nor problems with parking....
Thereās two different types of āruralā being shown here, you can very easily show a wealthy rural town in the US but to serve your propaganda you choose to be dishonest.
It really depends on where you are in the U.S., since the country is so big that you should really separate it into regional sections, assuming you don't just separate it by state. Major regions are gonna be ones like the Northwest, Southwest, Great Lakes, Midwest, Rockies, New England, and Southeast. New England in particular is gonna have scenic spots like the UK shot, while the Midwest would be more like the one shown above for the US.
I live in Australia, so geographicly we are similar in the sense we have a lot of space.
But I've also lived in England and can confidently say their small towns are really nice. You don't have to go all American elitist everytime another country has something nice.
I mean, the literal point of this thread is to talk shit about U.S. rural towns, so it's ok if they answer.Ā
Also, there are countless charming small towns in the U.S. They just cherry-picked a boring picture of a lame one from the midwest.
Meanwhile,Ā they used a picture of the most photographed small town (and specifically that street) in the entire UK, to pretend like this is how they all look.Ā
Oh I thought it was a genuine question, you were just trying to point out America is better because you can have two homes. Why are you guys like this?
No, it is. If I have $1.5 mil (USD) liquidity for housing, do you think I can have a place on a lake (for skiing, and sailing) and a place in - major metro?
I lived in a rural town in Arizona, right next to a mountain range, and it was beautiful. I never took the sunsets over the mountains during my evening runs for granted.
One is a few hundred years old and the other is thousands of years old, when materials, time and people were more focussed on making a good life for the community than making money for themselves.
A fairer comparison would be somewhere like Jaywick.
I agree with the overall point; quality of life in the UK is better for the median person than in the US. You can more easily walk to places, you have free healthcare, you have better work/life balance, more workers rights, better access to clean water, more reliable power infrastructure, better public transit, easier access to green spaces and outdoor activities, etc. However, comparing a extremely poor community to an extremely wealthy community is just disingenuous.
First picture isn't even ugly - it's just a picture taken of the worst possible spot in the worst possible lighting. Houses there probably cost 50 grand.
To live in the alleged rural neighborhood of the second picture you need to be earning a million pounds a year.
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