IN the latest of his punning travelogues, Wigan-born writer and broadcaster Stuart Maconie, the author of Pies and Prejudice and Adventures on the High Teas, has turned his attention to following in the footsteps of JB Priestley, whose English Journey recounted his travels around the country in 1933.

It was a huge and immediate success. A timeless classic, it is scathing about vested interests, intensely patriotic and politically progressive.

90 years later and following Priestley's exact route, Maconie takes a round about route around our post-pandemic country in an effort to see if the English are still as "beautiful, exasperating, passionate, solid, divided, combative, warm, humane and funny" as they were pre-Second World War.

How does the country look now, as it reopens and re-emerges from this ice age of doubt and insecurity. Re-energised? Hungry for change? Or moribund, dazed and desperate for old certainties.

"There are loads of state-of-the-nation books about the collapse of the 'Red Wall' or the left behind towns so I didn't want to write that book," said Maconie. "I didn't want it to be a dry, social-analytical thing and although I hope it's informative my main aim was to be entertaining."

 

From the Potteries and the Black Country, Newcastle and Norwich via the Costwalds and Liverpool, Maconie looks for the positives whereever he goes, although fans of Stoke or Boston might want to look away now. 

"I was conscious to always punch up rather than punch down," he said. "There is a real strain in British comedy to look down on certain places - look at The Office and Slough - but having said that I didn't want to shirk from the truth. 

"I did find a couple of places that felt unhappy and one of those was Boston in Lincolnshire - it seemed to be a great snapshot of the malaise that has affected Britain in the last few years and it was a reminder of how divided and fractured we've become post-Brexit. I remain an apologist for New Labour but there was a lot of misunderstanding about what would happen to towns like this with the volume of immigration when it came to sustainability.

"Nearly everyone I met there said 'this used to be a nice place' and that isn't as simple as bigotry - it's what happens when people don't think about how to develop towns.    

 "There were pleasant surprises too: I didn't really know Coventry and what a young, go-ahead city it is. Downtown Coventry felt like a university campus and they're dong great things there developing driverless cars.

 "I really loved Lincoln and Norwich too. Norwich gets a bad deal because of Alan Partridge but I left there thinking 'I'd much rather live here than London'. 

"But while a lot of our cities seem very diverse and dynamic and resurgent a lot of our towns didn't feel like that."

Travelling across England in the immediate aftermath of Covid and the relaxation of lockdown rules also presented Maconie with unique chance to check each location's temperature. 

He said: "I was travelling through an England where it felt two things were going on: I was looking at boarded up shops everywhere and thinking 'has that closed down due to Covid?' I could also detect, particularly in Liverpool, a real appetite for going out again. You could tell people were crazy to get out there in a good but slightly frightening way.

"It felt like there was a real difference between the night and day. In the evening you couldn't get a table at a restaurant but in the day you would be looking at shops that had probably been doing alright a few years before but were now closed." 

Preistley's book was an influential work, inspiring George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and has even been credited with winning the 1945 election for the Labour Party. What would he have thought about Maconie following in his footsteps? 

"I think we're quite kindred spirits in terms of our centre left politics," he added. "We're both more interested in ordinary people than we are with ideologies and I think we're both similar people cut from similar cloth. 

"I think he would have been shocked about the diversity in England but not in a bad way and the technology would have blown his mind.

"At the end of the day he genuinely liked people." 

 

 

Stuart Maconie will be signing copies of Full English at Waterstones in Birkenhead at 3pm on Wednesday, April 26. No ticket required - just come along, buy a copy of the book and Stuart will be happy to sign it for you. 

An Evening with Stuart Maconie takes place at Oh Me Oh My, West Africa House, 25 Water St, Liverpool, L2 0RG on Wednesday, April 26 at 7pm. Tickets £8 from waterstones.com