stuart maconie the full english tour

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The Full English: The bestselling state-of-the-nation travelogue Hardcover – 13 April 2023

Purchase options and add-ons, a sunday times book of the week and top 10 bestseller, a waterstones travel book of the year, a spectator book of the year.

What kind of country is England today?

What does it mean to be English?

Are we hungry for change or seeking old certainties?

Join Stuart Maconie on an enlightening, entertaining journey through England, from Bristol's Banksy to Durham's beaches, from Cotswolds corduroy to Stoke's oatcakes.

As his guide, Maconie walks in the footsteps of J.B. Priestley's classic travelogue, English Journey, to explore our national identity and how it has evolved over the last century. On his way, Stuart takes inspiration from the people he meets at bus stops and train stations, cafes and corner shops.

Travelling the length of the land, Maconie explores the differences between city and town, north and south, and examines our past and present with affection and insight. Whether he’s passing the boutique hotels of Manchester, the moors of Ilkley or the grand houses of Tynemouth, looking out over misty fens or urban skylines, he shines a light on the people who make these places and asks what the future holds for them. Along the way, he uncovers local heroes and secret histories over early breakfasts and last orders.

Through his journey, he lets us see our homes and habits, hopes and eccentricities with fresh eyes. The Full English challenges us to embrace the messy, shifting and diverse nature of England, and to ask ourselves what kind of country we want to be.

Stuart Maconie's book 'The Full English' was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 17-04-2023.

• Print length 352 pages
• Language English
• Publisher HarperNorth
• Publication date 13 April 2023
• Dimensions 15.9 x 3.4 x 24 cm
• ISBN-10 0008498261
• ISBN-13 978-0008498269
• See all details

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‘Maconie is a funny, astute writer, alert to the absurd.’ Sunday Times Book of the Week

‘Observant and witty.’ The Times

‘The deceptive lightness and accessibility of Maconie’s writing lead us gently through what is actually a deep dive into this most mysterious of peoples.’ Jonathan Coe

'Chatty and cheerful.' Graham Robb

‘Thoughtful and characteristically entertaining.’ Waterstones Books of the Year

‘Maconie catches the exhausted national mood beautifully.’ New Statesman

‘Takes the temperature of the English at this point in time.’ Hugo Rifkind

‘This might be Maconie’s best book yet. … What a treat to read such a clear-eyed but warm-hearted evocation of the country.’ Daily Express

Praise for Stuart Maconie…

‘As funny as Bryson and as wise as Orwell.’ The Observer

‘The best thing to come out of Wigan since the A58 to Bolton.’ Peter Kay

‘A fine writer: sharp, funny, tender and thoughtful.’ The Spectator

‘A funny, lyrical writer who prefers to persuade rather than browbeat.’ Mail on Sunday

‘Maconie's engaging, conversational prose is full of telling detail, jokes and deft quotation.’ The Telegraph

Book Description

The bestselling state-of-the-nation travelogue

About the Author

Stuart Maconie is a writer, broadcaster and journalist familiar to millions from his work in print, on radio and on TV. His previous bestsellers have included Cider with Roadies , Pies and Prejudice and Adventures on the High Teas . He hosts a show for BBC Radio 6 Music (with Mark Radcliffe) every weekend morning between 8 and 11am.Based in Birmingham and Manchester, he can also often be spotted on top of a mountain in the Lake District with a Thermos flask and individual pork pie. He is a champion ice skater and once shared a van with Napalm Death.

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperNorth (13 April 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0008498261
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008498269
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.9 x 3.4 x 24 cm
• Best Sellers Rank: 36,343 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books )

About the author

Stuart maconie.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more

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Stuart Maconie

Radio presenter, writer, journalist and critic. He co-hosts the Radcliffe and Maconie Show on BBC Radio 2, and presents his own show (Freak Zone) on more...

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Past Events

Here are the most recent UK tour dates we had listed for Stuart Maconie. Were you there?

