Notes From A Small Island: Journey Through Britain

by Bill Bryson

The tea-room lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.

The trouble with English towns is that they are so indistinguishable one from another. They all have a Boots and W.H. Smith and Marks & Spencer. You could be anywhere really.

I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world.

It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theatres, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world.

Everyone I saw said, ‘Gosh, you’re brave!’ when I revealed that I was planning to travel around Britain by public transport, but it never occurred to me to go any other way. You are so lucky in this country to have a relatively good public transport system (relative, that is, to what it will be when the Tories finish with it) and I think we should all try harder to enjoy it while it’s still there.

They are comfortable with faceless bureaucracies and, as Mrs Thatcher proved, tolerant of dictatorships.

The trick of successful walking, I always say, is knowing when to stop.

THERE ARE CERTAIN things that you have to be British or at least older than me, or possibly both, to appreciate: Sooty, Tony Hancock, Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men, Marmite, skiffle music, that Morecambe and Wise segment in which Angela Rippon shows off her legs by dancing, Gracie Fields singing ‘Sally’, George Formby doing anything, Dixon of Dock Green, HP sauce, salt cellars with a single large hole, travelling funfairs, making sandwiches from bread you’ve sliced yourself, really milky tea, allotments, the belief that household wiring is an interesting topic for conversation, steam trains, toast made under a gas grill, thinking that going to choose wallpaper with your mate constitutes a reasonably good day out, wine made out of something other than grapes, unheated bedrooms and bathrooms, seaside rock, erecting windbreaks on a beach (why, pray, are you there if you need a windbreak?) and taking an interest in by-elections. There may be one or two others that don’t occur to me at the moment.

And you tell me that it is one of the most beautiful, well-preserved cities in the world? I’m afraid not. It is a beautiful city that has been treated with gross indifference and lamentable incompetence for far too long, and every living person in Oxford should feel a little bit ashamed.

It gets me a little wild sometimes. You have in this country the most comely, the most parklike, the most flawlessly composed countryside the world has ever known, a product of centuries of tireless, instinctive improvement, and you are half a generation from destroying most of it for ever. We’re not talking here about ‘nostalgia for a non-existent golden age’. We’re talking about something that is green and living and incomparably beautiful.

I didn’t hate Milton Keynes immediately, which I suppose is as much as you could hope for the place.

wonder if other people notice how much comparative pleasure there is in drinking in a pub called The Eagle and Child or Lamb and Flag rather than, say, Joe’s Bar. Personally, I find endless satisfaction in it. I love to listen to the football results and the lulling rollcall of team names – Sheffield Wednesday, West Bromwich Albion, Partick Thistle, Queen of the South; what glory there is in those names – and I find strange comfort in the exotic and mystifying litany of the shipping forecasts. I have no idea what they mean – ‘Viking rising five, backing four; Dogger blowing strong, steady as she goes; Minches gale force twelve, jeez Louise’ – but they exert a powerful soothing effect on me. I genuinely believe that one of the reasons Britain is such a steady and gracious place is the calming influence of the football results and shipping forecasts.

How easy it is sometimes, I thought, to make enemies in Britain. All you have to do is stand in the wrong spot or turn your car round in their driveway – this guy had NO TURNING written all over him – or inadvertently take their seat on a train, and they will quietly hate you to the grave.

BLACKPOOL – AND I don’t care how many times you hear this, it never stops being amazing – attracts more visitors every year than Greece and has more holiday beds than the whole of Portugal. It consumes more chips per capita than anywhere else on the planet. (It gets through 40 acres of potatoes a day.) It has the largest concentration of roller-coasters in Europe. It has the continent’s second most popular tourist attraction, the 42-acre Pleasure Beach, whose 6.5 million annual visitors are exceeded in number only by those going to the Vatican. It has the most famous illuminations. And on Friday and Saturday nights it has more public toilets than anywhere else in Britain; elsewhere they call them doorways.

Blackpool’s beach is 7 miles long and the curious thing about it is that it doesn’t officially exist.

And yet Morecambe has its charms. Its seafront promenade is handsome and well maintained and its vast bay (174 square miles, if you’re taking notes) is easily one of the most beautiful in the world, with unforgettable views across to the green and blue Lakeland hills: Scafell, Coniston Old Man, the Langdale Pikes.

One day, I would like to think, people will rediscover the charms of a quiet break at the seaside, the simple pleasures of strolling along a well-kept front, leaning on railings, drinking in views, sitting in a café with a book, just pottering about. Then perhaps Morecambe can thrive again. How nice it would be if the Government actually erected a policy to this end, took steps to restore fading places like Morecambe – rebuilt the pier to its original plans, gave a grant for a new Winter Gardens, insisted on the restoration of seafront buildings, perhaps moved a division of the Inland Revenue or some other bureaucracy to the town to give it a bit of year-round life.

And yet even at its worst, the Lake District remains more charming and less rapaciously commercialized than many famed beauty spots in more spacious countries.

