Real England: The Battle Against the Bland
By Paul Kingsnorth
Portobello £14.99, 312 pages
FT bookshop price: £11.99

Where is the real England? The quest for this elusive entity has taken 20th-century writers to cricket grounds (John Major), country lanes where old maids bicycle to Holy Communion (George Orwell) and above all to pubs serving warm beer (Orwell again, and G.K. Chesterton). Paul Kingsnorth, former deputy editor of The Ecologist, takes his cue from some prescient words written 25 years ago by Richard Mabey in The Common Ground: “Time and again we have seen how most of the naturally rich areas that remain on the farm are now confined to land that is agriculturally marginal.” Mabey’s pronouncement on agriculture can be extended to culture: the richest, most interesting and even definitive bits of English culture are now to be found in the margins, not in the bland, motorway-linked, mall-strewn mainstream.