• Jun 08 2023 Chester, Storyhouse Stuart Maconie - The Full English
• Apr 11 2023 Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Wylam Brewery An Evening with Stuart Maconie Dan Jackson
• Oct 03 2019 Selby Town Hall Stuart Maconie
• 2019 Aug 30 Sep 01 2019 Birmingham, Moseley Park & Pool Moseley Folk & Arts Festival 2019 Public Service Broadcasting, The Zutons, Edwyn Collins, Tunng, Charlotte Carpenter…
• 2019 Jul 05 Jul 07 2019 Swadlincote, National Forest Timber Festival Gwenno, Hannah Peel, Stealing Sheep, Jesca Hoop, Phill Jupitus…
• Jun 11 2019 Milton Keynes, The Stables Jarrow – Road To The Deep South Stuart Maconie
• Jun 04 2019 Lincoln, The Drill Stuart Maconie
• May 18 2019 Liverpool, The Epstein Theatre Jarrow – Road to the Deep South Stuart Maconie
• Apr 30 2019 Manchester, The Dancehouse Theatre Paul Mason, Stuart Maconie
• Apr 11 2019 Lancaster, The Dukes Stuart Maconie

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The full english: a journey in search of a country and its people.

On Sale: November 19, 2022

Spend £25 and get FREE shipping on Harpercollins.co.uk !

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A Sunday Times Book of the Week and Top 10 Bestseller

A Waterstones Travel Book of the Year

A Spectator Book of the Year

What kind of country is England today?

What does it mean to be English?

Are we hungry for change or seeking old certainties?

Join Stuart Maconie on an enlightening, entertaining journey through England, from Bristol's Banksy to Durham's beaches, from Cotswolds corduroy to Stoke's oatcakes.

As his guide, Maconie walks in the footsteps of J.B. Priestley's classic travelogue, English Journey, to explore our national identity and how it has evolved over the last century. On his way, Stuart takes inspiration from the people he meets at bus stops and train stations, cafes and corner shops.

Travelling the length of the land, Maconie explores the differences between city and town, north and south, and examines our past and present with affection and insight. Whether he’s passing the boutique hotels of Manchester, the moors of Ilkley or the grand houses of Tynemouth, looking out over misty fens or urban skylines, he shines a light on the people who make these places and asks what the future holds for them. Along the way, he uncovers local heroes and secret histories over early breakfasts and last orders.

Through his journey, he lets us see our homes and habits, hopes and eccentricities with fresh eyes. The Full English challenges us to embrace the messy, shifting and diverse nature of England, and to ask ourselves what kind of country we want to be.

Goodreads reviews for The Full English: A Journey in Search of a Country and its People

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The Full English: Stuart Maconie

Published in 1933, author J B Priestley’s book,  English Journey , charted his journey across a changing England, a country that he loved and yet did not understand. Ninety years later, broadcaster and author Stuart Maconie has made the same journey through England using Priestley’s itinerary as a guide.  The Full English  is an insightful and entertaining book that interrogates the state of England today, a ‘sustained lovers’ quarrel’ with a country that is at once home and yet – at times – unrecognisable. Chaired by Professor David Amigoni, Keele University.

Sponsored by Keele University.

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The Full English by Stuart Maconie review — the Radio 6 DJ on tour

This grumpy state-of-the-nation ramble finds stormzy in a cotswolds tearoom, 20-a-side football, and sex shops.

“W hen did every corner of England start to reek of dope?” Stuart Maconie asks, wandering through Leicester town centre on one of the gentle fact-finding missions that make up The Full English . On other notebook-in-hand strolls around towns and cities he betrays mild bemusement at austere new vegan staples jackfruit and aquafaba, entertains a small revenge fantasy of “[heaving] a brick” at a kid racing around on a noisy trials bike and recoils from “shrivellingly anaphrodisiac” sex shops on grim corners.

