‘We have a big problem in Japan,' Country Life's editor Mark Hedges was once asked while having lunch at the Japanese Embassy. 'We cannot get our people to live in the countryside. Everyone wants to live in Tokyo or Osaka. What does your government do to make people move out of towns?’

'I explained that it was the opposite in the UK, where people aspire to live in the countryside,' Mark wrote in 2017, as he told the story . 'A move to the provinces is seen as a mark of success. This desire for rural life is a defining part of our nation.'

Those words seem even more apt today than they did eight years ago — as does Mark's prediction, even pre-Covid, that 'as super-fast broadband is eventually rolled out, village life will undergo a renaissance, these settlements transformed from dormito

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