Purbeck Vignettes -- 6: The Middle-Classness of Purbeck

"If we were to retire here," observed Judith, "we would probably become very right-wing in very short-order." And, much though I love Purbeck, it has to be acknowledged that it is a very middle-class, very comfortable, and very well-off area -- not just in the obviously expensive places to live such as Corfe, where the houses will be unaffordable unless you were born there or inherited property there, but even in former farming and fishing villages such as Kimmeridge. Until the Second World War, Kimmeridge and its like -- such as the deserted village of Tyneham, given up to the War Office in 1943 and never returned -- would have existed at or even below the poverty level, it inhabitants wringing a precarious living from the land and the sea; now, like the thoroughly tourist-centred Studland, they are places for incomers: second homes, 4WDs clogging the lanes at weekends, organic cafes catering to walkers such as ourselves. (Although in our particular case we were carrying our own sandwich lunch, so didn't need to stop for a latte and a carrot cake.)

Swanage has what would obviously be called "council housing", system-built terraces put up in the 1950s and 1960s to house the less well-off; but even these houses lack any air of indigence or unemployment. One gets the sense that anyone who falls into these categories sooner or later moves away, because living there is otherwise unaffordable. "Prosperous" is the word you want to apply here -- although it's equally possible that (counter-intuitive as it is) much of this properity is attributable to the recession, as people choose to holiday in the UK rather than abroad. If so, the Swanage news trade certainly knows its audience -- hunting for a copy of The Guardian on Saturday morning, I found instead huge piles of The Daily Torygraph, equally huge piles of The Daily Hate and The Getsworse, and only slightly smaller piles of The Sun.

For an alternative to a conventional middle-class life, it seems you need to go to Wareham, where can be found people who look as though they've fallen out of an earlier 1970s fashion plate (cheesecloth, dyed long hair, the works). It's almost as though -- because when we passed through it was the weekend of the Glastonbury Festival -- they'd set off for that first gig on Worthy Farm all those years ago, but had turned aside somewhere along the way.