Cottagecore

There is only ever one person in the cottagecore photograph: kneeling alone in the raised bed, baking a loaf too large for one to finish. Someone we never see is holding the camera. The solitude is performed for company, and this book is about what that performance hides.

The image has it backwards. The historical cottage was among the least self-sufficient dwellings in the parish. The fuel came off the common, the flour from a mill no household owned, the harvest always needing more hands than one family had. Strip away the shared land and work, and the cottage becomes what it is online today: a pretty house with a wage problem.

Drawing on four centuries of law and folklore, and on the spring of 2020 when Britain ran out of flour, Cottagecore traces how we romanticised the loneliest version of a life that was always collective. It is honest about the darker uses of that nostalgia, from the enclosing hedge to the blood-and-soil politics that has always shadowed the rural dream. And it ends where the longing really points, at belonging rather than self-sufficiency, with a field guide to rebuilding the village on the street where you already live.

The cottage was never meant to stand alone. Neither, it turns out, were we.