I feel I’ve certainly seen England from every angle in the past three months while touring in Full Circle, and it has surprised me how gorgeous the English countryside still is, and how hideous the infrastructure of some of our cities can be. In France and Italy, most towns have some sort of cohesion in their one-way systems and in the architecture of their civic and municipal buildings. By contrast, some of the English town centres seem to have been structured by saboteurs bent on uglifying them. One regularly finds a 21st-century monstrosity built out of giant glass eggshells sitting next to a classic 16th-century steepled church, which is in turn adjacent to a concrete bunker. I thought town councils were particular about the way their towns looked, but after 11 weeks witnessing the lunacy with which town planners have embraced every faint architectural breeze that has wafted through the last four decades I’m no longer sure about that.
There is little beauty to be seen other than in the countryside, and each high street is identical to the one in the last town, with its KFC, McDonald’s, Gap and M&S. There are few unique individual shops that specialise in one-of-a-kind clothing you won’t see every girlfriend wearing, and almost bygone are the days of butchers and fishmongers and the shops that used to sell highly desirable chotskys. Replacing them are M&S and huge malls and complexes offering us mass-produced ‘Made in Taiwan’ vases, lamps and photograph frames.
What is individual, however, is every British hotel room. Each has its own unique kind of light-switch, a/c controls, TV remote, telephone system and bathroom works, with every shower and faucet offering new mysteries and challenges which I am invariably incapable of surmounting.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in