Part of the writer and broadcaster’s persona is that of a slightly grumpy old flâneur, his catalogue of punning British travelogues — Pies and Prejudice and Adventures on the High Teas among them — raising what is traditionally known as a “wry eyebrow”

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Visit the Events Page for Off the Shelf events in November and December 2023

The Full English

Stuart maconie, sunday 29 october 2023, 15:00 at firth hall.

Sunday, 29 October 2023, 15:00

The event will last one hour followed by a book signing.

Writer, journalist and DJ Stuart Maconie journeys through England as he walks in the footsteps of J.B. Priestley’s classic travelogue, English Journey , to explore our national evolving identity.  Stuart takes inspiration from the people he meets and examines our past and present with affection and insight. He lets us see our homes, habits, hopes and eccentricities with fresh eyes.  The Full English challenges us to embrace the shifting and diverse nature of England and ask ourselves what kind of country we want to be.

Books will be on sale at the event. Books can be ordered online from La Biblioteka – Off the Shelf 2023 book store

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Stuart Maconie

Stuart is a prolific, popular and extremely highly regarded tv and radio presenter, journalist, columnist and best-selling author..

As a broadcaster, he is on BBC Radio 6 Music (with Mark Radcliffe) every weekend morning between 8 and 10am. Read More

[email protected] 020 7287 1112

Corporate & Events Agent

Georgia Preston [email protected] 020 7287 1112

Stuart is on BBC Radio 6 Music (with Mark Radcliffe) every weekend morning between 8 and 10am. His latest book, The Full English (Harper Collins North, 2023) sees Stuart travelling in the footsteps of J. B. Priestley, using his 1930s book, English Journey, as his guide. Along the way he interrogates its insights and perspectives, as he navigates his own way around twenty first century England. The Full English was The Times' book of the week and is a Sunday Times best-seller.

His previous work, The Nanny State Made Me (Ebury Press 2020) examines the positive impact of the Welfare State through the prism of his sixties and seventies childhood as well interviews with the countless beneficiaries of its work. He looks at its gradual dismantling and the effect that its rise and fall and (hopeful) rise has had on the nation we are now. The latest edition has been revised to reflect events since March 2020... In 2017, he retraced the Jarrow march, in real time, to mark its 80th anniversary. The book of his walk, The Long Road from Jarrow spent five weeks in The Sunday Times Best-Seller list, and The Observer said 'He is as funny as Bryson and as wise as Orwell'. His other books include the hit love letter to the north, Pies and Prejudice ; Adventures on the High Teas; The Pie At Night , and The People's Songs , which accompanies the Radio 2 series of the same name, currently being repeated on Sunday evenings. Stuart loves a quiz, and is a Mastermind Champion, scoring their highest celebrity score answering questions on Modern British Poetry from 1900. He's on the North of England team on Radio 4's Brain of Britain , hosts new Radio 4 quiz My Generation and has triumphed in Pointless Celebrities on two occasions. He is a fell-walker, northern soul afficionado, published poet and once shared a van with Napalm Death.

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Stuart Maconie – The Full English

• Saturday 27 April, 7.45pm
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A love-letter to England that weaves together history, politics and culture.  

Stuart Maconie is one of the keenest observers of English identity, so who better to take the temperature of the nation at this uncertain waymark on our national journey? His new book,  The Full English , is a love-letter to England that weaves together history, politics and culture. Following in the footsteps of West Riding polymath JB Priestley, whose classic examination of 1930's England  English Journey becomes his itinerary, Maconie undertakes his own inventory of the English. How does the country look today, freshly unmoored from its European neighbours and still emerging blinking in the daylight of our post-Covid world?  

Sponsored by Hexham Dental Clinic Chaired by Harry Pearson.

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Stuart Maconie – The Full English

Tickets £11/£9.

