Living Brexit in Rural Britain: Migration and Rural Communities, 2023-2024

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This dataset comes from the Living Brexit in Rural Britain project, funded by the Leverhulme trust and conducted from 2023 to 2025 collaboratively by the Universities of Sheffield, Aberystwyth, and Glasgow. This research tries to understand how Brexit continues to shape rural Britain, exploring the intersection of Brexit politics with broader social, economic, and demographic shifts. This project examined Brexit as an ongoing, multi-layered process, existing alongside other contemporary challenges and trends such as the COVID-19 pandemic, cost-of-living crisis, changing migration trends, and global geopolitical shifts. Research was conducted in three anonymised rural market towns across England (Bonnington), Scotland (Glenforge), and Wales (Bryngwyn), selected to reflect regional diversity and varying Brexit referendum voting patterns. Data collection involved a variety of qualitative methods, including 40 one-to-one interviews with rural policy actors, such as local politicians, agricultural sector representatives, business leaders, religious leaders, and community figures, and 15 focus groups with 58 residents in total. These residents were diverse in terms of age (mid 20s to mid 70s), length of residency, migration backgrounds, and national origins, from lifelong residents to recent international migrants. Additionally, biographical timelines of resident's personal histories were created during focus groups. Observational data were also collected through participant-observation conducted by research associates. Research found marked participant discussions surrounding rural economic and labour market changes, shifting migration patterns post-Brexit, community cohesion and division, rural depopulation, and the relationship between local and national identities. Project findings highlighted the pronounced impact of Brexit on rural economic sectors reliant on international labour, such as agriculture, hospitality, and social care. Participants noted significant demographic changes, including declining EU migration, increasing global migration, and aging, declining rural populations. Brexit's polarising legacy emerged as a continued source of community tension, particularly pronounced in the English case study town, although mitigated by a strong sense of rural community interdependence and cohesion.

Rural areas are experiencing dramatic social and economic change. For example, they have become significant sites of international labour migration and, increasingly, asylum seeker and refugee settlement leading to more ethnically diverse rural populations. Our project aims to develop understandings of how Brexit politics and policies interact with wider social, economic and demographic rural changes and affect everyday social life. While there were variations in how rural regions voted in the 2016 Brexit Referendum, there was nevertheless a higher Leave vote in rural areas compared to the national average. This suggests a relationship between rural areas and Brexit agendas as well as highlighting why it is important to understand rural contexts and the social and economic changes being experienced within them. It is nine years since the referendum and four years since the UK left the EU and our project examines what Brexit means for rural areas now and for the way in which rural populations think about the future of their rural localities. Putting the countryside at the centre of analysis the project pays attention to the social consequences of Brexit for different rural communities. It looks at the increasingly shared urban-rural experience of international migration and asks if it makes sense to 'ruralise' what have been more urban-associated ideas such as social cohesion and social inclusion. Situating itself in community life in small rural towns in England, Wales, and Scotland this project offers a nationally sensitive, place-based investigation of changing rural social relations and the ways in which rural localities are being reshaped after Brexit.