Sculpted by man and sheep – Rydal Water and Grasmere, the Lake District, 1835.
A friend of mine, who lives abroad, says there is one thing he really misses about London.
It’s what he calls ‘the unnoticed background’; things like the precise consistency, smell and look of the dead leaves we kick up on walks on Hampstead Heath on his holidays back in London.
Or the petrichor – the smell from the oils exuded by plants when it rains – and the light film of rainwater on Camden pavements.
He even misses what those pavements are made out of: the faint pink Aberdeen granite of hefty, pitted London kerbstones, flanked by smooth, dark-grey Caithness flagstones.
On his last trip back, my nostalgic friend got particularly distressed in a west London mews, when he saw that the Victorian granite setts had been replaced with asphalt.
We might not notice that background from day to day as acutely as my friend does – it’s often people from abroad who have the best eye for the peculiar Englishness of England. But, inadvertently, that background has a huge effect on the sights and sounds of everyday life. And we certainly miss it when it changes or is removed altogether.
The change in that background is particularly noticeable on the Caribbean island of St Martin – or St Maarten, as the Dutch call it. St Martin is split into French and Dutch colonial halves; the smallest island in the world to be divided between two countries.
There is no physical border between the two territories. But you can hear it whenever you cross the invisible border, because the sound of the tyres on the roads is different – each territory has followed the different tarmac composition of its colonial motherland.
Soon you’ll start noticing a similar effect in England – old-fashioned English asphalt, which melts in high temperatures, is gradually being replaced with French asphalt, which has a higher melting temperature.
A really sensitive driver would also notice the difference in sound between the average London road – which gets a fresh tarmac coat every thirty-seven years – and the average main road in Wales, resurfaced once every ninety-five years (and every 108 years for minor roads).
A tiny difference perhaps, but pile enough of those tiny differences on top of each other, and they end up affecting the lie of the land in a big way. Taken together, they produce the Englishness of England. And you don’t have to be a feverish jingoist to spot that Englishness, wherever you are in the country.
If you took a flight from Newcastle to Rome, fell asleep and woke up, disorientated, not knowing how long you’d been dead to the world, a glimpse out of the cabin porthole would tell you in a second whether you’d passed over the Channel. Dover may only be a three-minute trip from Calais in a plane but the differences between the look of the English and French landscapes are still enormous.
Whether your view is of a field in County Durham or a bypass in Norfolk, there are a thousand things that signal to your brain, ‘I am over England’ – and not France, Switzerland or Italy – even if you’d be hard-pressed to separate each element and identify it.
These are the basic questions that this book tries to answer. If you look out of an English window – or a window flying over England – how do you know that you’re in, or over, England? And, what’s more, how did our national characteristics create the lie of the land, and how did the lie of the land dictate our national characteristics?
The connection between landscape and character is so great that it affects most aspects of our behaviour, not least our diet.
In 2009, Professor Andy Taylor of Nottingham University carried out a study of distinct ‘taste dialects’ in different parts of Britain. Professor Taylor, who interviewed 13,000 people for the study, discovered that, in the same way that accents vary in different regions, so do regional tastes for certain foods.
According to Professor Taylor’s findings, the Welsh, with their industrial past, like strong-tasting foods – such as onions, leeks and Worcestershire sauce – that cut through dirt and grime after a day’s work in the mines.
In north-west England, they apparently go for moist comfort food while, across the Pennines, crunchy snacks are more popular. In chip shops in the north-east, you get chips and bits – all the burnt, crispy batter left over after frying. A hundred miles down the M62, in Lancashire, local taste veers towards chips and wet – the pure green liquid from mushy peas.
And so it goes on. Sweet, soft foods that are tasted on the front of the tongue and can be eaten with the hands – like naan bread – are popular in the Midlands. The Balti curry, cooked and served in a thin steel pan, with naan bread on the side, was invented in the so-called Balti Triangle, between Sparkhill and Moseley in Birmingham, in the early 1980s.
The Scots like soft, creamy food – ice cream is popular – and the south-west apparently goes for sweet flavours; thus the apples in Cornish pasties.
A similar geographical pattern crops up in British obesity maps. In December 2010, it was reported that the West Midlands, Britain’s former industrial heartland, was the fattest place in Europe. Almost a third of the adults living in and around Birmingham were obese; a figure twice as high as the EU average.
In England’s industrial heartland, extremely demanding physical jobs had been replaced by deskbound ones – fat-rich meals remained part of the culture, but they were no longer burnt off by industrial labour.
