New Roots, Old Soil Fenland Lives In Transition.

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In the Fens, a slow and relentless transformation is unfolding, one that stretches far beyond the soil itself. The agrarian farmers, once the heartbeat of the flat, fertile land, are dwindling. As they pass away their modest plots are increasingly amalgamated into the vast, faceless holdings of large agricorps. Each death marks not only the loss of a steward of the land but the quiet unraveling of a rich cultural tapestry that has defined the region for half a millennia. When the late Jessie Watson of Littleport, Cambridgesh…

New Roots, Old Soil - Fenland Lives In Transition.

{{ content.title }}{{ content.caption }}

In the Fens, a slow and relentless transformation is unfolding, one that stretches far beyond the soil itself. The agrarian farmers, once the heartbeat of the flat, fertile land, are dwindling. As they pass away their modest plots are increasingly amalgamated into the vast, faceless holdings of large agricorps. Each death marks not only the loss of a steward of the land but the quiet unraveling of a rich cultural tapestry that has defined the region for half a millennia. When the late Jessie Watson of Littleport, Cambridg…

A room (kolhata) to rent advertisement in a newsagents window. The text is in Russian cyrillic and deliberately designed to appeal to prospective East European migrants tenants of a certain age. Anyone who went to school within the USSR before its collapse 1991 learned Russian as part of the curriculum, and as part of the Soviet cultural domination of its occupied territories. Although widely loathed and abandoned after the fall of communism, the practise of having a common language proved useful for migrants when those countries joined the EU under the A8 accession rules in 2004 and they were given the right to come to live and work in the UK. That meant Czechs, Latvians, Lithuanians, Slovakians, Slovenians, Poles, Hungarians and Estonians could communicate with each other. Useful if you’re trying to make yourself heard on a factory floor or field in the Fens. Even today If you go into any of the East European shops in the town the transaction will often complete with the assistant exclaiming “spasiba”, the Russian word for thanks.