English Journeys: National and Cultural Identity in 1930s and 19 ...

the cathedrals and castles are open to the visitor, and the country village is still waiting to be discovered and photographed. “This is English,” announces the dust jacket blurb of Arthur Mee’s series of guides titled The King’s England: “this is ours.” That such sentiments could be expressed on the covers of a series that ascribes ownership of the land directly to the monarch may at first glance seem disingenuous, but the books turn it into an inclusive sentiment: although the king is, on one level, the current guardian of the nation, all men and women can—and perhaps should—take an interest in the inheritance around them.

Tempting as it might have been to eulogise England as a land of scenic and cultural plenty, there were those engaged in this emergent tourism sector who sought to raise more serious issues. If a motoring journey around England revealed many beautiful and unspoiled areas, it often also (unless one was either extremely careful in planning one’s route or selective in writing it up afterwards) brought to light less privileged regions, where the hardships of the period were more readily visible and where, rather than reposing in an idyllic world untouched by modernity, people were suffering the consequences of a life that either had not kept pace with the rapidly changing world or had been ripped apart by forces that showed no consideration for the traditions of the past. The emergence of a new, mass-consumer society prompted what Madeleine Bunting called “a deep anxiety about the loss of a distinctive sense of place, of authenticity and, even more importantly, of the freedom and autonomy of the individual.”³ To move between the different “Englands” that were in evidence at this time was to realise that the country was no longer by any measure organic and whole (if indeed it ever really had been); rather than finding a country uniformly beautiful and unspoiled, the traveller all too often had to ponder what had gone wrong. The countryside itself was under threat from the demand for housing, leading to much anxious discussion of “the octopus” of suburban sprawl and the speculative builder as the real enemies of the rural world, both of them intent on taking the countryside and building it up to be little more than an extension of the town. In much of the writing of this period, one finds a call to arms alongside the sense of ownership: if