I can’t remember how I came to have this handsome Folio edition of English Journey. It has sat on my bookshelf for many years, waiting patiently to be read. I may well have inherited it from my Dad’s large Folio collection, but I think it’s more likely I bought it for a few pounds from one of the second hand booksellers in Lewes. It is printed on glossy paper with contemporary photos on almost every page. The pages are deceptively large and I found I couldn’t maintain my usual target of fifty pages a night, rarely managing more than twenty or thirty. The photos are excellent including many by one of my Dad’s photography heroes, Bill Brandt. In a nice circular twist I have since discovered that Brandt was inspired to take many of his photos of northern English working class life by reading this book.

Priestley was a prolific and successful interwar novelist, playwright, and commentator. He is of the same wartime generation as Graves and Sassoon and fought in the trenches. He was buried by a trench mortar and badly wounded, but later returned to the front as an officer towards the end of the war. His background is northern middle-class, a native of Bradford. Although by the time he wrote English Journey he had settled in London. English Journey was commissioned by left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz as a study of contemporary England in 1933. At times during the trip, as he settles into yet another uncomfortable cheap hotel bedroom, Preistley rues the day he agreed to it, but he bravely plugs on seeking out the poorest and most deprived districts in many of the towns he visits. His efforts were well rewarded, it was a great success and influenced other writers including, notably, George Orwell’s Road To Wigan Pier. Indeed, his efforts to expose the deplorable conditions of much of the working-class is sometimes credited with winning the 1945 election for the labour party. The structure of the book is a straightforward place-by-place journal of a trip around the country. In each chapter he visits two or three cities of a particular part of the country, usually taking in two or three locations in each. He describes the places and the many people he meets and uses them for a series of musings on the state of the country.

He travels first to Southampton and then on to Bristol. Both prosperous towns in the 1930s that largely escaped the depression. He is very impressed with the huge liners docked in Southampton. They were the main international transport of the day. Huge floating palaces proudly and confidently exhibiting the art-deco fashion of the period. It’s notable that any Englishman today daily experiences the buildings and railways of the Victorians, but these monuments to early 20th century British prosperity and world leadership have entirely disappeared. That must skew our view of the period. He explores the prosperous high street and marvels at the abundance of products on display. It’s funny to read about things which are entirely commonplace now, but that were brand new in his day: luxury motor coaches, telephones, household appliances, and cinemas. He claims that the average person with a little money can now live as well as a lord. On the other hand he is rather disparaging of an entrepreneurial man he talks to on the coach, finding him crass and unsophisticated. I mused that it was people like this boorish businessman who had generated the prosperity Priestley is celebrating. Continuing on to Bristol he lavishes praise on the town, saying that it’s the perfect blend of ancient and modern, with the depth of history from being a major port for hundreds of years, but also buzzing with commercial energy.

In the Cotswolds he delights in its beauty while bemoaning the “Ye Olde England” tourism that was just emerging in the 20s and 30s. He has the charming self-awareness to also say that he’s making it worse by writing about it. He enthuses about the nobility of craftsmanship and rails against mass production, but concedes that the hand crafted goods he so admires would have been the beyond the means of most people.

He continues to Coventry and Birmingham. Coventry still had its ancient town centre before it was flattened by the Luftwaffe, and Birmingham it’s large Victorian buildings, both now replaced by concrete brutality. He must have seen the postwar rebuilding of these cities. I wonder what he made of it? Few would disagree now that it was atrociously misconceived. It’s a sad accident of history that such a destructive war coincided with an anti-human and beauty destroying architectural fad. What’s even sadder is that the architectural profession still hasn’t truly admitted guilt and atoned for its sins. Priestley is impressed by Coventry which at that time was a booming centre of the motor industry. The UK was then the second largest car producer in the world after the US. In Birmingham, with its older Victorian industrial base he’s less happy, particularly when he takes a tram into the rather grimy suburbs. He visits the Bournville model village established by the Quaker Cadbury family to house the workers of their chocolate factory. He admires their paternalism while disliking the paternal aspect of it. He says how he much prefers terraced houses to the detached villas he finds there, a view not shared by the residents of Bournville, he admits. Finally he visits the Black Country, then a still active, but slowly decaying, remnant of the first wave of industrialisation. He describes it as unremittingly grim.

He travels to Leicester and Nottingham. In Leicester he visits a typewriter factory. Another example of Britain’s industrial pre-eminance a century ago. The country was the Shenzhen of the day, full of factories producing all goods of all kinds. Priestly doesn’t really approve, he’d much rather see an arcadian agricultural country of happy peasants and craftsmen. He grudgingly concedes that the engineers he meets seem enthusiastic and enjoy their work. But isn’t it drudgery to work all day at a machine, he asks? A manager invites him home for dinner and he is very impressed by the man’s hobby of keeping colourful tropical birds. We are a nation of hobbyists he claims, a characteristic he heartily approves of. In Nottingham he visits the famous Goose Fair where he sees the world’s ugliest woman, a poor soul suffering from some kind of disfiguring disease. An attraction that we would find appalling today. He’s in turn appalled by the sight of working class teenagers having fun; the boys shouting and loutish, the girls like powdered dolls, screaming on the rides. He thinks the whole affair is just a mechanical excuse to take poor people’s money, with no redeeming artistic or cultural value. All very patronising.

