This book will appeal not only to historians and geographers, but to many who maintain a deep interest in the British countryside and its past, and to those who continue to share a fascination for the Second World War, in particular the 'home front'.

Introduction: writing food security in the mid-twentieth century
Prelude: the 1930s and the origins and purpose of state intervention in farming
Rural society on the eve of war
The arrival of the county committees and their structures
The membership of the county committees and their role in farm surveillance
Networking the rural community
Dispossessing farmers in England and Wales during and after the war
Power and tragedy: the sad case of Ray Walden
Reclamation: environmental and landscape transformation 1939 - 1945
Reclamation: the Fenland and coastal marshes
Wartime farming and state control in Scotland and Northern Ireland
Representation, memory and fiction
1945 and Postwar continuities
Contradictions in a countryside at war

Brian Short is an emeritus professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. He has a longstanding interest in the rural landscape history and society of South-East England.