Product Description

Everyone talks about 'Middle England'. Sometimes they mean something bad, like a lynch mob of tabloid readers, and sometimes they mean something good, like a pint of ale in a sleepy Cotswold village. But just where and what is Middle England? Stuart Maconie didn't know either, so he packed his Thermos and sandwiches and set off to find out...Is Middle England about tradition and decency or closed minds and bigotry? Is it maypoles and evensong, or flooded market towns and binge drinkers? Does it hark back to the myth of Merrie England or is it a modern concept borne of Top Gear and Princess Diana? Stuart Maconie leads an expedition by rail and road - via Carnforth and Adelstrop, Scratchwood and Tebay - in search of Jane Austen's Bath, Disgusted's Tunbridge Wells, Tom & Barbara Good's Surbiton, Betjeman and Brent's Slough, Elgar's Malverns, Inspector Barnaby's Midsomer and Thatcher's Grantham - with plenty of stop-offs for tea and pastries along the way.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1838 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
'Taken as a whole, the book amounts to a time capsule of England as it is now; it is, in its quirky offbeat way, a celebration of this country's extra-ordinary capacity to accomodate change while remaining essentially the same.' --Mail on Sunday, 8 March, 2009

I love Stuart Maconie - he's one of Briatin's truest and most comforting voices. In High Teas... he explodes the myths and stereotypes of Middle England. My own preconcived notions were banished with this delightful, warm postcard from some of England's most eccentric places.
--Gary Lightbody, Snow Patrol, FHM 1 Jan, 2010

Puffed up and preposterous, but Piers is the Pepys of the celebrity age.
Sam Leith, Daily Mail, 11 December 2009
--Ebury Press

Review
'It is these juxtapositions of the high and the low, the hip and the furiously unfashionable, or, if you like, the sublime and the ridiculous, that make Maconie such an entertaining tour guide.'

Review
'Maconie's gift is finding beauty in the most unexpected places and after reading this you'll want to call up Google maps and plan your own journey. It's a wonderfully enriching read.'

Customer Reviews

Not the Daily Mail
I found this even better than Pies and Prejudice with Maconie coming across as a thoroughly decent, thoughtful cove. This is categorically not the breast-beating, self-proclaimed "honest-to-good British bulldog" beloved of Fleet Street. It's a world of quiet gestures and a celebration of the workaday pleasures of living in Britain. Most Brits don't like alcopops...they like tea. The phrase "Daily Mail readers" is a hackneyed device to lump those of a braying bent into a worn-out cliche. To his credit, Maconie never really uses it, preferring instead to actually judge his subjects - from trainspotters to tea shop staff - on their own merits. It's not a book of lazy generalisations...but it's a damn fine book.

Adventures on the High Teas
I absolutely adored Pies & Prejudice and Cider With Roadies, and while I was eagerly awaiting Stuart Maconie's latest book, I didn't think I was going to identify with it in quite the same way. I needn't have worried, I loved it.

As well as exploring quaint villages and historic towns, he celebrates English humour, food and music, and stops off in places which have been influential in England's literary and cinematic heritage, including Jane Austin's old stomping ground of Bath and Knutsford in Cheshire (the real-life setting for Cranford), as well as a Brief Encounter with Carnforth Railway Station.

Anyone expecting Maconie to sneer at Middle England with a huge Northern chip on his shoulder will be disappointed. He comes across as a genuinely nice guy (`The English Bill Bryson' according to the cover) and the book is infused with warmth and affection for English traditions and heritage, with only a hint of gentle mockery at the most bizarre. As usual with his books, I was chuckling and nodding with recognition all the way through.

Melancholic and joyful too
As a sometime exiled Northerner it could only have been a matter of time before Maconie decided to create a companion of sorts to his joyous Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North, and here it is. Anyone expecting withering broadsides at the Home Counties is going to leave with a sense of bitter and chippy [Northern] disappointment. No matter, this book is not for them; instead it is a celebration of a Britishness (and also, quite separately an Englishness) that, while not being of the wild, untamed and windswept north, is in its own way just as wonderful.

The starting point is considering what actually constitutes Middle England. The temptation is to think of it as a rather pampered, hectoring cultural hinterland, full of angry calls to Jeremy Vine on Radio 2 and whinges about immigrants and workshy layabouts. Instead, Maconie rather refreshingly infuses these places (and their people) with a warmth and a welcome lack of finger-wagging metropolitan liberal judgement.

As it turns out, the so-called foaming Daily Mail-reading mob are rather more liberal and tolerant than we are mostly led to believe; no more so than at the start of his journey as he describes a sleepy Sunday afternoon in Meriden, delighting in observing the minutiae of the passers-by and the local shop.

For me though, the best part of the book is a treat indeed from a music journo of his rare erudition: his journey to Hergest Ridge and the surrounding area where he manages to talk about Mike Oldfield, Syd Barrett and Nick Drake in a truly affecting and moving way; so much so that I really want to have a look around Tanworth. Now. The church sounds especially lovely.

These ruminations on music, the poetry of Auden and Brief Encounter amongst other things all join together to paint a sometimes rather wistful and melancholic picture of an England almost past. There is a feeling evoked occasionally that we are on the cusp of losing some vital part of our identity that we will never quite get back.

It's not all bad news, though. In amongst the melancholy is a sense of playful yet rather deep love of the country and all its foibles and tics. Yes, some things are being lost, but new traditions and wonders are rising in their place. England (specifically) is not just the land of the hoodie and the binge drinker, no matter what certain, more hysterical, sections of our press might say. And this book is an unironic celebration of all of that. Another England, not like the one of his (also rather wonderful) previous book, but one worth celebrating all the same.