Rutland, England’s smallest county, has the motto “multum in parvo” (much in little) – a thoroughly British sentiment in Latin form, like having “every little helps” or “a grower not a shower” on a coat of arms. It is an appropriate boast for this tiny splash of countryside, squeezed between the mighty Midland-three of Lincolnshire, Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, and shaped like the profile of an elderly Labrador in a kerchief.
With a population of just 41,000, Rutland is all low-slung uplands, reservoir riviera and villages the colour of wholemeal toast. It often tops rankings of the “happiest” and “best” places to live. Avoiding any local lockdowns during the pandemic, Rutland was deemed to have such high trust and respect for rules that it would “survive a zombie apocalypse”. Beeping your car horn here, I’m told by the Conservative MP Alicia Kearns, is considered the “height of offence”. “People often say that Rutland is Britain in the Fifties.”
Nothing much happens here – other than a mild backlash against the arrival of its first McDonald’s six years ago (a drive-thru, no less), the recent discovery of a giant “sea dragon” ichthyosaur skeleton, and, every few decades, a zealous battle for independence.
It is the last that brings me to Oakham, Rutland’s county town, one Wednesday morning on market day. I nearly don’t make it. Not long out of Peterborough, my CrossCountry service slows to a trundle. “We are delayed due to animals on the railway. I believe a deer has been on the line,” sighs a voice from the tannoy that sounds all too accustomed to the habits of East Midlands muntjac. I watch a pheasant take his chance and cross the tracks.
While the rest of England has been obsessing over St George’s crosses on lampposts, Rutland’s county flag – emerald green, with golden acorns and a horseshoe in the centre – has been flying everywhere: in people’s front windows, parks, market squares and pubs. They shiver in the early-spring sunshine as I walk through Oakham. All is not well in this landlocked patch of Domesday England: Rutland’s county status is once more under threat.
In the late Forties and early Sixties, Rutland successfully fought off attempts by central government to remove its county status – only for it to eventually be absorbed into Leicestershire in 1974, when the country was sliced up into districts. Raddlemen (as Rutlanders are known; the name stems from the land’s reddish soil) eventually threw off this yoke in 1997, when their domain was reinstated as a county. By a quirk of history, however, this was never formalised in legislation, and so Rutland risks losing its status all over again, amid local government reforms that will likely see it paired with parts of Leicestershire.
Labour is jigsawing England into unitary authorities, limiting the great British tradition of grumbling about the bins to one council rather than two. While a government spokesperson insists to me that Rutland will remain a county, it would actually automatically lose its status under current law. And 7,141 local signatories – the biggest wet signature petition taken to parliament in the 21st century – are trying to make this known to the tyrannous cartographers of Whitehall.
All this vulgar business of mergers and acquisitions seems a long way away on market-day morning, though. The fishmonger lays out free bunches of wild garlic, as a pizza oven fires up and a guitarist tunes his strings. Oak-smoked Lincolnshire poacher from the cheese stall scents the breeze. Middle-aged couples wheel touring bikes around the stands, pensioners lean on their walkers to chat, and boarding-school boys slope back to class, squinting through tousled fringes.
“We have a strong pride and identity; we’re slightly different and quirky,” says Nick Taylor, 73, standing by the fishmonger’s with a tote bag on his shoulder. “It’s almost as if we’re an inland island. Losing our identity is a concern: there’s resentment from when we were in Leicestershire; we were ignored and left as a backwater.”
Between Otis Redding and Eric Clapton numbers, CJ Hatt, a 49-year-old busker with a Rasputin beard, tells me that “other counties won’t do such a good job”. “We’re happy being an island, we’re proud we’re different. They call us the ‘Devon of the Midlands’.” I hadn’t heard that nickname, I say. “Yes, I think because of our hills, our greenery…” he pauses. “But there’s no coastline I suppose, which would be amazing, really. And people assume we’re rich and there’s this perception it’s really nice and affluent, but we do have the problems everyone else has – the council, the roads, the potholes.”
In fact, passionate expressions of county pride all too quickly descend into the familiar catechism of Broken Britain. A longtime resident, 82-year-old Sylvia Gray, was brought up in a pub that was owned by her family for generations; she “loves” Rutland and feels it “needs to stay its own place”. But, she tells me, looking wistfully at the cluster of stalls, “the market is not as big as it used to be”.
The young couple running the Neapolitan pizza stand haven’t been able to afford to stay in the county of their parents, moving out to Leicestershire for a cheaper home. “It’s so beautiful and we’re engaged to get married in a church here. If we could’ve lived here, we would’ve, but it’s too expensive.”
Becki, a 35-year-old hairdresser who works at a salon on the market square and has lived here all her life, tells me on her break that she doesn’t care if Rutland no longer exists as a county – “as long as council tax goes down”. Rutland County Council charges the highest council tax in the country, reaching £5,591 for some. “The roads are dreadful, the parking charges are ridiculous, there’s no public pool, not a lot to take the kids to do.” She keeps her “mouth shut” when there are “debates among clients about” county status, she smiles.
When labouring in Rutland, the peasant poet John Clare observed in 1818: “Ye scenes of desolation spread around/Prosperity to you did once belong.” He might’ve been writing about today’s Middle England.
Across from a finely preserved set of stocks – sparrows flit through its holes – is Oakham Castle’s Great Hall. Its walls are hung with giant horseshoes: every royal and peer passing through the county must donate one. This is the “best-preserved Norman household building in all of Europe”, I’m told by a Hong Kong refugee called Andrew visiting from Birmingham, who is just as effusive about the café’s soup of the day: pea and mint.
I sit on a picnic bench in the shade of what would once have been the motte – the castle mound Norman invaders forced wretched Anglo-Saxons to build when they reached their settlements. For lunch, I unwrap my Rutland Pippin: a ham hock, sausage meat, Stilton and apple purée pastry in the shape of an apple. The delicacy is also fighting for protected status – which, having tasted it, I would throw all the weight of campaigning journalism behind.
As a Londoner who only ever ticks “Greater London” on forms, county pride has meant little to me. It seems that in all the public reckoning over British identity, our political class forgets it too (in banning non-Union Jacks and non-St George’s Crosses from public buildings, Reform councils initially accidentally banned county flags).
A majority of Brits might no longer feel national pride – a stark shift in public opinion over the past five years – but local pride holds up. Seventy-one per cent say they feel “strongly” attached to their county. The identity is more visceral than perhaps our policymakers realise; it has survived everything from the Norman conquest to local government reform, after all.
[Further reading: The Rasputin legend]
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This article appears in the 25 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Easter Special
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