English journey, or, The road to Milton Keynes

by Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge sets out to find England by retracing J.B. Priestly's famous "English Journey". Using the conventions of great British travel writing, Bainbridge, with the skills of a fine novelist, updates to the present Priestly's classic Depression-era journey to the heart and soul of England.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, British Literature, Society

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge DBE was an English writer from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often set among the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Award twice and was nominated for the Booker Prize five times. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Bainbridge among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".

Reviews

[James Barker · Rating 3 out of 5]

In which a chain-smoking Bainbridge asks people everywhere she goes what they think of the bomb (it is 1983, after all). Commissioned by the BBC to celebrate 50 years since J B Priestley had made his own 'English Journey,' this won't be for everyone... Bainbridge's typically dense description can obscure rather than reveal, although it is worth reading for the conversations on which she eavesdrops.

The writer concludes that change is terrible, particularly for the working classes who are the ones that suffer the most from that delivered upon them by those on high. Her visits to the north are particularly poignant- her birth-town has had the soul knocked out of it. 'Someone has murdered Liverpool and got away with it,' she says.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a fan of both Beryl Bainbridge and travel narrative, I was very excited to see that my library had a copy of this out of print title. Wasn't disappointed as her sense of humor came through loud and clear, even when making more serious points about how the nation had changed since her own youth.

[Dantanian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bainbridge seems to get a hard time from some reviewers of this book, but I can't help but like her intelligent , humourous and somewhat aghast reactions to her journey round Britain. She's certainly not all negative, not just reactionary...and looking back from now to the eighties when her journey took place, many cities really were going thru times of real economic downturns and planning disasters...it's interesting that what seems a short time ago , and my teenage years, seems in many ways an utterly different world. Sadly of course the poverty is still there... Thatcher's bloody Britain.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

"Beryl Bainbridge sets out to find England by retracing J.B. Priestley's famous English Journey.

"Using tyhe conventions of great British travel writing, Beryl Bainbridge, with the skills of a fine novelist, updates to the present Priestley's class Depression-era journey to the heart and soul of England.

"Readers will find in this book ample evidence of Beryl Bainbridge's sense of humor and her understanding of ordinary people for which her writing is well known."
~~back cover

I abandoned this book on page 76, at the start of the chapter On To Manchester. I just couldn't take another description of a dreary, dark hopeless English town. For example:

" ... I saw the top and bottom of it, the wretched no-man's-land of industrial development, engineering works, chemical plants, pylons and railway sidings -- mile after ugly mile of ingenious clutter sprawling along the banks of the river towards Southampton."

"In Bristol ... the authorities might as well put up a notice announcing that pedestrians, as well as trains, have had their day. ... There was the usual deserted walk-over straddling the road; plainly nobody needed to reach the wretched new office-blocks on the other side." And: "St Mary Redcliffe is now a traffic island; you have to be nippy to reach it. It looked older and was certainly blacker than Salisbury cathedral."

"First thing this morning we walked through the centre of Birmingham and then drove round it. Both journeys were equally depressing and the car ride frightening." And "We went ... out into the terrible streets. ... We came to a housing estate caught between the hell behind and the anarchy ahead. ... Beyond the avenue lay no-man's-land: nothing but the pylons holding hands as they marched to the horizon, and a railway line under a cat's cradle of rusty gantries jammed into the ruined earth. ... Castlevale Estate is made up of forty or so fifteen-story blocks dumped in a field outside Birmingham. The police patrol in pairs; the alsatian dogs run in packs. Very few cars ...And not much of a bus service by all accounts. ... Eighteen thousand people, mostly unemployed, living on a square mile of land. ... Not a cinema or a library to be seen, let alone proper shops, and only one small pub, 'The Artful Dodger', with its windows boarded up bewcause they've been smashed so many times."

Well, you get the idea. There were some less lugubrious descriptions of various places, but the author lost me when she characterized the Cotswolds as "For the retired and elderly folk who live there ... it's a twilight home; for the rest of us who came to stare, another museum." This is not the way I want to think of England, nor is it the way most authors depict England. Dame Bainbridge may have presented a truer portrait in this book, but if she has, I prefer the fictionalized version.

[Bill Lawrence · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this should have been so much better. I've only read one other book by Bainbridge and that was excellent. This feels like fulfilling a contract with the BBC for a series and a book, the book becoming an afterthought. Unlike the original J B Priestley English Journey, to which this openly references, it is very slight. I'll accept that it is humorous and maybe referring to "Spaghetti Junction in Bradford" is a joke in the context that she has seen too many places, or that names are deliberately wrong, or that when she writes about Stockton and it is really Billingham etc. but it really just feels very casual, and how much is factual or just made up. And despite travelling through England at a critical time, it says very little about the way the world is changing or the nature of society at that time. I felt it very condescending to the those who could be termed the victims of the system, but really it had nothing of the fascinating analysis that Priestley brings to his view of the world in the 1930s. By the end, I got a very strong sense she'd had enough, after about 4 days in Newcastle and another 4 in Billingham, she rushes through York, Lincoln and Norwich on day-trips before fetching up in Milton Keynes. How strange to dismiss those 3 great cathedral cities in overnight stays. She travelled the country, but seemed to see very little.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading this book, I'd love to retrace Bainbridge's retrace of Priestley's journey and see all the changes that have happened in the last 40 years. I am sure both Bainbridge and Priestley would turn in their graves. Bainbridge is a great companion - witty, descriptive, funny - and she was ahead of her time with regard the environment and animal welfare.

[Helen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vapid descriptions of England in the 80’s that come to no great conclusion. It is her journals so I suppose she wasn’t trying to make a point. But similarly no reason I think for having published her journals if they didn’t make some point or interest in them.

[John Stotesbury · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointingly tedious. I've read and taught Bainbridge in the past, but this latter-day potboiler of a latter-day commentary on JB Priestley's English Journey starts well, but deteriorates as she loses interest in her travels and her activities for BBC TV. In the end, a perfunctory failure.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 3 out of 5]

non-fiction, Bainbridge and a BBC crew travelling through England mid-80s.
I do have to say that she comes across as a bit of a reactionary at times, or if not that, a bit on the right-side of the spectrum.
It's not uninteresting but it's obviously a commission, so there's that.

[Wayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting read.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This acclaimed book, Priestley’s social commentary of life in England,was written 90 years ago. The reason you should read it ( re-read it ) now is because so many of the passages could be a commentary on politics and social injustice in England in 2023. It is uncanny and quite disturbing.