Commentators claim the recent wave of post office closures

sounded the death knell for the English village and the notion

of rural community spirit. Emblematic of the decline is 

the once-vibrant Westcountry village of Bickington, which in

recent years has lost  everything, from garage to pub –

and  its community spirit has ebbed away with them. 

Graeme Demianyk  visited the community

FORMERLY a farming community forged in the red soil of Devon,

the village of Bickington is not what it used to be. Time was

residents could stroll to a post office, pub, garage, village

hall, police house and two churches.

Save for the "ailing" village hall and 15th-century church,

all that is gone.

Boarded up and fenced off, the desolate Toby Jug pub is the

most visible manifestation of the demise. Sorry is not the word

to describe its battered appearance.

Scores of small communities are in an equally parlous state,

losing amenities thanks to Whitehall penny-pinching, market

forces and irresistible social change brought about by

supermarket giants, pub chains and cars. But you would have to

walk a long way to find a more potent symbol of the death of

the English village than Bickington.

Jeremy Christophers, whose family has roots in the village

stretching more than 300 years, remembers how it once was. As a

child, he bought ice lollies from the garage before charging up

the hill in search of penny dips at the post office. At 42,

this is all in recent memory.

"Since the pub closed, there is nowhere to talk to people,"

he says, standing in the shadow of the 19th-century hostelry

that once turned good profits thanks to coachloads of Dartmoor

tourists.

"You get a bit peeved with having to snatch conversations

through wound- down car windows until the next car behind

starts beeping and moves you along. We would have stopped in

the pub in years gone by."

The spirit of community in villages everywhere is in

terminal decline. This desperate message emerged during this

summer's post office fallout. Of 2,500 hubs earmarked for

closure, nearly 150 are in Devon and Cornwall. Bickington, five

miles west of Newton Abbot, has been untouched by the

announcement – the village lost its post office eight years

ago.

A village of stone walls and ivy that first appeared in

parish records more than 1,000 years ago, Bickington has not

plunged into rack and ruin. Far from it. On the upper plain, an

assortment box of mainly beautiful houses and well-maintained

ex-council properties are circled by verdant Devon countryside.

Emblems of a past tethered to the land, the Wheelwrights

Cottage, the Coach House and the Old Vicarage are conversions

as attractive as the names might suggest. This is England's

green and pleasant land that William Blake famously alluded

to.

But pretty quickly you see how the sense of unity has

crumbled. Mr Christophers, a district councillor for the

Bickington ward who runs a care home in nearby Ashburton, takes

me through the unfortunate story of decline. The methodist

church was converted into a house in the 1980s. The stone

village hall is limping along. The parish church recently put

up a notice asking for villagers to shore up its

congregation.

A busy road divides upper Bickington and the village of

Lemonford, and it was the strong infrastructure that kept the

community vibrant for years. The road is the old A38 – strain

and you can just about hear the new one that runs parallel –

and this artery through Devon saw "Sir Walter Raleigh and all

sorts came through here", Mr Christophers explains.

"It was the main road to the moors in the 1970s," he

continues as we walk the few hundred yards from the village

hall, through the grounds of the church and down to the

abandoned pub. "The pub would have coachloads off the

moors."

When it was closed by its owners, Exeter-based Heavitree

Brewery, in May 2003, the Toby Jug was the latest pillar of the

community to be knocked down. Being the last daily meeting

place, it could prove to be the most significant. The veil was

drawn over the pub, named the Jolly Sailor for a time, for

familiar reasons: it was "uneconomic".

Paradoxically, the closure galvanised the locals. About 100

campaigners have held a Christmas Eve vigil outside the pub

each of the last five years and protested fiercely at plans to

sell off the prime site for housing.

The property's use has been the subject of much speculation.

Gypsies took residence and left. Westcountry pub boss John

Stevens' takeover and refurbishment plan failed to launch.

Planning applications have been submitted to Teignbridge

council. But what happens next – there has been talk of

replacing the current building with an "eco-pub" – remains

somewhat murky.