Stuart Maconie is one of the keenest observers of English identity, so who better to take the temperature of the nation at this uncertain waymark on our national journey? His new book,  The Full English , is a love-letter to England that weaves together history, politics and culture. Following in the footsteps of West Riding polymath JB Priestley whose classic examination of 1930s England  English Journey becomes his itinerary, Maconie undertakes his own inventory of the English. How does the country look today, freshly unmoored from its European neighbours and still emerging blinking in the daylight of our post-Covid world?

Chaired by Harry Pearson

‘The deceptive lightness and accessibility of Maconie’s writing lead us gently though what is actually a deep dive into this most mysterious of peoples.’ – Jonathan Coe

Sponsored by:

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• Priority Booking for  Festival Friends   opens at 08.00 on Friday 1st of March. Tickets go on general sale from Monday 4th March.
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Northern Soul BBC Prom hits the road for 2024 UK Tour – Northern Soul Orchestrated

Following the phenomenal success of the Northern Soul BBC Prom last summer at the Royal Albert Hall, writer and BBC Radio 6 Music broadcaster Stuart Maconie, alongside the BBC Concert Orchestra and Manchester’s composer and conductor Joe Duddell, present Northern Soul Orchestrated, a brand-new UK tour for April and May 2024, brought to you by SJM Concerts. The tour promises to transport audiences back in time, capturing a movement’s spirit. Originating in the industrial regions in the 1960s and 70s across the North and the Midlands, the Northern Soul subculture emerged as a passionate and vibrant all-night dance movement centred around American soul music. Curated by Stuart and conducted by Joe, the orchestra will perform amazing new arrangements, by Fiona Brice and Joe Duddell, of Northern Soul classic anthems across five dates with a host of exceptional guest vocalists. Stuart Maconie, who also presented a Northern Soul All-Nighter on 6 Music in September 2023, says: “Northern Soul is music at its most exciting and alive. This is the sound of the streets and the dance floors, rich with passion, ecstasy, heartbreak and joy. We cannot wait to bring these fabulous songs and performances to the heart of the cities where they are cherished.”

Carolyn Hendry, Interim Director of the BBC Concert Orchestra said: “What a joy it is for us to bring Northern Soul Orchestrated around the country this spring. The concert is borne out of the Northern Soul BBC Prom, which premiered at the BBC Proms last year and had over a million plays on iPlayer and Sounds. As the UK’s most versatile orchestra, we take great pride in having the opportunity to share this special concert with audiences again.” Joe Duddell says: “After the tremendous response to the Northern Soul BBC Prom last July, it’s great to be taking this out around the country and reuniting with the same performers.” Kicking off in Wolverhampton at The Civic at The Halls on Wednesday 24th April, Northern Soul Orchestrated will visit some of the UK’s most prestigious venues in London, Manchester and Sheffield before concluding in Gateshead at The Glasshouse International Centre for Music on Saturday 18th May. The tour is one not to be missed. Tickets go on sale Friday 1st March at 9 am via  www.gigsandtours.com  and  www.ticketmaster.co.uk .

WEDNESDAY 24 APRIL 2024 – WOLVERHAMPTON THE HALLS FRIDAY 26 APRIL 2024 – LONDON ROYAL FESTIVAL WEDNESDAY 15 MAY 2024 – MANCHESTER AVIVA STUDIOS THURSDAY 16 MAY 2024 – SHEFFIELD CITY HALL SATURDAY 18 MAY 2024 – GATESHEAD THE GLASSHOUSE INTERNATIONAL CENTRE FOR MUSIC

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‘We in England are not a grown-up country ... So how about getting some grown-up priorities?’

Stuart maconie is proud of his country. but after travelling it to write the full english, he’d like it to focus on being happy, healthy and progressive.

