R. Frankenberg’s Village on the Border (1957) was the first « modern » anthropological study of a British rural community. By applying the techniques of ethnographic research and cultural comparison to a British milieu, it attracted great interest in the British media at the time, and was hugely influential in generating a tradition of « community study » within British social anthropology and sociology. In this article, the author shows the personal, academic and political influences which helped to shape Frankenberg’s pioneering work, and the ways in which it captured contemporary currents in British discourse. He concludes by suggesting why his study has had such a strong and enduring influence on the anthropology of Britain.