On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain

by Patrick Wright

The hulk of Henry VIII‘s flagship is raised from the seabed in an operation that captures the mind of the nation. An elderly lady whose ancient house is scheduled for demolition dismantles it, piece by piece, and moves it across the country. On Living in an Old Country probes such apparently fleeting and disconnected events in order to reveal how history lives on, not just in the specialist knowledge of historians, archaeologists and curators, but as a tangible presence permeating everyday life and shaping our sense of identity. It investigates the rise of “heritage” as expressed in literature, advertising, and political rhetoric as well as in conservation campaigns and urban development schemes, and it explores the relations between the idea of an imperilled national identity and the transformation of British society introduced by Margaret Thatcher. First published in 1985, this updated edition includes an extensive new preface and interview material reflecting on the ongoing debate about the heritage industry which the book helped to kick-start.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Patrick Wright FBA is a British writer, broadcaster and academic in the fields of cultural studies and cultural history. He was educated at the University of Kent and Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada.

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very entertaining account of a historian returning from BC to early Thatcherism. It's Verso, so you know there's lefty spleen a-plenty and surgical use of quotations: of gentry talking about history and the need to preserve the "mouldering," various bitch-slaps about the "predations of the Getty museum," etc. Oh how they have fallen...! Interesting about heritage debates, early cult policies of neo-liberalism,how people deal with living in "non-synchronous time" in various (anecdotal, policy, literary, rank, often very cranky) ways. Very much about social theory, and chatty at the same time.

[Peter Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anything I've written so far on history and heritage that's any good at all I nicked wholesale from Patrick Wright

[Rachel Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A treatise on living in a “rule nostalgia” country, published in the mid-80s, a time that people are now nostalgic for. Wright makes his points about living in country that exists in a permanent state of looking back via chapters on stately homes being left (or not) to the nation, Shell oil’s pastoral adverts, Mary Butts (a naturalist-slash-occultist), Remembrance Sunday, the Mary-Rose ship, Orwell’s “proles”, the gentrifiers of Stoke Newington, and Miss May Savidge, a woman who moved her Tudor house, brick by brick, from Hertfordshire to Cromer.

[Charlotte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a socialist polemic at times, but an interesting read.

[Bryn]

I gave up on this at around 3/4 of the way through. I wanted to love it, but I just did not have the proper something for it -- and the fact that I could not even figure out what that 'something' was made it all the more frustrating. Wright is clearly writing from a very firmly grounded ideological position, but he never actually spells out what that position is -- perhaps the original 1980s readers of these essays did not need it spelled out because of where they were published or Wright's reputation at the time, I do not know. Regardless, he has an enormous set of analytical tools, strongly felt values, ethical stances, approaches to issues, etc etc etc and then he applies them to a lot of things happening in the early 1980s, and I wanted to be fascinated but I spent too much time trying to figure out what his assumptions were and how they worked to ever actually engage with or even understand his arguments. I think he's a Marxist, maybe, but what kind? He has very intense feelings about the labour party, about Thatcher, about how people ought to be making history, about capitalism and the inability to imagine a future, but ... what exactly are his feelings? I am pretty sure he hates Thatcher but then he keeps phrasing things in ways which sound like he feels she's misunderstood or misjudged. He hates the idea that recovering the past is what history is about for his contemporaries, because he thinks people ought to understand? believe? that they are making history in the present... I think? Maybe? You see, I could not make head or tails of it, and that is not necessarily a fault in the book because obviously it has an audience, I am just not in that audience & I was frustrated and disappointed that this was not what I wanted it to be, which was a more basic, 101-level approach to the culture wars over history happening in early 1980s Britain.