‘Inappropriate and incongruous’: opposition to asylum centres in the English countryside

Recent plans to accommodate asylum seekers in a number of rural locales have fuelled debates about the ability of the countryside to accommodate difference. In this paper, I explore these debates by examining community opposition to the proposed development of asylum centres in Nottinghamshire and Oxfordshire (UK). Herein, a rhetoric of rejection is revealed that stresses asylum seekers would feel isolated in the English countryside and could be more appropriately settled in an urban context. While this argument enjoys some support from asylum welfare groups, it is suggested here that it serves to reaffirm the boundary between a rurality regarded as unsullied, sexually pure and white, and urban environments imagined as multicultural, permissive and spoiled. Accordingly, it is suggested that rural communities’ anxieties about the arrival of asylum seekers can only be understood by exploring the connections between rhetorics of displacement and (deeply rooted) rural fears of racialised and sexualised difference.