Where is England, anyhow? A vast cathedral of writers and musicians have tried to locate the elusive heart of a country caught in a perpetual tug of war between its grandiloquent past and uncertain future. Among the most recent is Stuart Maconie, the BBC broadcaster and writer. When he answers his phone, Maconie is, like all true Englishmen, waiting on the platform of a train station. It’s morning time and he’s in bright form, having spent a lively evening in Newcastle at a public gathering for The Full English, his engaging new travelogue, in which he retraces the reflective journey that JB Priestley took in 1933 for his book English Journey.
Priestley, a Bradford boy made good with a sharp eye and a biting, sometimes snobbish turn of phrase, meandered through Albion during the autumn of that year. Maconie spent two years in his footsteps, and the leisurely tone pays off: he succeeds in inhabiting the slim spaces where you can feel and sometimes see vestiges of Priestley’s England nine decades later. Maconie is a relaxed and informal tour guide who can drift from local cuisine to architecture to history to pop culture without the pages becoming a blizzard of facts and wacky stats.
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In Coventry, for instance, he reflects on the new energy and optimism of a city whose trajectory was radically redefined by the Blitz while recalling the mid-1970s “reconciliation” concert for which Tangerine Dream, the splendid German electronic trio, played a concert. (It is preserved on YouTube.) Headlines welcomed the startled performers with the declaration: “35 years ago, they came with bombs! Now, they come with synthesisers.”
Coventry’s Transport Museum recalls the time when the United Kingdom was the world’s second-biggest car manufacturer – the city built 1.8 million cars a year in the early 1950s. Wandering through the museum, Maconie, who is a first-class eavesdropper, overhears a woman saying to her family, “wistfully, peevishly even, ‘Oh, this country used to be great! We could be great again!’”
The sentiment makes his heart sink. A central theme of The Full English is the hankering after a sense of English greatness lost – also one of the central tenets of the Brexit fantasia. But, as Maconie Dick Whittingtons his way through England’s parishes, the reminder of empire is everywhere. It begs a question: isn’t it all but impossible for the English not to wonder about their past?
“That’s a really interesting question because that bit you mention, there are a couple of sections in the book which are the essence of what the book is about,” he says. “That is one of them. What is it about English greatness? We in England are not a grown-up country compared to the Norwegians, say. But I take the point. And I can be guilty, if that is the right word, of sometimes talking up England. When people say, ‘Why are you still going on about the second World War?’ part of me wants to say, ‘Well, hang on, standing alone against fascism is quite a thing to be proud of.’”
There are echoes here of one of the more celebrated fictional jaunts through England, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, in which Mr Stevens, butler for the prewar pacifist lord of Darlington Hall, embarks on his trip to the West Country – which is to say southwest England – for a reunion with Miss Kenton, ostensibly the former housekeeper but the closest he will come to knowing romantic love. Throughout, Stevens deliberates on the concept of greatness as defined by the role of the butler in English society: “And yet, what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart.”
Maconie conjures up the contemporary version of that beauty through vivid snapshots of the cities and towns as he finds them. Chipping Campden, the Cotswolds village where Graham Greene lived, is “more likely to offer an antiquarian volume, an artisanal biscuit or an understated lithograph. Or, now, its designer shops and delicatessens crammed with cave-aged cheese, sourdough and intensely-scented Ethiopian coffee”.
He spends a few pleasant hours in the Eight Bells, a pub that has stood for 700 years. A local handyman and his companion nip in and out for smokes. The local choir arrive to discuss their rehearsal. A newspaper headline tells of the stabbing to death of the MP David Amess.
England’s menacing political undercurrent is present throughout but subtly evoked. Maconie takes a detour to Radcliffe, near Bury, in northwest England, because it was a Labour town that voted Conservative in 2019. He wants to visit there, however, because Christian Wakeford, the local MP, has defected to Labour.
Maconie’s arrival is one of the most memorable passages in the book. “On the tram, or Metrolink more formally, you come into Radcliffe over the dark, swirling Irwell and rows of terraced houses. It’s a Saturday dusk, always an evocative time, redolent of the theme from Sports Report and Doctor Who. The cobbled ginnels fan away full of scattered wheelie bins and pizza boxes and the little shops turn off their lights.”
Isn’t that England, right there?
What would the Rees-Moggs and the Boris Johnsons have to do to get people to wake up and see that they are not your friend?
He makes his way to the Bridge Tavern – Maconie has wisely decided that a town’s boozer is the best way to detect its pulse – where a local man having a smoke outside nods towards the door and greets the stranger. “Looking for t’scores, lad? Go inside. You don’t have to buy owt. They won’t mind.”
Throughout, he touches on the England found in the films of Shane Meadows and in the writer Tabitha Lasley’s recent masterpiece, Sea State. He was acutely conscious, however, that he was just breezing through and that he reports rather than critiques what he encounters.
“Places like Swindon get bad press and they become whipping boys. And I wanted to be fair to those places. There were places like Boston [in Lincolnshire] that I thought were bleak. I didn’t want to blame anyone. But I did want to reflect that they were left behind. I didn’t want to mock. It’s okay to have a bit of a joke but not to punch down.”
