A diverse England we can shape to our taste

TO MAKE England a country with 6,000 different kinds of apple - what sort of aim is that? It is one of the many ambitions of Common Ground, a campaign which last week held a national conference on 'local distinctiveness'.

Places should be different, not all the same. Most of us want that. But does more diversity mean nostalgia, false ruralism and the politics of reaction? Or does it recognise that the standardising of everything we use, live in, grow, eat and sing has reached the end of its time? In the 21st century, a society of resourceful, 'empowered' individuals will probably shape their surroundings to their own tastes.

Common Ground was set up 10 years ago by Sue Clifford and Angela King. They sponsor 'community orchards', help Derbyshire well- dressers to revive their craft, prompt villagers to draw parish maps and walk their own bounds. They have written that landscape is a cultural creation 'held together by stone walls and subsidies, ragas and Northumbrian pipes . . .' Their conference programme contains a page listing 27 different Welsh words and expressions for rain.

Their arch-enemy is not so much straight uniformity, which is on the retreat, as phoney distinctiveness - 'facadism'. They hate the pseudology of ' D H Lawrence country' or 'Robin Hood country'. They loathe developers' prose, like this prospectus for an M40 discount shopping centre: 'The distinctive personality of the scheme is that of an English village street with its mixture of cottage-style shops and premises modelled on traditional rural industries such as the traditional blacksmith's shop . . .' They dread mass-produced 'Victorian' lamp-posts. For Clifford and King, distinctiveness is messy; a patchwork of old and new which is added to - not just preserved - by local people.

I like all this. Who wouldn't? But last week's meeting raised some deep questions about local distinctiveness. The first is: who makes the distinctions? In southern England, especially, communities are divided into 'activists' (who tend, oddly, to refer to themselves as 'everybody') and 'locals'. Activists are usually middle class or incomers. Locals are the rest, who are invited to rediscover their identity in ideas thought up by the activists. Sue Clifford spoke of the need to mix 'aboriginal knowledge' with what she called the 'tumbleweed expertise' of sophisticated incomers.

That is not easy. For most of history, ordinary people have thought of distinctiveness as something 'vertical': the quality difference between old and modern things. They contrasted roomy brick houses and cramped cottages, horse- and tractor-ploughs, thin native carrots and fat ones grown from expensive imported seed. But now they are invited to celebrate 'horizontal' distinctions: to be proud of wooden gates made differently from one county to another, and to prefer them to steel gates mass-produced in factories.

With this comes the problem of who does the perceiving. An outsider visits a new housing scheme and sees only monotony. But a child who lives there is aware only of distinctions - of pavement cracks, hollowed-out bushes, a close which smells of curry and one which smells of beer, a grating full of water sounds, a bend in a path. The whole estate is an imaginative map of differences. This is the sense of home we all have. 'Local distinctiveness', therefore, is laying a second map on top of the first. It is asking people to locate themselves by other landmarks which they may never have seen: biscuits which their ancestors allegedly used to bake, Civil War battles never mentioned at school.

Common Ground is part of a movement taking place everywhere. But it is a paradoxical, double sort of movement. The world is at once uniting and disuniting, becoming more and also less uniform, heading into the past in order to arrive in the future. Economies and cultures are clearly fusing, and yet the world is also disintegrating into smaller units, as we have seen since 1989. In the same way, reviving what is best about the local past - as Common Ground does - lands us in a quite unfamiliar future.

Take the example of bread. Once villagers baked their own 'distinctive' loaves. Then came village bakeries, and then urban plant bakeries distributing standard bread over huge areas. Now, once again, small high-quality bakeries are reappearing locally, each trying to make a 'distinctive' product. But this is not a straight return to the past. First, because the new local bakers are seldom 'locals', but often incoming refugees from urban stress. Second, because they are using new small- scale technology which is actually more sophisticated than the process used by plant bakeries. In other words, an attempt to revive the past has - unintentionally - led into a place which is neither past nor present but virgin territory.

Personally, I am sceptical that local distinctiveness gets stronger the further back in history you prowl. If you could ride on a cart through the villages of, say, 15th-century Leicestershire, you would be appalled at their uniformity. Churches and manor houses would vary a bit - though not nearly as much as they do now. But cottages, clothes, wagons and fences would look drably similar from one place to the next, to say nothing of the monotony of open fields before the enclosures. Poverty is the great standardiser. Anyone who has travelled through rural Russia knows that.

It was quite recently, in the 19th century, that most of the diversity began which we are asked to treasure as 'heritage'. It was then, with the impact of industrialisation, higher wages and better transport, that there began the rapid piling of one style upon another. The half- timbered cottage grew a Victorian shop facade, the medieval church tower sprouted a metal spire, the ale-house became a hostel for Irish navvies, and then a neo-Gothic bank. A red telephone box appeared on the green beside the stocks. The Georgian stable became a garage. Last year it was cleverly converted to a cottage by two young New Agers from Birmingham, who have launched a petition to bring back the maypole and a Campaign for Real Bricks.

Each fashion leaves survivals, which pile up into this charming rubbish-heap we call distinctiveness. To their credit, the Common Ground people understand these ironies. They do not want to live in the past, only to loot it for building material. What they build with it will be interesting - and new.