SAMPLER
ABO UT BR I TAI N A Journey of Seventy Years and 1,345 Miles
Tim Cole
In fond memory of my father Edwin Roger Lloyd Cole (1942–2020) and my paternal grandparents Herbert Aubrey Cole (1911–84) and Elizabeth (née Lloyd) Cole (1910–2004) who first took me About Britain.
Contents About Britain
1
1 West Country: Barnstaple–Exeter–Torquay (76 miles)
11
2 Wessex: Southampton–Whitchurch–Salisbury (104 miles)
35
3 Home Counties: Canterbury–Margate–Canterbury (104 miles)
59
4 East Anglia: Cambridge–Littleport–King’s Lynn (124 miles)
87
5 Chilterns to Black Country: Stafford–Coventry– Oxford (104 miles)
115
6 South Wales and the Marches: Hereford– Merthyr Tydfil–Caerleon–Hereford (147 miles)
143
7 North Wales and the Marches: Caernarvon– Capel Curig–Caernarvon (88 miles)
165
8 East Midlands and the Peak: Stamford– Ashby-de-la-Zouch–Stamford (108 miles)
189
9 Lancashire and Yorkshire: Southport– Glusburn–York (108 miles)
217
10 The Lakes to Tyneside: Newcastle on Tyne– Otterburn–Durham (108 miles)
247
11 Lowlands of Scotland: Edinburgh–Perth–Glasgow (146 miles)
275
12 Highlands and Islands of Scotland: Perth– Crianlarich–Oban (128 miles)
309
Back About Britain
335
Notes Acknowledgements
339 375
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About Britain This is the story of an unexpected journey. Like many things I end up doing, it began with a serendipitous discovery. There’s an Oxfam bookshop that lies between my office and another building where I often have meetings. If I’ve got a few minutes spare, I’ll drop in for a quick look. One afternoon I was scanning the travel shelves when I came upon a slim volume shedding its dust jacket. The torn cover combined the muted green and brown shading of a topographic map with the sharp red lines of a road map. The box in the top left-hand corner announced that this was About Britain No. 1. West Country. A New Guide Book with a portrait by Geoffrey Grigson, while the black-and-white Festival of Britain logo in the bottom right-hand corner revealed it was published in 1951. It was only 50 pence so I bought it, largely on account of the painting of the distinctive red cliffs of south Devon that I’d visited as a child, reproduced in vivid colour on the title page. Of course, as always happens, having bought this volume I started spotting others from the same series. Charity bookshops seemed to stock nothing else. The guide to the West Country was quickly joined by others. Priced at ‘a reasonable’ threeand-six for those lacking ‘ten shillings or fifteen shillings to spend on a fat topographical volume’, these were short, massmarket guidebooks with an average initial print run of 50,000 copies.1 Plenty were produced and plenty are still around. Before long I had a complete set of all thirteen volumes and my thoughts turned to what I might do with these guides. After the watercoloured title page, photograph-topped contents page and 1
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a few words on ‘using this book’ came an opening essay about the region as a whole. These lengthy ‘verbal portraits’, although penned by different authors, covered more-or-less the same range of subjects and were interspersed with photographs that both accompanied the text and were found in a central section of full-page images carefully arranged in pairs. Next came six – or in some cases a few more – mapped-out driving tours around the region, before a gazetteer and short reading list completed things in just under a hundred pages. I’m not a book collector, but something was starting to draw me in. I decided to begin where any historian would: in the archives. Sitting at a numbered desk in the National Archives in Kew, I read the minutes of the meetings of the various Festival of Britain committees that developed the books that I’d been amassing. From these, I was able to piece together the backstory of the way these guides were created to encourage domestic and foreign visitors to see more than simply the main Festival of Britain exhibition in 1951. Championed by the post-war Labour government, the festival was intended as a rerun of the 1851 Great Exhibition and a chance to showcase Britain as a country that was successfully rebuilding after the trauma of the Second World War. Those putting the festival together mainly focused on developing content for the exhibitions on the South Bank that would show that ‘British initiative in exploration and discovery is as strong today as it ever was’ but they were also keen to get visitors out of London, onto the road, and about Britain.2 As is so often the case, things did not turn out quite as intended. The original plan was to develop a series of special coach tours during the festival year. Sample itineraries were drawn up covering ‘Upper Thames and East Midlands’, ‘Upper Thames and West Midlands’ and ‘Lower Severn, Gloucester, Somerset, Welsh Marches, Cotswolds’, each in five and a half days. These were planned with an eye to selecting ‘sites, 2
