The good old days? Look deeper and the myth of ideal communities fades | Jon Lawrence

As studies of kinship show, many people were glad to escape the strains of close-knit living

In the countdown to a possible no-deal exit from the EU, there are some who cling to an optimistic narrative that our community spirit will get us through. Indeed, recent experiences in Whaley Bridge lend some support to the idea that in a crisis community is revealed. The irony is that, in part, the whole Brexit project has been fed by an inchoate, but powerful, sense of nostalgia for community lost.

There is nothing new about this longing for a past "golden age" of community. For at least two centuries, writers such as Coleridge, Ruskin and TS Eliot have compared their own fragmented, hedonistic and selfish times with an imagined earlier age of social harmony and "community" (indeed, a medievalist colleague assures me that, in the early eighth century, the ageing Bede took a similar view of developments in Anglo-Saxon England).