But the approaches to the village – actually, it’s just a hamlet (and do you know the difference, by the way, between ‘village’ and ‘hamlet’? Surprisingly few people do, but it’s quite simple really: one is a place where people live and the other is a play by Shakespeare)

I stood and watched him awhile and finally asked him why he was standing out in a cold rain rebuilding the wall. He looked at me with that special pained look Yorkshire farmers save for onlookers and other morons and said: ‘Because it’s fallen down, of course.’ From this I learned, first of all, never to ask a Yorkshire farmer any question that can’t be answered with ‘pint of Tetley’s’ and that one of the primary reasons so much of the British landscape is so unutterably lovely and timeless is that most farmers, for whatever reason, take the trouble to keep it that way.

Did you know that the Government spends less per person each year on national parks than you spend on a single daily newspaper, that it gives more to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden than it does to all ten national parks together? The annual budget for the Lake District National Park, an area widely perceived as the most beautiful and environmentally sensitive in England, is £2.4 million, about the same as for a single large comprehensive school. From that sum the park authorities must manage the park, run ten information centres, pay 127 full-time staff and forty part-time staff in summer, replace and maintain equipment and vehicles, fund improvements to the landscape, implement educational programmes and act as the local planning authority. That the Lakes are so generally wonderful, so scrupulously maintained, so seldom troubling to mind and spirit is a ringing testament to the people who work in them, the people who live in them and the people who use them. I recently read that more than half of Britons surveyed couldn’t think of a single thing about their country to be proud of. Well, be proud of that.

One of the things you get used to hearing when you are an American living in Britain is that America will be the death of English.

We sat and delved among our brown bags in the piercing wind, cracking open hard-boiled eggs with numbed fingers, sipping warm pop, eating floppy cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, and staring into an impenetrable murk that we had spent three hours climbing through to get here, and I thought, I seriously thought: God, I love this country.

if you have never been to Durham, go at once. Take my car. It’s wonderful.

How is it possible, in this wondrous land where the relics of genius and enterprise confront you at every step, where every realm of human possibility has been probed and challenged and generally extended, where many of the very greatest accomplishments of industry, commerce and the arts find their seat, how is it possible in such a place that when at length I returned to my hotel and switched on the television it was Cagney and Lacey again?

have often been struck in Britain by this sort of thing – by how mysteriously well educated people from unprivileged backgrounds so often are, how the most unlikely people will tell you plant names in Latin or turn out to be experts on the politics of ancient Thrace or irrigation techniques at Glanum. This is a country, after all, where the grand final of a programme like Mastermind is frequently won by cab drivers and footplatemen. I have never been able to decide whether that is deeply impressive or just appalling – whether this is a country where engine drivers know about Tintoretto and Leibniz or a country where people who know about Tintoretto and Leibniz end up driving engines. All I know is that it exists more here than anywhere else.

Let’s talk about John Fallows. One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to ‘bugger off’ to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.

That’s the thing about Glasgow. It has all this new-found prosperity and polish, but right at the very edge of things there is always this sense of grit and menace, which I find oddly exhilarating. You can wander through the streets on a Friday night, as I did now, and never know when you turn a corner whether you are going to bump into a group of tony revellers in dinner jackets or a passle of idle young yobboes who might decide to fall upon you and carve their initials in your forehead for purposes of passing amusement. Gives the place a certain tang.

We’ve been hearing this warped reasoning for so long about so many things that it has become received wisdom, but when you think about it for even a nanosecond it is perfectly obvious that most worthwhile things don’t begin to pay for themselves. If you followed this absurd logic any distance at all, you would have to get rid of traffic lights, lay-bys, schools, drains, national parks, museums, universities, old people and much else besides. So why on earth should something as useful as a railway line, which is generally much more agreeable than old people, and certainly less inclined to bitch and twitter, have to demonstrate even the tiniest measure of economic viability to ensure its continued existence? This is a line of thinking that must be abandoned at once.

I suppose everybody has a piece of landscape somewhere that he finds captivating beyond words and mine is the Yorkshire Dales. I can’t altogether account for it because you can easily find more dramatic landscapes elsewhere, even in Britain. All I can say is that the Dales seized me like a helpless infatuation when I first saw them and will not let me go. Partly, I suppose, it is the exhilarating contrast between the high fells, with their endless views, and the relative lushness of the valley floors, with their clustered villages and green farms. To drive almost anywhere in the Dales is to make a constant transition between these two hypnotic zones. It is wonderful beyond words. And partly it is the snug air of self-containment that the enclosing hills give, a sense that the rest of the world is far away and unnecessary, which is something you come to appreciate very much when you live there.

Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it.

What a wondrous place this was – crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Lord Chancellor to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a naval hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? (‘Please, Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.’) What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardeners’ Question Time, and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course.

How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state – in short, did nearly everything right – and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things – to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view. All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you. And then I turned from the gate and got in the car and knew without doubt that I would be back.