Made in England - Patrick Wright

• Made in England
• Reading Detectives
• John Akomfrah
• Projects
• Get Creative
• Artists commissions
• Classic poetry moments
• Video Nation

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

In the mid-nineties, I talked with a founder of a distinctly Chestertonian Movement for Middle England, a devolutionary campaign which urged the English to consider 'taking root in your region and helping to run it'. Since relaunched as 'England Devolve!,' this campaign was founded partly a response to the perceived vibrancy of immigrant life. Britain's Afro-Caribbean, Irish and Asian communities had their own culture and a sustaining sense of where they came from, and the English should surely emulate them in recovering their regional roots and traditions.

The founders seem to have been of a co-operative and strongly democratic persuasion. And yet, when they started to attend meetings and rallies with their flag showing a carefully fragmented cross of St George, they found people backing off as if they were motivated, as the England Devolve! website now recalls, by 'chauvinism, nationalism or worse'.

More recently, while driving through Oakham, the county town of Rutland, one evening in 2006, I turned on the radio to hear a rousing song called 'Roots', by the West Country folk band 'Show of Hands'. The song lamented the fact that, unlike the Celtic nations and Britain's immigrant communities, the English have lost their culture or traded it for a few mind-sapping American songs played on a jukebox in a forlorn, and probably also lager-filled public bar.

The song went on to become something of a popular anthem, and yet here too the reception was mixed. The next time I heard Show of Hands on the radio, they were at some pains to distance their song from the British National Party, members of which had turned up to reveal their enthusiasm for it at a recent concert at the Albert Hall.

I am not seeking to condemn either that song or the Movement for Middle England, both of which have usefully demonstrated the importance of sorting out our ideas. The imagery of endangered England has undoubtedly served good causes over the years. Yet it has also justified the apprehension of those members of British immigrant communities who have expressed their reluctance to identify themselves as English, suspecting that this is really a hostile ethnicity in disguise. It is on the same account that some Labour ministers have in recent years felt licensed to dismiss all thought of post-devolutionary political reform in England, using the racist and Europhobic expressions of English nationalism as their justification.

Meanwhile, recent events on Broadway Market are encouraging. They suggest that while defensive battles may remain necessary, they can be conducted in the name of a mixed and present-day local community rather than a mummified set of ancestral roots. It’s possible to be vigorously English without resorting to mournful elegies, or without having to prove your descent from the ancient Iberian or Celtic stock that Hilaire Belloc, writing a century ago, described as 'the permanent root of all England'.

As for the organic metaphor, which so many embattled English folk have ended up applying to their own endangered way of life, Broadway Market has a message there too. While it should certainly not be applied to mixed human populations, it remains just fine on the fruit and vegetable stall.

previous 1 2 3 4 5

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.

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.

Skip to top