Archive for Englishness and British national identity

Tomas Bata was a Czech shoe manufacturer, who set out to do for the shoe what Henry Ford did for the motor car. One branch of his international empire, a workers’ community as well as a factory, was established in 1933 at East Tilbury, Essex, on the north bank of the Thames estuary. The British Bata Shoe Company’s factory is now closed but I visited this modernist settlement in 1998 when it was still working. This text is extracted from my book The River: The Thames in Our Time (1999).

Four talks about Englishness produced by John Goudie and broadcast on BBC Radio Three in June 1996. 1. Posthumous England; 2. Deep and Beleaguered England; 3. Threadbare England; 4. Thin England.

In 1995, the Open Spaces Society announced that the first new common to be established in England during the twentieth century was being set up in the Norfolk village of Rushall. I went to have a look. First published in the Guardian, 2 September 1995.

John Major’s new-year resolution for 1995 was to remind us that we should be proud to be British. In the approach to a conference in which Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd would seek to emphasise Britishness, I argued that more flag-waving was the last thing we needed, and that real patriotism would lie in recreating a country that deserved the people’s confidence. Published in the Guardian, 31 December 1994.

A review of Meredith Veldman’s book, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain. Published in the Guardian, 23 April 1994.

On This England, revealing that this ‘heritage’ quarterly which favours cottages, steam engines, choirboys and old shepherd’s smocks, also has a toxic undercurrent connecting it with the far right. Published in the Guardian, 18 August 1993.

In June 1993, I joined a party of British Organic Farmers on a visit to Highgrove, the estate that Prince Charles was then converting to organic production. This article, which reflects on the transformation of the organic movement since its dalliance with fascism in the 1930s, was first published in the Guardian (G2) 17 June 1993.

A profile of the television dramatist Dennis Potter. I met him early one morning in his agent’s office, near Covent Garden. He was still drinking wine from the previous night’s party connected to the launch of ‘Lipstick On Your Collar’ - agonising but lucid. Published in the Guardian, 15 February 1993.

More than 300 years ago, under the Puritans of the Long Parliament, the celebration of Christmas was made illegal in Britain. In late November 1991, I went to the Highlands and Islands of northwest Scotland to talk with the heirs of the Puritan tradition who are fighting a rearguard battle against an overwhelming festival they regard as English, Roman and idolatrous. Published in The Independent Magazine, 21 December 1991.