About England
David Matless
Having read it
★★★☆☆
To be honest, despite a few interesting and intriguing insights and views put forward, namely around the ‘madness’, perspectives, creativity and humour of England by its inhabitants – all worth four out of five, at least! – the book seemed lost in its own academic skills and majesty, but then maybe that was its underlying point and a reflection of the English in trying to do everything, but nothing very well: despite its rolling hills, its creative and cultural endeavours and attitudes and approaches to things, England is, well, lost in its existential flatness; stuck in eras past, heritage and tradition, misunderstanding its rich, diverse and varied inheritances from others (ideas, food, culture, people and countries) and never really willing to face, tackle and constructively and legitimately move on from its legacies and heritage – change those net curtains, crikey!
A bit like the author writes:
Opening the English past might shape an open English future.
But then again, too much heritage, certainly physical, just takes up space that can’t be used for something more productive and contemporary (without just monetary profit being used as a marker of success).
Still, nostalgia, what’s that all about, eh?
Nostalgia, whether for the remembered or the heard about, gives a critical take on the present. Heritage, as ever, is harnessed for today.
Oh, and yes, from about the second chapter onwards, I did mostly skim and skip the reading of the book (despite a few attempts at nearly reading a whole chapter) so would probably be marked down by academia for that.
A good passage
Landscape follows the money, and while landed wealth came from many sources, including landownership, agricultural production, international trade, mineral extraction and manufacturing, cultures of gentility played down rough connections, including connections to slavery. The aspiration to a country life on the part of the newly wealthy placed them at a distance: profits flowed to them, whatever their source, yet they could live a life upstream.
A second good passage
Orwell’s ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ also noted a sensibility that Right to Buy would tap into:
The modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller than the stockbroker’s villa, but it is recognisably the same kind of house, which the farm labourer’s cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a council housing estate is likely to be – indeed, visibly is – more middle-class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum.55
For Major, as for Thatcher, suburbia denoted an England escaping or secure from the inner-urban or the Labour Exchange. The suburb was a stepping stone to material advancement. The calculation of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century political parties, Conservative and Labour, was that suburbia was a stepping stone to power.
A third good passage
The successful attempt to align the landowner not only with national heritage but with the public interest was an extraordinary cultural achievement at a time of industrial unrest and economic crisis. The Historic Houses Association submitted a 1-million-signature petition to Parliament in autumn 1975, having circulated it in houses open to visitors. The Earl of March stripped a Goodwood room of its contents, asking visitors to sign a petition if they disapproved of such a potential effect of a Wealth Tax. Cormack’s 1976 book Heritage in Danger, which suggested that ‘It is perhaps in our country houses and churches that one comes closest to the spirit of England’, included a photograph captioned ‘The Earl of March sits in an empty room, demonstrating the devastating effect taxation could have at Goodwood’.25 The image is credited to the Earl of March, suggesting either use of a self-timer or an unnamed servant behind the lens. In a time of severe economic hardship, public sympathy is elicited for the aristocracy via oxymoronic portraits of genteel poverty. The soundtrack could be the Kinks 1966 song ‘Sunny Afternoon’, where the taxman takes the narrator’s dough and leaves him in his stately home, lazing the sunny afternoon away.
Cormack’s book was adapted into a television series by the Birmingham-based commercial television company ATV, and the 1978 edition of Heritage in Danger carried a foreword by Roy Strong: ‘It is in times of danger, either from without or from within, that we become deeply conscious of our heritage.’ Heritage was ‘a deeply stabilizing and unifying element within our society’, a one-nation object:
‘In the 1940s we felt all this deeply because of the danger from without. In the 1970s we sense it because of the dangers from within. We are all aware of problems and troubles, of changes within the structure of society, of the dissolution of old values and standards. For the lucky few this may be exhilarating, even exciting, but for the majority it is confusing, threatening and dispiriting. The heritage represents some form of security, a point of reference, a refuge perhaps, something visible and tangible which, within a topsy and turvy world, seems stable and unchanged.’26