The Full English: A Journey in Search of a Country and its People

Three years before George Orwell made his expedition to the far and frozen North JB Priestley – who had grown up there after all – cast his net wider, writing a book subtitled “a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933.” It was a huge and immediate success. A timeless classic, it is scathing about vested interests, intensely patriotic and politically progressive.

English Journey is warm, funny, tender. But tough. There is steel here too. J B Priestley’s elegant and readable prose, written for a mass audience, is just as forensic a reading of a changing England and just as passionate a call to arms as anything in Orwell’s bleak masterpiece. Moreover, it both captured and catalysed the public mood. But it’s more than this. It’s a love letter, albeit an exasperated one, to a country that he loves and yet finds unfathomable.

Stuart Maconie has often expressed the same passions and puzzlement. Now, ninety years on, he intends to take an English Journey of his own, with Priestley’s thirties itinerary as guide. 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.

Revisiting English Journey, interrogating its insights and perspectives, walking in Priestley’s footsteps and riding the roads and rails he did, Maconie’s latest is popular, timely and entertaining, taking the form of a ‘sustained lovers quarrel with England’, as did the original.