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This is the story of a ‘typical’ village: the challenges it faces and how it tries to overcome them, and its ambitions for the future – where it wants to be in thirty years time.

To tell it we created an imaginary village, with a mix of services and facilities we see in so many of our rural communities. Then we brought together people with an understanding of rural life, the joys and pleasures as well as the challenges and frustrations of living in our smaller communities.

We asked those people to discuss what might change in the years to 2050, and what the village could become if it could find a way of dealing with the pressures all our rural communities face today.

It’s a story that can apply to so many places and, although each place will have its own distinctive challenges and ambitions, there are lessons in the story of our village for all rural communities.

Explore the site via the menu options (above) or follow the links to find out more about the challenges facing rural communities, the workshop we ran with rural experts, our hypothetical village, its characters, and the story we created.