Stuart Maconie: ‘I can be guilty, if that is the right word, of sometimes talking up England. Part of me wants to say, Well, hang on, standing alone against fascism is quite a thing to be proud of.’ Photograph: Andrew Key

Where is England, anyhow? A vast cathedral of writers and musicians have tried to locate the elusive heart of a country caught in a perpetual tug of war between its grandiloquent past and uncertain future. Among the most recent is Stuart Maconie, the BBC broadcaster and writer. When he answers his phone, Maconie is, like all true Englishmen, waiting on the platform of a train station. It’s morning time and he’s in bright form, having spent a lively evening in Newcastle at a public gathering for The Full English, his engaging new travelogue, in which he retraces the reflective journey that JB Priestley took in 1933 for his book English Journey.

Priestley, a Bradford boy made good with a sharp eye and a biting, sometimes snobbish turn of phrase, meandered through Albion during the autumn of that year. Maconie spent two years in his footsteps, and the leisurely tone pays off: he succeeds in inhabiting the slim spaces where you can feel and sometimes see vestiges of Priestley’s England nine decades later. Maconie is a relaxed and informal tour guide who can drift from local cuisine to architecture to history to pop culture without the pages becoming a blizzard of facts and wacky stats.

[  Women’s Prize for Fiction 2023: debutants join past winners on shortlist  ]

In Coventry, for instance, he reflects on the new energy and optimism of a city whose trajectory was radically redefined by the Blitz while recalling the mid-1970s “reconciliation” concert for which Tangerine Dream, the splendid German electronic trio, played a concert. (It is preserved on YouTube.) Headlines welcomed the startled performers with the declaration: “35 years ago, they came with bombs! Now, they come with synthesisers.”

The Full English: Sunbeam Rapiers being made in Coventry in 1955. Photograph: Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Hulton/Getty

Coventry’s Transport Museum recalls the time when the United Kingdom was the world’s second-biggest car manufacturer – the city built 1.8 million cars a year in the early 1950s. Wandering through the museum, Maconie, who is a first-class eavesdropper, overhears a woman saying to her family, “wistfully, peevishly even, ‘Oh, this country used to be great! We could be great again!’”

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The sentiment makes his heart sink. A central theme of The Full English is the hankering after a sense of English greatness lost – also one of the central tenets of the Brexit fantasia. But, as Maconie Dick Whittingtons his way through England’s parishes, the reminder of empire is everywhere. It begs a question: isn’t it all but impossible for the English not to wonder about their past?

“That’s a really interesting question because that bit you mention, there are a couple of sections in the book which are the essence of what the book is about,” he says. “That is one of them. What is it about English greatness? We in England are not a grown-up country compared to the Norwegians, say. But I take the point. And I can be guilty, if that is the right word, of sometimes talking up England. When people say, ‘Why are you still going on about the second World War?’ part of me wants to say, ‘Well, hang on, standing alone against fascism is quite a thing to be proud of.’”

The Full English: Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, as Mr Stevens and Miss Kenton, in the film version of The Remains of the Day

There are echoes here of one of the more celebrated fictional jaunts through England, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, in which Mr Stevens, butler for the prewar pacifist lord of Darlington Hall, embarks on his trip to the West Country – which is to say southwest England – for a reunion with Miss Kenton, ostensibly the former housekeeper but the closest he will come to knowing romantic love. Throughout, Stevens deliberates on the concept of greatness as defined by the role of the butler in English society: “And yet, what precisely is this ‘greatness’? Just where, or in what, does it lie? I would say that it is the very lack of obvious drama or spectacle that sets the beauty of our land apart.”

Maconie conjures up the contemporary version of that beauty through vivid snapshots of the cities and towns as he finds them. Chipping Campden, the Cotswolds village where Graham Greene lived , is “more likely to offer an antiquarian volume, an artisanal biscuit or an understated lithograph. Or, now, its designer shops and delicatessens crammed with cave-aged cheese, sourdough and intensely-scented Ethiopian coffee”.

He spends a few pleasant hours in the Eight Bells , a pub that has stood for 700 years. A local handyman and his companion nip in and out for smokes. The local choir arrive to discuss their rehearsal. A newspaper headline tells of the stabbing to death of the MP David Amess.