Maconie was born in 1961. Like many of his generation, he delighted in being smashed by wave after wave of English pop-music invention that has rolled through every decade since. Music became as good a way as any of interpreting and imagining England. A popular broadcaster – many people would recognise what one reviewer terms his “Lancastrian burr”, both from his BBC Radio 6 shows and his regular TV appearances – he is also credited with coining the term Britpop. After his memoir of a life in music, Cider with Roadies, was published, the comedian Peter Kay described him as “the best thing to come out of Wigan since the A58 to Bolton”.
The broadcaster, then, is one of England’s proud northerners who have thrived in the southern metropolis before finding their way back. His politics are moderately left. His journeys for this book bracketed the time of Covid. Both his parents died in that time, though not from the virus. He is not given to standing at the lectern, but his exasperation at the areas that fell for the Brexit myth is never far beneath the printed word.
“A country that elects someone like Boris Johnson is just not a grown-up country,” he says with passion. “It is insane. What would the Rees-Moggs and the Boris Johnsons have to do to get people to wake up and see that they are not your friend? That is the part about modern England that is really confusing. I do think it is tied up with the culture-war thing. I do think it is overstated. I am walking through Newcastle now, and if I stopped people and asked, ‘What do you think of the culture wars?’ 90 per cent wouldn’t know or care what I was talking about.
“But, as I say in the book, it is in the vested interests of the left and the right to keep the culture war going because it pays their wage. But, to come back to the question: England’s dark, bloody and sometimes great history is difficult to avoid. Still, I do wish that sometimes we could take a step back and say, ‘Why can’t we be more like Norway?’ Why can’t we be less concerned with bossing the world and try and become a happy and content people?”
John Boynton Priestley was born in 1894, the year Gladstone resigned as prime minister, and died in 1984, the year Bronski Beat released Smalltown Boy. It was quite a span. An immensely popular writer – his novel The Good Companions sold by the truckload – Priestley wrote political columns, a series of plays about time slips and nonfiction and he lived, as they say, rent free in the minds of the literati, memorably described by Virginia Woolf as “the tradesman of letters”. Maconie is not alone in detecting a whiff of jealousy in the takedowns.
“I’m a big fan. Because I think he is a rare example of someone who has almost disappeared from English cultural life. He was extremely popular with the reader in the street and also ferociously intelligent, well read, politically astute. I think, to a certain degree, he began to play to the stereotype of the gruff, no-nonsense Yorkshire man. There’s loads about the intelligentsia of the time – Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf – but there was a huge jealousy because he sold so many books. I just think he did so many things so well and so successfully. He engaged with ordinary people without talking down to them and he was a terrific writer. Politically, I am close to him in that he was a progressive, patriotic centre-left person. His sympathies were with ordinary working people in the north of England. I like him.”
Maconie quotes an English Journey sparingly, but it becomes clear that Priestley allowed his moods and eye to dictate what he recorded. “If there is a queerer village in all England than this, I have never seen it,” he said about Shotton Colliery, in Co Durham. On Stockton: “Better looking than Middlesbrough.” Gateshead doesn’t fare well, either: “Insects could do better than this.” Maconie’s contention is that, despite the caustic eye, Priestley wrote from a place of empathy – and, perhaps, with the insecurity of a returning northerner.
“In Newcastle last night, we discussed Priestley’s section about the city. He is scathing about the accent. He’s from Bradford! The crowd were very good natured and not really annoyed about it. I think they got it. It’s a thing you come across in Wigan with George Orwell. This idea that ‘he never did anything for our town! He talked it down all the time.’ And I am sick of trying to explain to people he wasn’t coming to write a tourist brochure. He was coming to talk about an unfair, horrible state of affairs and to say that people deserved better. And I think Priestley was saying that this hopelessness is not okay. I don’t think he is there to sneer. It is not Betjeman’s Slough, which seems to me to be just a sneer by a posh boy. I think, with Priestley, there is anger underneath it that sometimes can come out.”
Maconie does, however, quote the infamous passage in the Priestley book in which the author, roaming through Liverpool’s poverty-stricken Irish community, noted that “the Irishman in England too often cuts a very miserable figure. He has lost his peasant virtues, whatever they are, and has acquired no others ... If we do have an Irish Republic as our neighbour, and it is found possible to return her exiled citizens, what a grand clearance there will be in all the western ports, from the Clyde to Cardiff, what a fine exit of ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease.”
“It’s hard to gloss this as anything other than bigotry,” Maconie writes. It is, he says now, a horrifyingly bleak passage to read. But his book “is not an unalloyed fan letter to Priestley. There are other examples as well where you can say, ‘We could offer an explanation.’ But, really, it is just out of order.”
If there is a neat summary to what he discovered in following Priestley’s ghost, it is that England’s cities are thriving while its towns are ailing. “There are a lot of English people who know Marbella better than the Potteries,” he points out. He would urge people to find the England beyond the blazing cities and main arteries. It is the towns that seem to have fallen into the time slips that Priestley dramatised in his plays.
“And it explains why those towns were the ones where Brexit happened and the red wall crumbled,” Maconie says as he prepares to board his train – he doesn’t say whether it’s running late.
“There are populations that feel Westminster has turned its back on them. But there is enormous cause for optimism. We are never going to be the workshop of the world any more. That is no bad thing. Let’s start forgetting about being ‘great’. That’s no bad thing. So how about getting some grown-up priorities, like the Scandinavians, of having a happy, healthy, progressive country? That is what I’d take away from it.”
The Full English, by Stuart Maconie, is published by HarperNorth
