I’d read Stuart Maconie’s book Pies and Prejudice where he went around the North of England and talked about what the North of England actually had to offer, and how it was really a nice place, and that prejudiced Southerners who thought of it as just flat caps, whippets, and derelict industrial estates were miles out in their estimation.

In Adventures on the High Teas: In Search of Middle England, he turns his attention very much to Middle England, and looks at what these towns and villages have to offer, and that those who look upon Middle England in that very ‘High Teas’ method are probably just as wrong and just as prejudiced as the first lot.

Middle England. It’s not really a place. It’s more a certain kind of Englishness, one distilled to its very essence like sloe gin, dark and potent.

Adventures on the High Teas, p5

Again, it’s very readable, and although there is a tendency for the places to blur into another somewhat as you are working your way through the chapters, but it’s obvious the Stuart has gone to some effort to find something nice to say about each place he has visited — in some cases this appears to have been more of a struggle than in others, but there is always some thing that you didn’t know about the place, or something to challenge your previous perceptions…

There’s the fact that Royal Tunbridge Wells is rather unfairly associated with a particular kind of furious letter-writer…

The paper’s then editor, alarmed at a lack of correspondence from readers to fill up his letters page, forced his staff to pen a few fictitious ones [...] One of the staff of the Tunbridge Wells Advertiser signed his simply ‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’, and a cultural touchstone was born.

Adventures on the High Teas, p64

Stuart has a great sense of finding the absurd and comical in situations — mocking both his and other people’s perceptions — which makes the book an ideal travel companion. You can pick it up on the train or by the pool, read through a chapter or two of light-hearted entertaining but informative froth, and then quite happily set it down until the next time.

It’s also changed my perception of what people consider “Middle England”. So far as I can tell, it’s basically “the bit that isn’t the North, isn’t London, and isn’t big cities”. As well as the places, Stuart easily gets caught up in other things; there is a surprising amount of detail about Marmite, and one chapter could almost be seen as a love letter to the British railway system of the pre-Beeching era.

Stuart, like me, also remembers Adlestrop, which I presume is why he visits it. Adlestrop is famous only for a poem which is about a train journey which stops temporarily in Adlestrop where nothing happens.

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

First two verses of Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas

In the towns he visits, you get to hear about various restaurants, ice creams and so on that he has tried, and provokes certain pangs of jealousy “hey, home come he gets paid for pissing about in various towns and writing about it? I want to do that…” in me, but I’ll forgive him that, because he makes me laugh a lot in the book, for example when he visits Nuneaton:

I see a keystone by the very handsome town hall proclaiming ‘Prêt D’Accomplir’. My poor french initially reads this as “We’ve already done it”, which I think is the most brilliant motto ever, as casually boastfully dismissive as, “Nuneaton: Yeah, Right, Whatever…” Disappointingly, it actually means Ready To Achieve

Adventures on the High Teas, p193

He also visits Gloucester, Oxford, Grantham, and … Carnforth? amongst other places. Given Carnforth’s northerly position (north of Manchester, near Lancaster), I’m not entirely sure how this qualifies as “Middle England” and think he’s just tried to sneak it in for two reasons — to see if anyone will actually notice, and secondly to give him even more of an opportunity to reference Brief Encounter and continue with his railway love affair.

I didn’t enjoy it as much as I’d enjoyed Pies and Prejudice, but that’s probably because I am a fiercely proud Northerner. What I can say is that I did enjoy it, and that I feel I’ve learned quite a bit about some other places that I wouldn’t generally think about. And that can’t be a bad thing.

So if you think you might enjoy reading this book, why not use
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