Book review: An Englishman at home, on a journey of nostalgia around his own country

Stuart Maconie's 'The Full English' recounts a winding, London-free road trip that opens on a coach to Southampton and draws to a close in Norwich

Music writer Stuart Maconie’s heartwarming book ‘The Full English’ follows the route of JB Priestley’s ‘English Journey’.

• The Full English: A Journey in Search of a Country and Its People 
• Stuart Maconie 
• Harper North, £10.99

Stuart Maconie, once of the NME music magazine, has evolved into England’s finest purveyor of punning book titles.

Cider with Roadies was his memoir of life as a music journo. Pies and Prejudice looked at the modern realities of northern England.

His latest book, The Full English, recounts a winding, London-free road trip that opens on a coach to Southampton and draws to a close in Norwich. The itinerary is based on JB Priestley’s for English Journey, first published in 1934.

Maconie is an amiable, entertaining raconteur. Having landed in an insalubrious hotel, he pops out for a bottle of scotch and a can of Febreze, “the latter to mask the corked wine and seaweed smell of my room, the former to help me not care about it”.

He lists pubs in North Shields, of which local people tended to say, after they had closed down, they “weren’t as rough as people said” — thus proving, Maconie drily quips, “that they absolutely were”.

There is an over-supply of whimsical asides, and, yes, more puns: “Hebburn knows I’m miserable now,” he sighs when tormented by a rich fug of garlic emanating from a closed Italian restaurant in the Northumbrian shipbuilding town. A brief reminiscence about Butlin’s is priceless.

Maconie shares ideas as well as gags. No Tory policy or politician is safe from his ire. And he’s prepared to stick up for brutalism in architecture.

Noticing a pub in Gateshead offering a comedy drag night, he observes: “I seem to be unique in modern Britain in finding drag bleakly unentertaining. One day I hope, we shall see it for what it is, a kind of blackface offering crass stereotypes of women by men.” 

A coda describing his elderly parents’ deaths during covid restrictions is both grim and moving.

It is a shame that Maconie rarely engages directly with people who might disagree with him. And he sometimes leaves interesting questions unanswered.

“When did every corner of England start to reek of dope?” he asks, but takes it no further. 

When he recalls Priestley’s account of his visit to Liverpool, which simply oozes contempt for Ireland and the Irish poor, Maconie ventures some mitigation, which he knows sounds “mealy-mouthed”. 

Priestley, being on what might be called ‘Team Northern Socialist’, is afforded the benefit of the doubt denied to others.

But then this is a journal of personal thoughts and impressions, not a debating chamber. 

Again and again, Stuart Maconie takes us around cities that were once industrial powerhouses, but now offer up artisanal gelaterias, microbreweries, and yoga centres, as well as some still unconquered tawdriness around the fringes or in certain left-behind, woe-begotten town centres. 

On balance, there is a lot less squalor than in past times and a lot more… What, exactly?

Maconie is an enthusiast for modern England, revelling in all manifestations of its multiculturalism; but he is also, one suspects, a nostalgist at heart.

His dream England might be something like Clement Atlee’s post-war society, when the NHS and the welfare state were first built and when manufacturing was still in good fettle, mixed perhaps with some of his favourite bits from his own childhood of the 1960s and ’70s, including the burgeoning pop culture.

Or it might be like the trams of contemporary Lancashire, “as modern as a Scandinavian parliament building and as nostalgic as carbolic soaps and football pinks”.

Certainly it would be devoid of the political “lies and charlatanry” which, he detects, are making people weary; and Brexit would be a bad dream.

All told, The Full English is a road worth travelling. 

There is something very heartening, touching even, about a travel writer who still finds his own country so full of fascination, so rich in moments of discovery as well as things to deplore, no matter how many years roll by.

As a resident, if not a native, of England, I put the book down wanting to get back to Norwich and Newcastle soon, to visit the Black Country Museum in Dudley for the first time, and maybe to snoop around the backstreets of Stoke (but not for long).

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