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148). A key relawork at the level of the individual (Banks, 2007 tionship here, and one with a history that ultimately pre-dates the Romantics though they popularised it, is an affective relationship to place. In my own ethnographic research into rural, regional and remote cultural workers, based as they are proximate to nature, the affective affordances of this proximity remain central to the experience – both pragmatic and intangible – of non-urban cultural work in the twenty-first century. Importantly for smaller rural, regional and remote communities, access to the lifestyle affordances of especially desirable ‘sea-change’ (or ‘tree-change’) communities remains a reason for people not only to stay but also to move to the locale to pursue a small business operation or, as we will see in Chapter 3, second family or personal income, or perhaps to top-up semi-retirement income.

There’s a lot more space’ (30–39–year-old female jeweller, Lake District). My interviewees frequently evoked this ‘space’ not only in terms of ‘inspiration’, but also in reference to time out spent walking or simply in terms of having ‘time’ and ‘tranquillity’ – what Franco Bianchini refers to as ‘creative idling’ (LITTORAL, 2006, p. 51). 4). Again, in the experience of the photographic studio, some of the clients like to come out here because it’s somewhere different, that also is an element of it.

As actors struggle to re-embed life projects and biographical narratives, the desire to do so in particular locations becomes more pronounced. While this can generate social reaction, we might also suggest, for cultural producers, that the feel or sense of a place might provide a focus or inspiration for alternative forms of cultural production based on aesthetic, practice-based or social/ ethical endeavour. (Banks, 2007 7, p. 145) With creative industries scholarship now being identified by some leading scholars as cultural studies’ ‘New Right’ (Maxwell and Miller, 2011, p.