Hidden hardship: everyday experiences, coping strategies, and barriers to wellbeing in rural Britain

Poverty in the UK is more often associated in public discourse, the media, and in policy with urban than rural areas. With the exception of notable pieces in rural geographies, research across the social sciences has also focussed more on urban than rural poverty. This is mistaken: rural poverty is a significant problem too. This paper focusses on rural hardship in the Cotswolds in the UK which is an area associated with affluence, super-rich celebrities, and royalty. Through participatory research, this paper seeks to understand how people in the North Cotswolds experience hardship, their coping strategies, and the barriers to improved wellbeing. It argues that the North Cotswolds is an area of hidden hardship which means that the rural idyll needs challenging further in public and policy discourse, which research such as this can play a role in. In doing so, this paper’s primary contribution is to have developed the conceptual language of hardship. This is significant for three main reasons. First, the paper argues that the language of hardship is more accessible methodologically, and secondly, that hardship can be a more encapsulating, holistic and multidimensional term than poverty. Thirdly, by using the theoretical lens of the philosopher Spinoza and his concepts of affect, affective capacity and conatus, the paper develops an original way of understanding hardship that results in the paper putting forward a definition of hardship as being about both struggle and resilience on an ongoing daily basis rather than about an emergency one-off situation.