South Riding charts the story of Sarah Burton's homecoming to Yorkshire in 1934 after twenty years teaching in London and the Empire. After a fiery interview with a conservative interview panel, outspoken Sarah takes up her first headmistress-ship at Kiplington High School for Girls, determined to demonstrate to her new pupils that the future is theirs for the taking. Change is on her agenda straight away - of the curriculum, of teaching methods, of the rundown buildings. Her hurry to transform the South Riding brings her into immediate conflict with landowner Robert Carne, a man tragically trapped in his past, and wins her the friendship of Joe Astell, a reforming socialist councillor bent on improving the lives of the Yorkshire poor by means of a spanking new housing estate to replace the rural slum known as The Shacks. As term begins, Shacks girl Lydia Holly arrives at the High School, with talent to burn and domestic circumstances that make it almost impossible for her to realise her dreams. Meanwhile, Sarah is brought closer to Carne through his highly-strung and delicate daughter, Midge.
Sarah’s ambitions for her school find their focus in Lydia Holly, the gifted oldest child of a labourer and his wife who live with six children in the nearby shanty town.
After a highly charged encounter in a Manchester hotel, Sarah and Carne return to the South Riding more at odds with each other than ever, as Andrew Davies's adaptation of Winifred Holtby's rich and panoramic portrait of a Yorkshire community in the Thirties concludes. Sarah, humiliated that Carne is avoiding her, distracts herself with work, her priority being to find a way to get Lydia Holly back to school and away from a future of domestic drudgery looking after her father and younger siblings.
