How the Kinks captured a changing England on ‘Village Green Preservation Society’
It is no accident that The Kinks are remembered as the most English of all the British Invasion bands. Ray Davies’ wry observations of English life allowed the group to create songs that captured the absurdity of Englishness as well as the shifting social landscape of the nation as a whole. If there’s one song that captures Davies’ view of Englishness better than any other, it is undoubtedly ‘Village Green Preservation Society’ from the 1967 album of the same name.
Davies’ childhood coincided with a period of enormous change in the UK. Once the nation had regained equilibrium after the Second World War, there was a sense that innovation was the only option. This catalysed a mental revolution that saw anti-Victorian sentiment sweep the nation. Reverence for churches and the Victorian morality that had once stewed there began to decline.
At the same time, London’s Victorian architecture began to disappear – replaced by modernist tower blocks that left the city’s inhabitants feeling as though they were surrounded by glass and steel. In the late 1940s, Victorian buildings had come to be viewed with scepticism by promoters of the newly-introduced listed buildings program, many of whom believed that only the most outstanding buildings – those constructed between 1850 and 1914 – should be saved from the wrecking ball.
By the time Dave Davies penned the titular track of The Village Green Preservation Society, nostalgia was brewing. Though the spokespeople of the UK’s countercultural youth movement rejected the social politics of the Victorian age, they developed a strange affection for the aesthetics of the era. “We are the Skyscraper condemnation Affiliate,” Davies sings in ‘Village Green Preservation society’, “God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards.”
It’s usually fairly easy to tell when Ray Davies is being satirical. That’s not the case in ‘The Village Green’. Though the speaker’s desire to protect aspects of British cultural identity comes off as faintly ridiculous, it is the ridiculousness of “Donald Duck, Vaudeville and Variety” that makes such things worthy of protection. While some critics have argued that this snapshot of village life was inspired by Davies’ early life in Devon, the songwriter has dismissed such interpretations. As he explained during an interview with The Independent in 2009, much of it is based on his memories of growing up in London in the 1950s: “You have to remember that North London was my village green, my version of the countryside. The street [and district] I grew up in was called Fortis Green, and then there was Waterlow Park and the little lake.”
It’s easy to view ‘The Village Green’ as an attempt by Davies to reconstruct some lost past. The album – a collection of songs rich in pastoral imagery and nostalgia for childhood and lost Empire – is certainly the most Proustian LP the band ever produced, and it’s not unsurprising that it made The Kinks look like traitors of the youth movement. ‘Village Green’ evokes a Victorian vision of “Merrie England”, which isn’t all that surprising given that the UK was going through a similar period of urban development and industrial acceleration.
It’d be wrong, though, to assume that The Kinks were trying to somehow lose themselves in the past. At no point do the Kinks treat the past as a place to escape the modern world. In fact, in ‘Village Green’, Davies is simply observing and cataloguing the English eccentricities he views as worthy of conservation. England was changing at an incredible speed, and some things were bound to get lost along the way.
