both also gone, had a copy that I spent many quiet hours contemplating, and I was overjoyed to find my own in a second-hand bookshop in Presteigne. It still has the price—£8—pencilled on the first page; truly the finest eight quid I’ve ever spent. If I could calculate the number of hours I’ve spent combing its pages, it would easily run into several hundred, yet every time I open it, I still find something brand new that I want to go and see immediately.
The country as captured by the artists of the 1960s AA Illustrated Road Book of England & Wales
Alone on my desert island, the maps, descriptions and little sketches of the country I’d loved and lost would be a terrific condolence. The British landscape, a patchwork of astonishing variety spread over a comparatively small area, is the perfect antidote to any malaise of the spirit; I am sure that for almost any condition of the heart or head, there is a landscape to soothe and calm, or invigorate and inspire. We have a bit of everything, but not too much of anything.
A map reminds us constantly of what is possible, of how much we have seen, and how much we have still to see. This therapeutic longing for place and rootedness has its own word in Welsh, hiraeth, for it is central to the Welsh condition. Homesickness doesn’t quite cover it in English, but what cannot be readily expressed in one word has found ample expression over the centuries in art, literature and music. In the mud and madness of the First World War, it was the poetry of A. E. Housman, invoking an England of foursquare permanence and bucolic tenderness that filled the pockets of the poor bastards in the trenches. From the same war, Cotswold composer-poet Ivor Gurney was invalided back to Britain, eventually cracking under the strain of his own imagination and the horrors that he’d witnessed, and committed to an asylum in Kent. There, he would respond to nothing except an Ordnance Survey map of the Gloucestershire countryside that he adored, had explored so freely, and had written about with such vivid hiraeth. The map was a cipher for all that he loved, the last thread that connected him with life.
Our eternal love affair with our own topography is one of the defining features of being British. Of course, every country has this to some extent, but we have long honed it into an art form and an obsession. It’s the ‘sceptr’d isle’ thing, for even the frankly weird shape of our country is enough to get the juices flowing. The island of Britain is the oddest of the lot: a long, thin, slightly cadaverous outline, yet prone to sudden bulges and protuberances that hint at a fleshy softness and yielding giggle. There are the satisfying semi-symmetries of East Anglia and Wales, Kent and the West Country and the jaws of Cardigan Bay, the raw geology of Scotland’s unmistakeably bony knuckles, the little Italy of Devon and Cornwall. The island of Ireland, that ‘dull picture in a wonderful frame’, with its smooth east and shattered west, sits there knowing all too well that its larger neighbour, entirely shielding it from the European mainland, is going to be trouble.
I used to have a huge map of Great Britain and Ireland on my wall, and invite any visitors to place a pin in it where they felt that they most belonged. Some people plunged in their pins with relish, while others hovered for ages: ‘D’you mean, where I live?’ ‘No, where you feel you belong—it can be where you live if you like, but it doesn’t have to be.’ I loved to watch the mental process going on, the look of wide-eyed wonder as even people who’d never much thought about maps stared hard at the familiar shapes and let themselves mentally patrol the landscape. How differently people perceive the same place is a neverending source of fascination to me. We all have our own prejudices—justified or not—against certain locations, and we’ll go to the grave with them. There is institutional snobbery at work too, for there are, and have been for centuries, two very different maps of the country that reinforce almost every aspect of our history and identity. I call them the A-list and B-list maps of Britain.
The A-list map presents all the places that don’t need to be preceded by an apology: the high and mighty locations that know themselves to be the chosen ones. The map of B-list Britain—where I was born, raised and far prefer to live—covers everywhere else. When I’ve written travel features for the national press, it has always been about places that are firmly on the B-list: Birmingham, the Black Country, the East Midlands, Hull, Glasgow, various parts of Wales and Limerick in Ireland. The pattern has been the same every time. I submit my copy, and get a phone call or email a couple of days later suggesting that the feature needs a new introduction; something along the lines of ‘Well, you thought it was all a bit grim and rubbish, but—surprise!—there’s more to Blah than that these days.’ Sometimes they don’t even bother with the phone call or email, just add it as their own introduction, the generic view of B-list Britain as seen from the desk of a London hack. You see it even more graphically in the newspapers’ property pages: it’s cheap, but—oh dear—it’s Humberside.
Every country has its split, its Mason-Dixon Line; the British equivalent was always held to be one that connected the River Severn south of Gloucester with the Wash on the east coast. South of this diagonal lay the comparatively wealthy, Conservative-voting, whitecollar, Church of England part of the land; to the north, the poorer, Labour-voting, manual-working, nonconformist tribes. The line rippled in places, so that the southern tranche extended to Malvern and Worcester, around Warwick and Leamington Spa, and included the hunting country of Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland.
Growing up, it was a border I was acutely aware of, for I crossed it every day on the way to school. It was only a 25-minute train journey from Kidderminster to Worcester, but they were in different worlds. Worcestershire is an England-in-miniature in this regard: the county’s favoured images of orchards, cricket and Elgar belong entirely to its more upholstered, southern half. We in the northern triumvirate of Kidderminster, Bromsgrove and Redditch clung to the coat tails of the West Midlands and felt like scruffy gatecrashers in our own county. It was painfully evident at school, which drew its pupils from right across Worcestershire. The kids from Malvern and the Vale of Evesham had dads in Jags and strutted around the place as if they owned it, which they quite possibly do by now. There was never any doubt that they were several cuts above the far fewer of us who spilled off the train every day from Kidderminster, Stourbridge and Rowley Regis, with accents to prove it.
We even name our goods and companies keeping to the strict rules of the A- and B-list maps. This was something that hit me with a slap years ago in an airless undertaker’s parlour, where my mother and I were trying to sort out the arrangements for my grandfather’s funeral. With that sickly, faux-somnolent air they wear while thinking gleefully of all the noughts on your bill, the undertaker slid the catalogue of available coffins under our noses. They were all called the Windsor, the Oxford, the Canterbury, the Westminster and so on. Where, I wondered, were the Wolverhampton, the Barnsley or the Wisbech? Were Scots offered a Stirling or a Brechin in which to cart away their dearly departed?
A-list names conjure up the solid, dependable image that companies are desperate to tap into. Men’s products, in particular, mine the same seam repeatedly, whether in colognes called Wellington and Marlborough (but not, definitely not, Wellingborough), or the Crockett & Jones range of fine footwear—pick from, among others, Tetbury, Chepstow, Coniston, Brecon, Welbeck, Bedford, Chalfont, Pembroke or Grasmere. We buy insurance from Hastings Direct, rather than Bexhill Direct, where the company’s
