Pj Kavanagh

Continuity under threat

This handsome and encouraging book is perhaps unfortunate in its title.

This handsome and encouraging book is perhaps unfortunate in its title. The suggestion is that the author has been forced to rummage among the wreckage that is England in order to find something, anything, that is still intact. Its origins and intentions are quite the opposite.

As Richard Ingrams explains in his short introduction, when he was editor of Private Eye he published a regular feature called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’, written by John Betjeman — a suitable kind of investigation for a satirical magazine. When, in 1992, he founded The Oldie, a feature called ‘Unwrecked England’ written by this author, Betjeman’s daughter, was precisely intended to redress the balance, to express enthusiasm, and this is what her Oldie pieces collected here triumphantly do. Caught on the journalist’s tag of her column’s title — which Oldie readers will recognise and rejoice at — a wider readership, which it deserves, might be deceived.

The 100 articles here, a selection from 25 years of enjoyment, do not merely celebrate little pockets of beauty that have somehow survived. They express a continuity, under threat of course; everything always is and always has been. If it isn’t the Scots or the Norsemen it’s the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Industrial Revolution, the Age of the Motorway, or sheer human wrong-headedness. They all give evidence of an instinct for survival that seems almost miraculous. This is a greatly cheering book, written with charm and containing great photographs.

No piece is without its enlivening anecdotes. Blanchland, for example, in Northumbria (the places are in alphabetical order) was so out of the way in the 14th century that a band of Scottish marauders failed even to notice it. To celebrate their deliverance the monks rang a peal of bells and the Scots returned to sack the place.

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