Chasing the White Horse: Local Landmarks and Local Identities in the Thames Valley
Volume 3 | Issue 4 - Landmarks
Article by Simon Mackley. Edited by Stephen Woodward.
When shortly before midnight on 16th July 1974 the Conservative MP for Newbury, Michael McNair-Wilson, rose to deliver a speech in the House of Commons, it was against a backdrop of extreme political turmoil. Just a few months beforehand, a miners’ strike had crippled the country and forced the government of Edward Heath from office. In Northern Ireland power sharing under the Sunningdale agreement had collapsed, and the prospects of peace seemed more distant than ever. An intense campaign was underway for British withdrawal from the European Economic Community, and both main parties were badly divided on the matter. Yet McNair-Wilson was to speak on none of these issues. Instead, he rose to demand ‘the return of the White Horse to Berkshire’.
McNair-Wilson was referring to the White Horse at Uffington, an ancient hill figure cut into the side of the Berkshire Downs. Up until 1974 the landmark, along with much of the surrounding area, had fallen within the county of Berkshire, and although its Bronze Age origins made it far older than the county, the White Horse was nonetheless adopted as one of its key symbols. It appeared upon the County Council’s coat of arms and was the badge of the Berkshire Yeomanry. Across the county, local businesses and community organisations adopted the symbol as their own, and by all accounts the landmark was firmly associated with Berkshire.
However, in 1974 the link was broken. The Local Government Act 1972 had significantly altered the structure of local government and, when the changes were implemented two years later, the county map of England was substantially redrawn. New counties such as Avon and Humberside were created from scratch. The historic counties of Bristol and Rutland were stripped of their status. In the Thames valley, the entire northwest of Berkshire, including Uffington, was transferred into neighbouring Oxfordshire. The White Horse had galloped across the border.
In Berkshire there was considerable resentment over the loss. On the 1st April, the day the legislation came into effect, local activists staged a bonfire at the site to protest against the changes. Campaigners hurried around the county whipping up support of the White Horse’s return, and before long a petition boasting over 10,000 signatures was presented to the Queen at Windsor, humbly requesting the she restore the boundaries of the ‘Royal’ county of Berkshire. When this plea fell upon deaf ears, McNair-Wilson took the case to Parliament. Accusing the government of ‘ending 1,000 years of history’ with the ‘stroke of a civil servant’s pen’, he pleaded for the government to reverse the decision.
The government, however, was unmoved. The Minister responding to the debate, Gordon Oakes, ridiculed the notion that the White Horse was rightfully Berkshire’s. Pointing out that it had been cut into the hillside long before Berkshire came into being, Oakes asserted that ‘It is not a Berkshire symbol, an Oxfordshire symbol or an English symbol’. It was instead a British monument, and one that was now held in trust for the whole nation. The Government had spoken: the White Horse was to remain in Oxfordshire.
This was not, however, the end of the Berkshire campaign to reclaim the landmark. In 1981, just under 9 years after the changes, Berkshire County Council put forward a proposal to have the horse returned. Recognising that a return to Berkshire’s original borders would be unacceptable to Oxfordshire, the Council instead proposed altering the county boundary so that it ran alongside with the route of the ancient trade road, the Ridgeway, which snaked through the north of the Berkshire downs. With a little creativity, the border could be redrawn in such a way that the White Horse would technically be included in the county boundaries, even if much of the surrounding area remained in Oxfordshire. Anticipating little objection from Oxfordshire County Council at the loss of such a small area of territory, it looked at last as if the campaign to reclaim the White Horse would succeed.
However, in an ironic twist, a campaign which had rested upon the links between the landmark and the local community was itself defeated by local opposition. The Local Government Act may have taken the White Horse out of Berkshire, but the plans put forward by Berkshire County Council would have gone a step further by taking the site out of the Vale of the White Horse. Clearly, whatever Berkshire’s claim to the symbolism of the White Horse, it could not be denied that the connection to it of the local communities was stronger. The plan was rejected, and the White Horse has remained within Oxfordshire to this day.
While of little consequence in itself, the dispute highlights the importance of physical landmarks in creating local identities, and the problems that emerge when authorities fail to appreciate this. What must have seemed to the Civil Service as an entirely sensible alteration to the machinery of local government was seen by many in Berkshire as an attack on their very identity. Similarly, what appeared to Berkshire County Council as an unobjectionable proposal to reclaim the White Horse faced fierce opposition from those living close by, who viewed the landmark as a key feature of their own, rival identity. Of course, the struggle for the White Horse was of little wider significance, even at a local level: residents of both counties had far more pressing issues in their lives that the redrawing of the county borders. Nonetheless, it can serve as a useful reminder to governing authorities, of all sizes, that when their efforts at organising territories fail to take into account the relationship between physical landmarks and local identities, the finished map rarely goes unchallenged.