Rebecca Smith’s book, Rural, is an exploration of the British countryside and the professions and communities whose labour has shaped it – but often go overlooked.

In the second of our sessions chaired by Fieldwork Bookclub’s Adam Bedford, Rebecca will discuss how precarious life can be for the people who rely for their living on the natural landscape, and how these rural working-class worlds have changed – and so often struggle – as the world has changed around them.

She asks us to consider the question: what, then, is the future of the countryside, whether we live in or long for rural Britain? 

Rebecca Smith worked for BBC Radio for over a decade, producing live and pre-recorded programmes and researching titles for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week and The Fiction Serial. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the Scottish Book Trust’s Ignite Fellowship. She currently writes for various publications and reviews for BBC Radio Scotland’s The Afternoon Show.

Adam Bedford has studied and worked in and around agriculture for the past 20 years. In his day job he represents and advises farmers, and in his spare time runs the ‘Fieldwork Book Club,’ an online book club with 500 subscribers across the world reading books on food, farming and the natural world and interviews different authors every month. Adam lives rurally near York with his family.