Pax-The-Manica

A good friend of mine, a Mr Oliver Baker, lent me Jeremy Paxman’s book on ‘The English’ a short while back which I have been reading with growing interest. Apart from being the recipient of the lovely retro cover design of the Penguin Celebrations range, this is a fascinating study. Especially for someone as conflicted by his identity as an english person as I am.

 

A fine read

There’s a pleasing undercurrent of anger here in the chapter ‘There Always Was An England’, analysing imagined ideas and fantasies of ‘England’. It contains this fine rant about the damage that the English bucolic idyll fantasy has done to our sense of urban living:

‘… the most recent calamity to befall England was for her cities to be half-bombed in the war: the measure of misfortune not so much what was lost as what replaced it. When the Luftwaffe gave the English the opportunity to rebuild their cities more graciously, they merely recreated worse versions of what had been there before… the redevelopment of English cities has been left in the hands of the stupid, short sighted and sometimes corrupt local councils, aided and abetted by third-rate architects and get-rich-quick builders. If ever evidence were needed of English contempt for the urban way of life, it is there in concrete and steel.

Which brings us to the third and most damaging of the consequences of believing that the ‘true’ England is the England of the shires. It excludes the vast majority of the people who live in England. The country they see around them is one of blacktop streets, cars and concrete and occasional parks. The best they can hope for is some imaginative association with the land of warm beer and old maids cycling to church, but it is bought at the price of making them feel shut out and convincing them that ‘England’ happened years ago.’ 

 

Bravo! Although published some 10 years ago much of what Paxman diagnoses here still stands, despite some the of great urban initiatives underway in Mayorial-London (seems very odd that London didn’t have a Mayor for most of my life thus far)… I enjoy your anger Mr Paxman, long may it flourish. 

As balm for all the shitty high streets and high-rises and pebble-dash here is an image of a tree house designed by the brilliant boys of Baumraum. If I ever I become extremely wealthy I shall be writing this blog from one of these tree houses.

Humans CAN be good!