Raymond Williams: Border Country

Overview

Raymond Williams, novelist and lecturer, thinks university education should be fitted to the demands of real life. He believes that many of Britain's rebellious students are, like himself, inhabitants of what he calls 'the Border Country.' In this film Williams contrasts life in his working-class birth-place, Pandy, on the Welsh-English border, with academic Cambridge, where he teaches English literature. 'The journey between them is more than a physical journey. It's a journey between different kinds of life, different values. I cross that border in my mind almost every day. It seems to me important because the border country is everywhere. In so many places people are moving or being moved from old, settled ways into new, unprecedented ways which have to be felt, recognised, understood, responded to, altered.'