‘The race for space’: capitalism, the country and the city in Britain under COVID-19

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Abstract
This article draws on the work of Raymond Williams to argue that under covid-19 the dominant ‘ways of seeing’ the countryside and the city in Britain are working to obscure the structural violence of capitalism. Cultural narratives of ‘exodus’ from the city abound in British media, fuelling a material ‘race for space’ as the middle class rush to buy up rural properties. The ‘cottagecore’ social media aesthetic has proliferated, offering privatized solutions to the crisis through nostalgic imagery of pastoral escape. At the same time, nineteenth-century discourses of dark, diseased cities have been rearticulated, providing ideological support for racist migration policies. Exploited migrant workers in Leicester are framed as ‘modern slaves’ in the city’s ‘dark factories’; their bodies are transcoded as ‘dirt’ which must be ‘rooted out’ of the nation. We argue that these binary narratives and aesthetics of a bountiful, white countryside and an infested, racialized city lead to an ‘unseeing’ of the deep structural causes of inequality. We develop Williams’s analysis to show how these cultural imaginaries also sustain the gendered and racialized division of labour under capitalism, arguing that the country-city distinction, and the material injustices it obscures, ought to become a central focus for cultural studies.