'In a compelling and innovative account of specific customs and creative practices in rural England, Rosemary Shirley's focus on the rhythms and rituals of the everyday in "non-metropolitan" situations valuably disrupts that still habitual view of the countryside as a timeless and anti-modern landscape to be looked upon from outside, for an understanding of lived sites of modernity which are just as complex, dynamic and evolving as those urban contexts more frequently considered in studies of visual culture and everyday life.'Ysanne Holt, University of Northumbria, UK 'This exciting and important book reveals the non-metropolitan realms of the UK to be complex, lively and awkward sites of modernity. Challenging us to reconsider what does and does not belong in such spaces, art works, mass observation reports, public campaigns, guidebooks, scrap books, motorways, fast cars, modernist art, litter, pylons, festive rituals, photographs, folk art objects, domestic appliances and home furnishings are marshalled to demonstrate how cultural practices and representations mutate to reveal competing notions of place and identity. In demolishing stereotypical, reified dualisms that distinguish between town and country, the rural is shown to be replete with extraordinary and ordinary assemblages. These collages combine heterogeneous elements that foreground everyday ambiguities and complexities, and fold together the contemporary and the archaic to gloriously confound orthodox conceptions.'Tim Edensor, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.