Engel was always a perfectly decent sports writer but on this showing he’s yet another journalist who thinks they can tread the same travelogue path as Bill Bryson or Paul Theroux without an iota of their wit or their outsider’s perspective. Apart from being irritatingly jokey, the book reveals a lot of ignorance at times (eg the sections on Stevenage and Letchworth, the respective histories of which Engel misunderstands in stereotypical class terms) and there are moments of actual offensiveness. For example, Luton may well be an unlovely place in a physical sense, but it's breathtaking to say, as he does here, that it has 'no sense of community'. Bear in mind he's talking about a town with a majority non-white population and, incidentally, the biggest street carnival in Europe outside Notting Hill. By failing to see the wood for the trees, Engel misses exploring what community is really all about, either because he doesn't bother to look for it or because his definition of community is too narrow, He never makes it clear how he defines community - or 'Englishness', come to that). Surely communities aren’t just about having an independent bookshop on the high street or historic architecture or having quaint customs, they’re about people making the best of where they live.
Where people put down roots is down to individual circumstance, opportunity and work, and the voices of people who have done that - the people who make up the soul of these communities - are consistently missing. There's a hole right at the heart of the book because of this. To put it as kindly as possible, the author comes across as a bewildered middle class man out of touch with the social and cultural changes of the last 30 years or so. He only seems really comfortable writing about the history of places, and that's been done much more diligently and with greater insight by other authors. The result is a narrow and surprisingly mean book that lacks the good heartedness, generosity of spirit and willingness to listen that distinguish, say, Stuart Maconie's books on a similar theme.
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