England’s menacing political undercurrent is present throughout but subtly evoked. Maconie takes a detour to Radcliffe, near Bury, in northwest England, because it was a Labour town that voted Conservative in 2019. He wants to visit there, however, because Christian Wakeford, the local MP, has defected to Labour.

The Full English: Christian Wakeford's shuttered constituency office in Radcliffe the day the MP announced his defection to the British Labour Party from the Conservatives. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty

Maconie’s arrival is one of the most memorable passages in the book. “On the tram, or Metrolink more formally, you come into Radcliffe over the dark, swirling Irwell and rows of terraced houses. It’s a Saturday dusk, always an evocative time, redolent of the theme from Sports Report and Doctor Who. The cobbled ginnels fan away full of scattered wheelie bins and pizza boxes and the little shops turn off their lights.”

Isn’t that England, right there?

What would the Rees-Moggs and the Boris Johnsons have to do to get people to wake up and see that they are not your friend?

He makes his way to the Bridge Tavern – Maconie has wisely decided that a town’s boozer is the best way to detect its pulse – where a local man having a smoke outside nods towards the door and greets the stranger. “Looking for t’scores, lad? Go inside. You don’t have to buy owt. They won’t mind.”

Throughout, he touches on the England found in the films of Shane Meadows and in the writer Tabitha Lasley’s recent masterpiece, Sea State . He was acutely conscious, however, that he was just breezing through and that he reports rather than critiques what he encounters.

“Places like Swindon get bad press and they become whipping boys. And I wanted to be fair to those places. There were places like Boston [in Lincolnshire] that I thought were bleak. I didn’t want to blame anyone. But I did want to reflect that they were left behind. I didn’t want to mock. It’s okay to have a bit of a joke but not to punch down.”

The Full English: a man sits on a doorstep in Boston, in northeast England; the town registered Britain's strongest support for Brexit in the 2016 referendum. Photograph: Lindsey Parnaby/AFP via Getty

Maconie was born in 1961. Like many of his generation, he delighted in being smashed by wave after wave of English pop-music invention that has rolled through every decade since. Music became as good a way as any of interpreting and imagining England. A popular broadcaster – many people would recognise what one reviewer terms his “Lancastrian burr”, both from his BBC Radio 6 shows and his regular TV appearances – he is also credited with coining the term Britpop. After his memoir of a life in music, Cider with Roadies, was published, the comedian Peter Kay described him as “the best thing to come out of Wigan since the A58 to Bolton”.

The broadcaster, then, is one of England’s proud northerners who have thrived in the southern metropolis before finding their way back. His politics are moderately left. His journeys for this book bracketed the time of Covid. Both his parents died in that time, though not from the virus. He is not given to standing at the lectern, but his exasperation at the areas that fell for the Brexit myth is never far beneath the printed word.

“A country that elects someone like Boris Johnson is just not a grown-up country,” he says with passion. “It is insane. What would the Rees-Moggs and the Boris Johnsons have to do to get people to wake up and see that they are not your friend? That is the part about modern England that is really confusing. I do think it is tied up with the culture-war thing. I do think it is overstated. I am walking through Newcastle now, and if I stopped people and asked, ‘What do you think of the culture wars?’ 90 per cent wouldn’t know or care what I was talking about.

Brexit Britain: Boris Johnson in Middlesbrough during his 2019 general-election campaign. Photograph: Frank Augstein/Pool/Getty

“But, as I say in the book, it is in the vested interests of the left and the right to keep the culture war going because it pays their wage. But, to come back to the question: England’s dark, bloody and sometimes great history is difficult to avoid. Still, I do wish that sometimes we could take a step back and say, ‘Why can’t we be more like Norway?’ Why can’t we be less concerned with bossing the world and try and become a happy and content people?”

