This paper presents a rapid assessment of current and likely future impacts of the COVID-19 outbreak on rural economies given their socio-economic characteristics. Drawing principally on current evidence for the UK, as well as lessons from the 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak and the 2007/8 financial crises, it outlines the likely key demand and supply effects, paying attention to the situation for agriculture as well as discussing the implications for rural communities. A distinction is made between the effects on businesses offering goods and services for out-of-home as opposed to in-home consumption. Gendered dimensions are also noted as likely business and household strategies for coping and adaptation. The paper concludes with a brief mapping of a research agenda for studying the longer-term effects of COVID-19 on rural economies.
Rural enterprise hubs are physical infrastructures designed to help rural businesses access tangible and intangible benefits. They generally operate within two main business models: ‘Honey Pots’ (i.e. targeting business-to-customer tenants) and ‘Hives’ (i.e. targeting business‐to‐business tenants). This paper focuses on the former type, Honey Pot hubs, which are best suited to tenants who sell their products/services directly to the general public, such as some creative sectors, retail and tourism. Honey Pot hubs are designed to cater to such needs by attracting footfall to the space, providing cafes and facilities for the general public and hosting events. This paper explores how these Honey Pot hubs contribute to rural and regional development, through the creative practices of their tenants. The paper draws on qualitative interviews with Honey Pot managers and tenants in remote rural locations of the North East of England. The findings are useful for Hub practitioners, policy makers and rural creative businesses who want to develop similar initiatives in their locales.
This article is the product of a one-year AHRC experimental pilot project to understand Knowledge Exchange (KE) relationships around the arts in rural Northumberland. There were three strands to the work; Art, Music and Rural Economy with a Research Associate leading on each strand. There were multiple fields in this project; the actual fields of Northumberland and the landscapes in which art and music were practised, the disciplinary fields of the researchers, and the invisible, intangible fields of KE practice. This article reflects on our ‘field’ work – those interactions in fields of landscape, fields of discipline, and fields of social relations, which provided the context for our interventions. Specifically, this article reflects an experimental and experiential relationship with our ‘fields’ most potently around the process of entering and leaving those fields and the multiple interaction between ourselves as researchers and our material and cultural landscape. The article concludes with some of the implications of our ‘field’ practices for future experimental research and the co-production and elaboration of new fields of intervention.
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