Rurality in England and Wales 1991: A Replication and Extension of the 1981 Rurality Index

This paper sets out to create rurality indexes for 222 non‐urban Local Authority Districts (LADs) in England and Wales 1991, replicating the earlier work of Cloke (1977) and Cloke and Edwards (1986) for 1971 and 1981 respectively. The same technique is employed to generate the rurality indices for 1991 as that used by those previous researchers. The results for 1991 are then compared to those for 1981, illustrating the robustness of the rurality index. Despite the robustness of the rurality index, it was felt that too much of the variation in rurality was left unexplained by the previous construction. Therefore, principal components analysis is used to identify two new dimensions of rurality: Structural Rurality and Demographic Rurality. The remainder of the paper investigates the ways in which these new, or additional, indices of rurality may prove useful to the further study of change in rural areas of England and Wales.