"We are massively optimistic," Mr Christophers says,

however, of a possible re-opening. "We are ready and waiting to

support it."

So much so, that villagers have even concocted off-the-wall

plans to make it viable. One of the more sensible ideas is to

order everyone's food shopping online from Tesco and have it

delivered to the pub on a Friday afternoon, knock back a couple

of ales and chat in the Toby Jug.

Mr Christophers, whose ancestors built the pub, acknowledges

that the villagers only realised what they had once it was

gone.

"Often people won't say anything until it is an issue that

affects them. I put one A4 piece of paper up about the closure

of the Toby Jug, and about 30 people turned up to the parish

council meeting. Usually we'd struggle to get half a dozen.

Then 80 came to the next meeting. It rammed the village hall to

the gunnels."

Heading down the old A38, we pass the old post office. It

has been converted into a house. The owners keep the signs

outside: "Post Office and Savings Bank" it reads in bold red,

with "confectionery" and "cigarettes" beneath. The cast-iron

red telephone box went with the post office.

Further still down the hill, houses stand on the site of the

old garage forecourt. A victim of major petrol retailers

switching to computers, you would never have known it was there

unless someone pointed it out to you. The garage went about

five years ago – the petrol before that.

Back up the hill and Mr Christophers points out another

converted house. The stone plaque with the words "Devon

Constabulary" are the only clues that this was the village

police house until the early-1970s. "It's wide but not very

deep," Mr Christophers notes. "Village police houses were like

that."

You can only imagine what village life was like even 20

years ago. Each of these amenities would have been a hive of

activity, villagers bumping into each other while posting a

letter, filling the car with petrol or reporting a trivial

misdemeanour. You couldn't avoid your neighbours if you wanted

to.

Compare that to Bickington in 2008. Mr Christophers, clearly

a well-known figure in the village, waves to friends and

acquaintances as they drive by, probably on their way to

Ashburton or Newton Abbot. Through necessity, nobody walks

anywhere. His comments about "snatching conversations through

wound-down car windows" start to ring true.

Many Westcountry villages are retirement magnets, but quite

a few young families live among Bickington's 300- strong

community. Yet they could be scared off without local services

and the council's reluctance to build homes in the village in

the last 30 years, Mr Christophers says. He decries the local

planning system that has slowly strangled the life out of

Bickington.

But do people want to connect? In increasingly insular

times, is "community" an outmoded concept? After walking the

village and speaking to some of the village's oldest residents,

it proves to be a tricky question to answer.

Stuart Hands, 74, has lived here since the 1960s and is the

author of The Book of Bickington, the first comprehensive

history of the village. The retired teacher reckons the nature

of community has changed from one of place to one of

interest.

"Your community is the golf club or the church rather than

Bickington," he says philosophically. "Society is always

changing. It is not about whether or not that is good or bad.

It just is. And we all need to cope with what it is. You can't

turn the clock back if people don't want that."

David Whitbread, a retired diplomat who has lived in the

Devon village for 13 years, feels that people just don't talk

to each other any more. "If you don't have a pub, a place where

you get to know people just casually, there is never going to

be a community spirit. I came back from living overseas and got

involved in village things and knew 99.9 per cent of the

village. I reckon that I know 25 per cent of the village

today."

Bickington is not dead yet, however. Mr Christophers recalls

that 500 people bought tickets for last year's village ball at

Yeo Farm. People do want to come together. They just need a

catalyst.

He added: "There are more under-16s here now than in the

last century. There are children here, but they won't stay if

there's nothing to do.

"Planners say Bickington is unsustainable. I couldn't

disagree with them any more vehemently. There are few villages

that are near a road network that is so comprehensive."

We head back to the village hall to meet Bob Wakeling,

chairman of Bickington Parish Council. He says the village is

being starved of even the smallest services. The nursery at the

village hall is about to move. Promises of 30mph signs through

the upper village have yet to materialise. Even the recycling

bank at the pub has recently been removed.

"You can't get anyone interested in the plight of this

village," he said. "It has just been held in suspension – and

as a consequence, it is dying."