Next year Great Northern Books publishes a seventy-fifth anniversary edition of J. B. Priestley’s An English Journey. I’ve just finished reading a slightly mildewed Heinemann/Gollancz edition and am thoroughly charmed. The year that George Orwell published Down and Out in Paris and London, Priestley set off by car and motor coach in a similar spirit of social investigation. A lively writer with a sharp eye for detail, Priestley finds an England of factories, potteries, provincial theatres and dole queues. There are endless cups of tea. There’s engaging banter about faintly sinister new crazes such as ‘hiking’, and faintly sinister old ones such as the hunting of foxes. But behind the humour lies the constant spectre of social inequality: rich bankers and decaying industrial towns; spruce City men and impoverished mining villages. ‘What,’ Priestley asks, ‘had the City done for its old ally, the industrial North? It seemed to have done what the black-moustached glossy gentlemen in the old melodramas always did to the innocent village maiden.’ Sadly, this is as true today as it was in 1934.

An English Journey provides a fascinating snapshot of the regional distinctions and variations that made up England in the 1930s. The book also witnesses the start of the sprawling homogeneousness that defines much of the country today. Complaining of growing political apathy or the deadening rise of consumerism, Priestley sounds as much like a twenty-first century pundit as a man who fought in the First World War. However, his delighted description of a ‘voluptuous’ public motor-coach reminds one that Priestley lived in an era before the National Express became a fact of English life.

Photograph by Sal Greenhalgh