Diet and obesity have, in turn, had a distinct effect on life expectancy. In the south-east, men can expect to die, on average, at 79.7; in the north-west at 77.1
We are defined by our diet and surroundings in life; and in death, too. When the police were trying to identify ‘Adam’ (whose name was later identified as Ikpomwosa) – the torso of a black boy spotted floating in the Thames near the Tower of London in September 2001 – his diet was the best clue.
The amount of British food in his stomach and pollen in his lungs showed that he had only been in the country for a few days. His stomach also contained an unusual mix of plant extracts, traces of the toxic calabar bean, clay particles flecked with gold, and levels of strontium, copper and lead that were two and a half times normal levels. There were also traces of a potion with ingredients used in African magic; implying he’d been murdered in a ritual killing.
Further analysis of the minerals in his bones – again a result of diet and the soils where his food was grown – suggested that he was brought up somewhere around Benin City in Nigeria; where indeed he did turn out to come from.
None of this is an exact science. There’s another more straightforward reason why curry and naan bread are popular in the Midlands – the car-making region provided work for Asian immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s. Still, the reason why so many cars were made in the Midlands is because the area was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution – a reflection of Britain’s coal-rich geology.
The line between geography, geology, diet and national character still holds true. Britain – an island built of coal, surrounded by fish – can never get really cold or starve.
That theory has been tested by cheaper foreign coal, overfishing and overseas snatching of our fish stocks. But the point remains broadly true – we rarely do starve or freeze to death. Our lives and deaths – and characters – are, to a great extent, produced by our surroundings.
On a wider scale, the whole northern hemisphere – its history and the character of its people – is greatly influenced by a serendipitous combination of shallow minerals, easily harvested hard timber, fertile soil, plenty of water sources, and few droughts, parasites, natural disasters, predators or endemic diseases. This beneficial combination further suited the growth of stable, property-owning democracies. Areas that aren’t so blessed with natural benefits like this – such as Africa – inevitably find it harder to develop and progress politically.2
Any attempt to relate this two-way traffic between the look of England and the English character – and how each affected the other – is mined with difficulties.
There are thousands of factors behind a national character, presuming you accept such a thing exists in the first place; thousands more that create the way a country looks.
I have concentrated on four factors: England’s geography, geology, history and weather.
You can point to pretty strong basic effects of our geographical position on our character. At its simplest interpretation, cold weather requires thicker clothes, more time spent indoors and more fuel. An island nation is not only relatively easy to defend; islanders will also see less of neighbours who live across, say, a 21-mile channel of water, than those who live in countries divided only by terrestrial borders.
It works the other way, too – our surroundings are produced by our character. This is a harder route to track. You can definitively say that, in a cold place, people wrap themselves up in warm clothes. It’s harder to show that a particular country’s inhabitants are perhaps unusually sensitive, and so in turn produce a particularly pretty national landscape.
But you can draw general conclusions along these lines. Nikolaus Pevsner, the German émigré architectural historian, connected the decent English home, the temperate climate and the moderate politics, to disappointing English art – and our failure to produce a Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Michelangelo, Titian or Rembrandt.3
The English may not be romantic, passionate or imaginative, but they are objective, pragmatic and good at close observation; that’s why, Pevsner thought, English artists like Gainsborough and Reynolds were so good at honest portraits. In the absence of great art, the English distinguished themselves instead with irrepressible humour, architectural quirkiness, and a love of the pastoral and the domestic. It’s telling that Gainsborough’s most popular picture – Mr and Mrs Andrews – is half double portrait, half rural landscape, in a landscape-shaped frame.
Pevsner was particularly impressed with the quiet, sedate, understated English terraced house – dependent on proportions rather than ornament, on refined decoration rather than inventiveness.
George Orwell went further than Pevsner, saying that the English completely lack artistic ability except when it comes to literature – the only art that can’t cross frontiers. Apart from Shakespeare, said Orwell, the best English poets were barely known on the Continent.4
Orson Welles, playing Harry Lime, made a similar generalization about national character in The Third Man (1949) in an improvised speech to Holly Martins, played by Joseph Cotten, on the Prater wheel in Vienna.
‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance,’ said Welles, ‘In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’
(Welles later admitted, ‘When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they’ve never made any cuckoo clocks.’)
I don’t completely agree with Pevsner. There are English artists and architects who come close to the best Continental Europeans. But both Pevsner and Welles ring true when it comes to their broad generalizations about a national look shared by buildings, art and – I would add – landscape.
Another generalization to consider is the question of English versus British. There has been endless discussion about what we mean by English as opposed to British, but this book is focused primarily on English rural and urban landscapes, and on the English character. There are differences between England and Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, and their inhabitants, which could fill a book of their own. I didn’t want to get bogged down in those relatively small, if compelling, differences. Instead, I wanted to talk about the differences that separate England from the rest of the world (the vast majority of which, in fact, England shares with Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland).