He returns to his Yorkshire roots, staying in his childhood home in Bradford for a few days. He describes various characters, including a woman who had worked in the same wool mill for 50 years. He finds it hard to believe that a human life could be so unremittingly monotonous. In another interesting passage he says that Bradford has fewer foreign immigrants than in his time. He says the German Jews who used to be a common sight seem to have moved on. I wonder what he’d make of Bradford today, with a third of the population South Asian muslim? I suspect he would have celebrated the diversity. He rhapsodizes about the Yorkshire moors, and celebrates the new hobby of hiking that was taking off in the early 30s. I was very curious about this and did a little extra research. Apparently “hiking” (a trendy new American word - traditionalists preferred “rambling”) was a huge cultural phenomena in the 1930s with distinctive dress - shorts for women! - and an accompanying ideology of clean-living and clean-air.

Onward to the potteries; Stoke-on-Trent and its surroundings. My Geography north of London is not good; I had to look up its location to discover that it sits between Birmingham and Manchester, not too far from Shrewsbury and familiar Shropshire. In the 30s it was still the center of a huge pottery industry, the landscape dotted with kilns. Priestley finds the whole place ugly and depressing and wonders how anyone could live there, but he’s intrigued by the art of making chinaware and thinks that the workers here have more interesting and artful jobs than those working in other industries. There’s a great scene as he spends an afternoon trying desperately to turn a half decent pot without much success. In Liverpool he explores the dockside slums. He is fascinated by the mixed-race children he encounters there, children of the many prostitutes with fathers from all corners of the world. He comments on how attractive they are. Rather disturbingly he muses that most of the girls will follow their mothers into the oldest trade. In the 1930s, there was no stigma about condemning an entire group of people based on their nationality or ethnicity. Racial stereotyping was a widespread and popular pastime. In a rather distasteful display of prejudice he reveals a deep dislike of the large Irish community, saying that the city would be much improved if they all went back to Ireland.

He visits Blackpool out of season. Everything is shut, the seafront is lashed by gales, and his hotel is almost empty. Interesting, but hardly a realistic or fair assessment of the place. Any holiday town will be a little depressing out of season. He’s snobbishly dismissive of working class holiday habits and the tacky entertainment laid one for them. In Blackburn he visits various unemployed cotton workers. The bottom had fallen out of the market for British cotton goods thanks to vicious competition, especially from far eastern producers, he especially mentions Japan. Unfortunately for the textile workers, clothing is a classic industrial entry point, and usually one of the the first trades of any newly industrialising country. I’m sure the Japanese textile workers were in turn put out of work by Chinese or Bangladeshis. Astonishing to think that Lancashire used to clothe half of India. The inevitability of decline must have been no consolation to the unemployed weavers he encounters. Of course they should have been helped to retrain and move on, but at that time there was no conception that the government should intervene directly in the labour market.

He travels to the Tyne, Newcastle, Gateshead, Jarrow. All unremittingly grim in the wake of decline of the shipbuilding industry. He meets a young working class communist and paints a very accurate picture of his world-view, full of conspiracy and zero-sum thinking; one that’s still common with many people today:

“He did not make this an excuse to attack a muddled wasteful competitive system; which would have been legitimate enough. He saw it as one more example of the conspiracy of bosses and officials. He thinks that most people are poor because a few are rich. Any man receiving more than a few pounds per week automatically becomes one of the sinister conspiring class. The modern world is to him simply a wicked place, and not, as it seems to many of us, a stupid place. … Men of the employing or managing classes are never to him men very much like himself who, thought they may be the servants of a faulty and even cruel system, are honestly trying to do their duty and be be decent and kind and unselfish; they are always sneering cunning tyrants, to whom the very poverty and helplessness of the people are a source of deep satisfaction. … Nobody could be more cynical than he is about elected persons and men in authority here and now, but he has no difficulty in persuading himself that in a Communist England all elected persons and men in authority would acquire a new mystical virtue.”

In a final descent into the heart of industrial darkness, he travels, with some trepidation, to the East Durham coal fields and the coastal mining town of Seaham. The experience was unremittingly grim. The miners living a troglodyte, dangerous, and filthy existence underground, only to be greeted by a bleak and scarred landscape and substandard, cramped housing on their return to the surface. In exchange they were paid a barely subsistence wage. The chapter includes a long plea for social democracy, to nationalize the pits, pay the miners a fair wage, clean up the environment, and ensure better working conditions. He rails against the complacent attitude of the upper classes with their assertion that the miners are “used to it”. Priestley refuses to go down a mine himself. He says he’s had claustrophobia ever since being buried during the war.