John Boynton Priestley was born in 1894, the year Gladstone resigned as prime minister, and died in 1984, the year Bronski Beat released Smalltown Boy. It was quite a span. An immensely popular writer – his novel The Good Companions sold by the truckload – Priestley wrote political columns, a series of plays about time slips and nonfiction and he lived, as they say, rent free in the minds of the literati, memorably described by Virginia Woolf as “the tradesman of letters”. Maconie is not alone in detecting a whiff of jealousy in the takedowns.

“I’m a big fan. Because I think he is a rare example of someone who has almost disappeared from English cultural life. He was extremely popular with the reader in the street and also ferociously intelligent, well read, politically astute. I think, to a certain degree, he began to play to the stereotype of the gruff, no-nonsense Yorkshire man. There’s loads about the intelligentsia of the time – Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf – but there was a huge jealousy because he sold so many books. I just think he did so many things so well and so successfully. He engaged with ordinary people without talking down to them and he was a terrific writer. Politically, I am close to him in that he was a progressive, patriotic centre-left person. His sympathies were with ordinary working people in the north of England. I like him.”

English Journey: JB Priestley in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, in 1941. Photograph: Bill Brandt/Picture Post/Hulton/Getty

Maconie quotes an English Journey sparingly, but it becomes clear that Priestley allowed his moods and eye to dictate what he recorded. “If there is a queerer village in all England than this, I have never seen it,” he said about Shotton Colliery, in Co Durham. On Stockton: “Better looking than Middlesbrough.” Gateshead doesn’t fare well, either: “Insects could do better than this.” Maconie’s contention is that, despite the caustic eye, Priestley wrote from a place of empathy – and, perhaps, with the insecurity of a returning northerner.

“In Newcastle last night, we discussed Priestley’s section about the city. He is scathing about the accent. He’s from Bradford! The crowd were very good natured and not really annoyed about it. I think they got it. It’s a thing you come across in Wigan with George Orwell. This idea that ‘he never did anything for our town! He talked it down all the time.’ And I am sick of trying to explain to people he wasn’t coming to write a tourist brochure. He was coming to talk about an unfair, horrible state of affairs and to say that people deserved better. And I think Priestley was saying that this hopelessness is not okay. I don’t think he is there to sneer. It is not Betjeman’s Slough, which seems to me to be just a sneer by a posh boy. I think, with Priestley, there is anger underneath it that sometimes can come out.”

Maconie does, however, quote the infamous passage in the Priestley book in which the author, roaming through Liverpool’s poverty-stricken Irish community, noted that “the Irishman in England too often cuts a very miserable figure. He has lost his peasant virtues, whatever they are, and has acquired no others ... If we do have an Irish Republic as our neighbour, and it is found possible to return her exiled citizens, what a grand clearance there will be in all the western ports, from the Clyde to Cardiff, what a fine exit of ignorance and dirt and drunkenness and disease.”

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“It’s hard to gloss this as anything other than bigotry,” Maconie writes. It is, he says now, a horrifyingly bleak passage to read. But his book “is not an unalloyed fan letter to Priestley. There are other examples as well where you can say, ‘We could offer an explanation.’ But, really, it is just out of order.”

If there is a neat summary to what he discovered in following Priestley’s ghost, it is that England’s cities are thriving while its towns are ailing. “There are a lot of English people who know Marbella better than the Potteries,” he points out. He would urge people to find the England beyond the blazing cities and main arteries. It is the towns that seem to have fallen into the time slips that Priestley dramatised in his plays.

“And it explains why those towns were the ones where Brexit happened and the red wall crumbled,” Maconie says as he prepares to board his train – he doesn’t say whether it’s running late.

“There are populations that feel Westminster has turned its back on them. But there is enormous cause for optimism. We are never going to be the workshop of the world any more. That is no bad thing. Let’s start forgetting about being ‘great’. That’s no bad thing. So how about getting some grown-up priorities, like the Scandinavians, of having a happy, healthy, progressive country? That is what I’d take away from it.”

The Full English, by Stuart Maconie, is published by HarperNorth

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