Paul Kingsnorth is an angry man. When he looks back at his journeys around England that have taken him from remote hamlets in the Lake District to sprawling out-of-town shopping centres, it is this emotion that claims him. He tells us so in the final chapter of Real England, which takes the pulse of England, drawing on the stories of the people he meets and their concerns, combined with his own.

His findings are bleak. Our national character is being eroded; our towns and countryside increasingly controlled by the “deskbound, rulebound profit-watchers in some distant business park”. He blames this on property developers, chain stores, greedy supermarkets and ineffective government legislation, as well as on our own reluctance to protect what we love about England.

Working similar ground to Andrew Simms’s Tescopoly, it is an important book, at no point dull, thanks to its cast of colourful characters, such as The Knights of Bury St Edmunds, in their plastic helmets, who lay an ancient curse on the high street retailer Debenhams to stop its plan to open a giant store in the town’s old cattle market. But, boy, is its message depressing.

It reminds me of Larkin’s poem Going, going, in which “The shadows, the meadows, the lanes” are replaced with “concrete and tyres . . . And split-level shopping.” This time it is Starbucks and Tesco, and more specifically globalisation, that is transforming our communities and robbing us of our identity.

There are glimmers of hope, when he meets a man responsible for a community-owned pub or a village rallying round to save a local shop, but they are few and far between. Mostly, things in England are going to pot.

Like Larkin, it would be easy to accuse Kingsnorth of being anti-change, a Luddite railing against modern miseries, when in fact quality of life has improved for many people, but the book aims at a higher purpose than tabloid whingeing. It is a call to arms, a reminder that if we don’t like what is happening, we should take action. We need, he says, to reclaim our identity. “[In England] we can’t sing our own folk songs or, increasingly, cook our own national food,” he writes in the final chapter. “We sneer at Morris dancers while we sip skinny lattes. We are cut off from who we are and where we have come from.”

Perhaps the most depressing thing of all is that he’s right.

Real England: The Battle Against The Bland by Paul Kingsnorth
Portobello, £14.99; 304pp

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