His final stops are Lincoln and Norwich, giving both himself and the reader a well earned rest from the decaying industrial misery of England’s manufacturing and mining districts. Despite the harsh winter weather he enjoys both cities, spending a hearty time with friends in both, and rhapsodising about their medieval beauty (the cities, not his friends). He makes a good case - with which I heartily agreed - for regional government in the UK, if for no other reason than it would make Norwich the capital of East Anglia. Norwich was the first town he visited that I know well, and it was nostalgic to read his descriptions of Tombland, Elm Hill, the market square, and the cathedral. All familiar haunts during the five years I lived in the city.

He returns home to London from Norwich in thick fog and reflects upon his journey. He says there are three Englands: the “old England” of rural villages and farms, landed estates, cathedrals, castles, and market towns; then there is the nineteenth century England of basic industries, mining, textiles, and shipbuilding. It’s most prevalent in the industrial north of grim towns, ruined landscapes, and now redundant communities. Lastly the “new England” of motor vehicles, aviation, and electronics, modern factories, semi-detached suburbia, and mass entertainment. His heart is with the old England, but he’s realistic enough to know that it has passed and can’t provide a good living for everyone; he’s scathing about Victorian industrialisation, saying it was as destructive as it was enriching. He again makes a plea for public help for these northern regions. Of the new England, he’s rather snobblish, saying that the culture has less value; it’s cheap and tacky; but he concedes that it’s the new England that will best provide prosperity for the average person. It reminded me of William Gibson’s “the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed”, it seems this was certainly the case in interwar Britain.

Priestley is full of contradictions. That’s part of his charm. He has enormous sympathy for the poor, especially the destitute communities of declining industrial areas. But when the working class have money and leisure time, he’s scathing about the way they choose to spend it. You might say he’s paternalistic, and there’s certainly an element of that, but when he sees true paternalistic industrialisation, at the Bournville estate, he doesn’t really approve. The country was moving from having a tiny wealthy upper class and a majority too poor to do anything but just survive, to a new income distribution with a large and growing middle-class. This could only be achieved by mass production and growing suburbs. This massive growth in disposable income also meant that the economy was no longer geared towards the needs of the aristocracy, but now provided for a much wider class of consumer. To the surprise of commentators like Priestley it turned out that their tastes did not match those of the existing elite. They deplore consumerism, but it’s not consuming per-se they dislike but who does it.

Priestley is rightly damning of the conditions of the poor in the depressed areas of the north. He comes close to thinking that nineteenth century industrialisation was a mistake; that it’s ugliness and destruction outweighed the wealth it created. He says that wealth has since left the areas that generated it and has been invested in good living for the factory owners and their backers. But do we really know the condition of the poor peasantry in rural England? He himself says that the population didn’t grow in previous centuries, but has multiplied since the industrial revolution, which must imply that if nothing else the population was at least surviving now. There’s no route from “old England” to “new England” without going through the nineteenth century. In fact the “old England” that Priestley sees isn’t really old England, but a tourism and large-scale farming supported sanitised mutation of it. The decline of the old industrial areas was inevitable once other countries industrialised and started to pull themselves up the same ladder. Britain suffered from being the pioneers, the first country to explore what it meant to be industrialised. But the explorer had no map, no way of knowing the solutions to the various challenges it would throw up. Of course some kind of social democracy would have been the best answer to post-industrial decline. A programme of public investment in re-skilling and unemployment support. The welfare state did eventually emerge, but twenty years after Priestley wrote this book. Perhaps it simply takes that long for lessons to be learnt, answers discussed and devised, and action to be taken. One could argue that it was the national mobilisation of WWII that finally proved that state intervention could be effective. One wonders what the country would have looked like in 1950 had WWII never taken place?

Priestley writes well, in a conversational and easy style. His personality shines through; never failing to give his opinions, and happy to contradict himself and then recognise the contradiction. As an account of the England of 1933 it is superb; not giving a simple one-dimensional picture, but rather a rich mosaic of people and places. It reveals the country with all its beauty and ugliness, it’s wealth and poverty. It’s so true that a community of 40 million people (at the time) can many things simultaneously. There’s much to deplore, but also much to admire, and Priestley very fairly does both. It’s a country that’s very different to today, but yet one that both my grandparents and father were born into, and one where we can still feel its echoes almost a century later. It’s instructive to see my own heritage in terms of the picture Priestley paints. I have almost no ancestors of the Victorian-industrial England of the north. My dad was certainly born poor, but in a very rural setting in Kent. He was lucky enough to have the talent to find his own route into the new England by the 50s, working in graphic design, very much one of the new occupations. My grandfather on my mother’s side was very much “new England”, born into a commercial family in Banbury. My grandmother was lower-upper-class with uncles who were managers of empire in India and China. Priestley doesn’t mention this England, but he probably felt it was well enough known to look after itself. Now it’s as dead as those textile factories.