Many things I say about England apply elsewhere – the clouds that drift over Cardiff often cross the Welsh border, too. And I will still occasionally refer to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland for comparison. I will also sometimes refer to Britain as opposed to England, when the relevant statistic is only available for the larger area.
Before picking out what the English look is, we must distinguish between the two most powerful forces behind it: natural force and manmade force.
Natural forces created the first layer of modern England – the mountains, hills, rivers, lakes, forests and coastline.
And then came the second layer – the manmade one. Most of England – rural and urban – has been occupied by man for over a thousand years. A stroll through any part of it shows man’s handprint in practically every century; a handprint usually made for a practical purpose – to enclose a field with hedges, say, or to carve a railway line through a hill.
Even landscapes that look untouched by man have often been sculpted by him. The smooth fells of the Lake District have been grazed by Herdwick sheep for more than a thousand years; its fields are divided by drystone walls laid by farmers in the eighteenth century; even the water level of its lakes is determined by the demands of Manchester’s half a million residents for fresh water.
Sculpted by man and sheep – Rydal Water and Grasmere, the Lake District, 1835.
Man’s handprint can be mammoth, if concealed by great age – like the first removal of the forests and woods, with much of them cut down before the Romans turned up; or the late-eighth-century Offa’s Dyke, running from the coast at Prestatyn, Flintshire, down to the Severn at Sedbury, Gloucestershire.
The Fens were transformed from swampy marsh into a fertile spot by Dutch engineers who drained the land in the seventeenth century, leaving behind half of the best agricultural land in England; its fertility provided by marine silt, ancient fen vegetation and fen peat.
In fact, all four distinct areas of Norfolk, including the Fens, were sculpted by man. The Breckland was once thick forest, which, cleared in the Iron Age, led to the erosion of sands to produce heathland. The Wash, created by glaciation, used to stretch much further inland, until seventeenth-century drainage schemes produced more fertile land around Downham Market.
And the Broads are the only Anglo-Saxon archaeological site that has become a huge modern holiday camp. Originally, they consisted of around fifty peat pits, dug out from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, with the removal of around 900 million cubic feet of peat.5 After the decline in peat-burning, thanks to increased coal imports, the pits were flooded. They were further concealed by higher sea levels that came with a warmer climate after 1250. Then, after a big flood in 1287, the Broads were actively flooded to produce fisheries. Man and nature had accidentally co-operated in producing a landscape that now looks utterly natural.
Human modifications are often hidden deep beneath this apparently natural disguise. The moors of northern England, and the Scottish Highlands, have more heather than anywhere else in Europe, in order to boost the numbers of grouse, the much valued game birds. The heather is intensively cultivated and burnt back in rectangular strips – producing what look like miniature fields. The burning is done in rotation, to produce a variety of age and height in the heather: grouse use the taller patches for shelter, while they eat the fresh, young shoots.
Before this manicured cultivation was introduced, the moors had patches of wild heather – but not in the same abundance, or with the same regularity of appearance. Long, long before, much of the moorland was part of the ancient wildwood.
Those seemingly ancient grouse moor landscapes were in fact created as recently as the nineteenth century, when the sport grew increasingly popular, for several reasons: the invention of the breech-loading shotgun in the early nineteenth century; Queen Victoria’s acquisition of Balmoral in 1854; and the introduction of trains to carry the sporting rich overnight from London to the north.
The grouse moor look took off across Britain, and the world. Surrey heathland became fashionable in the nineteenth century because it reminded Victorians of the Scottish Highlands. It’s no accident, either, that parts of New Zealand look like Scotland; Scottish immigrants planted the hills with heather in the nineteenth century, to bring back memories of the old country.
This similarity between landscapes – on opposite sides of the world – depends on a precise combination of geology, soil, flora and fauna, as well as the human will to shape the land in a certain way.
Look at New Zealand on a globe, and it shares plenty of characteristics with Britain: as an archipelago not too far from a pole, close to a big land mass, largely populated by English-speaking, white humans of Western European extraction.
With the best will in the world towards New Zealand, the British archipelago got a slightly better deal. It’s that much closer to the neighbouring land mass, and that land mass – Europe – has for the last 2,500 years been a hotbed of intellectual, commercial, religious and scientific innovation.
Examine Britain on a globe, and it is serendipitously situated. Not only does it look east towards Europe, but also south to Africa and west to North America. All those places are made that much more accessible from Britain because of our island nature. The logistics of the British Empire would have been hard to arrange from anywhere else.
Even if you rarely leave Britain’s shores, it is still unusually blessed, in its geology, geography, history and in the element that has done more than any other to mould England – and the English. And that is the weather.