J. D. Taylor (1) (1987–)

Taking inspiration from Orwell's The road to Wigan Pier and advantage of a fortuitous research grant, Taylor decided to make a tour around The Island, "to just go out there" and challenge himself to look at the unfamiliar, talk to people and find out how they live, and to record the impressions that stayed with him. And to do all this at the least possible expense, riding a rusty secondhand bike and staying with friends of friends or camping on waste ground.

It was May 2014 when he set out from London into deepest Essex, and it took him some four months to zigzag up the East Coast to Edinburgh, round Scotland (taking in Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles), and back down the West Coast via Wales, Cornwall and Kent, a route that seems more G.K. Chesterton than George Orwell (Beachy Head via Birmingham). Although he talks about "the Island", he actually visits every part of the British Isles except for the island of Ireland. People were starting to get excited about the Scottish Referendum, but the B-word hadn't entered the national vocabulary yet, although he sees it foreshadowed in UKIP posters and xenophobic mutterings in pubs.

He's obviously read his E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm and pays proper attention to scenes associated with all the great rebels against central authority, from Wat Tyler to Arthur Scargill (he even calls in on the anti-fracking protesters near Preston), and he can't help noticing the beauty of the landscape from time to time, but what he's really interested in are the "ordinary" people he meets along the way, in supermarkets, takeaways, pubs and corner shops. His icebreaker question is "what is it like to live here?", and, just about everywhere, the answer is somewhere on the spectrum from "crap" to "not too bad, considering". Anyone who knows anything about the British will understand that the second of these implies something far worse than the first...

Taylor paints a sadly familiar picture of a whole large section of British society who have renounced any hope of employment beyond unfulfilling minimum-wage jobs in the service sector, and feel themselves priced out of the education, decent housing, healthcare and social services they would need to improve their lives. Towns that feel as though they've fallen off the map, rundown shopping malls full of pound-shops, bookmakers and moneylenders, chain-pubs and fast-food. And ever-increasing levels of state intrusion into the lives of the poor, taking away their freedom to make decisions about their own lives and erecting barriers against any attempt to challenge or protest state actions. Huge levels of resentment and frustration, channeled by the self-serving propaganda of press and politicians into anger at (mythical) hordes of foreign benefit-tourists and scroungers.

As he admits himself, it's a subjective impression, influenced by his own expectations of what he was going to find, and by the logistics of his journey - successful young professionals or working parents are perhaps the categories least likely to be hanging around in pubs or shopping-centres with time to chat to scruffy young men on bikes. But Taylor seems to be a good listener, and he talks to people we perhaps would strive to avoid, so his reports of what people tell him are well worth reading. And they don't leave us with much more hope for the future of the country than the similar stories Orwell told 80 years earlier. The point about "hope" was the thing that struck me most - I grew up with a rock-solid faith in the working-class culture of self-improvement that goes back to the mid-19th century, things like Mechanics' Institutes, trades unions, Methodist chapels, the Co-Op, the WEA, Ruskin College, the Open University - all now either a thing of the past or out of reach of the kind of people Taylor talks about.

Whilst he's a very interesting and provocative observer of society, Taylor unfortunately isn't such a good writer: the energy and commitment of what he has to say were only barely enough to get me over all the humps in his prose. There are a couple of awkward grammatical constructions that keep coming back to annoy us, there's a whole repertoire of words on the edge of familiarity that he almost always uses wrongly (especially verbs, for some reason, e.g. "regale" when he means "harangue"), and he has a fatal fascination with "poetic" adjectives, frequently using words like "azure", "verdant", "bosky", and "riparian" in quite prosaic contexts without any apparent sense of irony. I'm not good at colours myself, but even I get the feeling that there must be something seriously wrong if the sea at Beachy Head and the rivers at Capel Curig are described as "vermilion" when the context doesn't seem to allow for either pollution or sunrise/sunset turning the water red.

So, it's not Orwell, and it could have done with editing down to about 2/3 of its present length, but it's still a book worth looking at if you want to get a sense of the mood of Britain on the threshold of Cameron's Little Accident. And it might be a useful corrective if you're a lycra-victim planning a major cycling tour. First throw out most of your high-tech camping gear, and then "kill all the gentlemen"...… (mehr)