Made in England - Patrick Wright

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Patrick Wright

Patrick Wright's books include The Village that Died for England, Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War, and On Living in an Old Country. He teaches at Nottingham Trent University, and also at the London Consortium.

Real England? Reflections on Broadway Market

Writing in 1940, the year of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, George Orwell famously came up with a different list in which the sound of clattering clogs featured alongside cricket on the village green and a subsequently much cited maiden aunt bicycling to communion. Orwell's list was thrown wide to include the north as well as the south, and the industrial working class rather than just the traditional countryside.

Yet, the characteristic images listed are only half the story of these attempts to define and rally the English. Just as the 'real England' of Broadway Market has been achieved in defiance of the local authority and its developers, the England invoked in earlier times has often been thrown into relief by a burning sense of imminent danger. This is easily understood at times of war, when the threat is palpable. Yet it is by no means only at such moments of righteous emergency that Englishness has been a defensive stance. Even in peace time, being English can feel like a perpetual Dunkirk, in which everything that is valued is polarised against 'encroaching' developments that promise only nullification and destruction.

This pattern was established in the first years of the twentieth century by the writer G.K. Chesterton and his friend Hilaire Belloc. Chesterton and Belloc espoused the cause of 'Little England', which they tried to separate out from the larger identity and purposes of the British Empire. While Rudyard Kipling might wander the globe as the poet of British imperialism, the true Englishman, so Chesterton suggested, stayed at home, content in his local place, even if it only amounted to a few cottages, an unmodernised pub and a couple of fields. He was slow-thinking, rooted in his liberties as well as his place, and instinctively wise. He might look out over nothing more than a cabbage patch but he still grasped more about life than the footloose British traveller, who saw nothing but scenery and for whom no place was more than a 'destination'.

Reading Chesterton's defence of the traditional English pub with its real ale we may rightly sense a distant anticipation of the 'slow' movement of our own time. Yet there are, I think, also reasons to be cautious about this way of thinking. It defines England not as a present political society with its own varied and also disputatious population, but as an inherited way of life that is under constant threat of being closed down and thrown irretrievably into the past by hostile modern forces pressing in from outside.

Anyone wanting to review the encroaching threats arrayed against Chesterton's browbeaten English folk and their traditional liberties might start with The Flying Inn, a comic novel written shortly before the First World War. The enemies here include the British State, with its arbitrary rules and systems of administration. Academic learning is on the list, with its abstracted expertise, and its rejection of grounded commonsense. So too is Islam, presented as the alien creed of a 'prophet' who, through the influence of overeducated upper class disciples, manages to get an alcohol ban imposed over England. Then comes the rest of the metropolitan elite, with its secularism and its crazy taste for avant-garde pictures. Other threats included big business and department stores, which Chesterton finds guilty not just of displacing the small shop-keeper but of corrosive cosmopolitanism and luxury. Like Belloc's, his defence of England was tinged with anti-Semitism too.

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Copyright Patrick Wright 2008

Disclaimer: the views expressed in the copyrighted poems and essays are the views of the author alone, and are not endorsed or otherwise by the BBC or Arts Council in any way whatsoever.

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Andrew Veitch
Thank you Patrick. We shall be four years old on May 10. To have someone understand what we are trying to do, and to voice it so eloquently, is just about the best birthday present a mucky-faced East London kid could have.Andy Veitch, Chair, Broadway Market Traders' and Residents' Association.

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