Written and sung by the band's principal songwriter, Ray Davies, the song was first recorded in November 1966 during the sessions for Something Else by the Kinks (1967) but was re-recorded in February 1967.

Both the composition and instrumentation of "Village Green" evoke Baroque music, especially its prominently featured harpsichord played by the session keyboardist Nicky Hopkins.

Unlike most of the band's late 1960s recordings, it employs real orchestral instruments, including oboe, cello, viola and piccolo, as arranged by the English composer David Whitaker.

It served as one of the central inspirations for The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society and was the album's title track until only a few months before its release.

[5][c] Music critic Ian MacDonald suggests the ban left the group comparatively isolated from American influence, guiding them away from their earlier blues-based riffing towards a distinctly English songwriting style.

[8] He expressed his pride of Britain in an April 1966 interview with Melody Maker magazine, wishing its culture could remain distinct from that of America and Europe, as well as a desire to keep writing "very English songs".

[9] Davies likely composed "Village Green" around 16 August 1966, the same day the Kinks played at Torquay Town Hall in Devon, a rural part of England.

[10] He later recalled the song spawning from his disappointment after finding out the beer at a Devon pub was stored in a pressurised metal keg rather than in a traditional wooden barrel.

Both Avory and bassist Pete Quaife recalled being annoyed by the method, since it prevented them from easily adding fills and embellishments that fitted the song.

[34] The song employs a fifth-cyclic sequence and a descending chromatic chorus, elements which musicologist Allan F. Moore writes evoke the music of Baroque composer George Frideric Handel.

Moore thinks the relationship to Handel is further emphasised by the presence of a harpsichord,[35] an instrument which band biographer Johnny Rogan writes helps develop the song's drama.

[37] Like many of the Kinks' songs, its chorus features wordless backing vocals,[38] an element which cultural researcher Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski writes evokes "carefree childhood".

[42] The singer remembers the green in his memory as somewhere he misses but expects to have changed since he left it,[43] mourning the town's invasion by American tourists and the community's cheapening atmosphere.

[46][e] He writes that while "Village Green" covers similar thematic elements in its "simplistic glorification of daisies, clocks and steeples",[36] it instead satirises the more optimistic sentiments expressed in the title track.

Rayes writes that Davies's notion of "an encroaching modern English culture" parallels the novel's motifs of "mythic America and the changing American dream".

[63] Band researcher Doug Hinman writes that around the same time, in early June 1968, Davies's plans for a solo LP and the Kinks' next album had "[slowly] mutated into one" under the expected title Village Green.

[71] In a retrospective assessment, J. H. Tompkins of Pitchfork suggests the song displayed the increasing disconnect between the Kinks and the broader rock world, contrasting its understated style against the "bombastic, urban" sound of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil".

[31] The Kinks performed an instrumental rendition of "Village Green" in concert on 14 January 1973 at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, augmented by additional singers and a brass section.