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areas and activities which would give the visitor a memorable, enjoyable and balanced picture of life as it is lived in the British Isles’ and to ‘preserve a balance between urban and rural life’. Visits to historical sites such as Blenheim Palace or the ‘Colleges and College Gardens with tea break’ in Oxford were mixed with experiences of contemporary industry such as ‘opencast iron mining at Corby’. Although these coach ‘Tours of Britain 1951’ would be led by expert guides drawn from geography departments in British universities, the Festival Office wished to produce accompanying ‘Tour Guide Books’ to ‘supplement’ the guides’ narrative. With an eye to the future, they also realized that guidebooks would not simply ‘replace the guide-managers and local guides in cases where visitors prefer to tour unescorted in their own vehicles’ but also guarantee ‘a permanent record, and guide in the future, of the Festival theme’ once the events of 1951 were over.3 It was a good job they made this provision. Plans for coach tours quickly fell by the wayside and the guidebooks and motor car became the sole means of conveying visitors across the country. Digging into the files, I discovered that there was another twist to this tale. Those putting these volumes together soon became aware that others also had plans to produce ‘a series of General Guide Books’ to coincide with the Festival of Britain. Rather than creating two competing series, it made better sense to combine forces. Therefore, in November 1949, the Brewers’ Society came on board as sponsors. By the time the Festival of Britain Council was belatedly informed of this collaboration it was a fait accompli. The offer that the guidebooks ‘be produced under the full editorial control of the Festival Office but free of all cost to the Festival’ was one that was simply too good to be turned down by the budget-conscious Festival Council. However, that didn’t stop at least one of their members from expressing his concern that allowing ‘a commercial enterprise to 3
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produce Festival guide books’ might result in ‘a deterioration of Festival standards’.4 The Brewers’ Society certainly brought their own editorial vision with them to the project. The main liaison between the Festival Office and those putting the guidebooks together – the wonderfully named Colonel Penrose Angwin – insisted that ‘responsibility for factual accuracy would rest with the Festival Office ’ under guidance of the newly created ‘Tours Advisory Panel’ that was largely filled with academics. However, while the precise content was to be determined by this group of experts, the Brewers’ Society and their editorial team at Holdens determined the look and feel of these mass-market guidebooks and took an increasingly leading role. Reading through the minutes of the meetings of both the ‘Tours Advisory Panel’ and the ‘Guide Books Editorial Committee’ during the rest of 1949 and into 1950 offered a glimpse of the lengthy and often vigorous debates over what these guidebooks should contain, as well as what they should be called. Initially known in-house as the ‘Happy Travellers Guides for the Festival of Britain’, a number of potential names were considered and dismissed – ‘The British Way’, ‘British Ways’, ‘Portrait of Britain’, ‘British Portrait’, ‘Britain at Home’ and ‘Britain on View’ – before settling on About Britain.5 All archives are places of presences and absences, and the paperwork relating to these guidebooks was no exception. The minutes of the various committees that met during 1949 and 1950 survived, but there was much less information available when it came to the later stage of test-running aspects of the guides in the summer of 1950. Publication deadlines were pressing and so men and women with ‘a wide knowledge and affection for the area’ were hired to check the proposed motor tours.6 However, the surviving paperwork that I worked through tended to be limited to initial contracts, letters of acceptance and details of payment 4
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or correspondence quibbling over what were seen as excessive claims for contingencies. It seemed that the budget was clearly in the minds of those in the Festival Office in London in 1950 and so all they kept was the paperwork of financial transactions. Archives can be frustrating places. Time and time again you are left wondering why someone kept this paperwork but not that. I’ve long been interested in the creative potential of working with the constraints that archives always present, but I realized that reading the paperwork about these guidebooks would only get me so far.7 Sitting silently in Kew – pencil in hand – my mind drifted to the roads that those with ‘a wide knowledge and affection for the area’ had driven in the summer of 1950, and visitors had carefully retraced the following year. Although the paperwork I looked at was mainly concerned with how much meals had cost en route, it contained enticing details of these first journeys. I was drawn to a letter sent from the Festival Office, on my birthday as it happened, to a geography lecturer in Manchester, Norman Pye. In July and August, he checked the six tours included in the guidebook to Yorkshire and Lancashire, pausing in Scarborough, Harrogate, Rotherham, Lancaster, Warrington, Glusburn and York for his one shilling and six pence lunch.8 Reading through this litany of lunch spots not only made me hungry, but desperate to leave my desk in Kew and head out on the road to follow in his tyre tracks. Pye was no longer alive, but the places he drove through were still there.9 And so I decided to follow one route randomly drawn from each of the twelve volumes. I began with the guidebook I’d first chanced upon. It had twelve, rather than the customary six, tours in the back. Most were marked out on strip maps self-consciously styled on the first road maps produced by John Ogilby in the seventeenth century, but I settled on the map-less seventh tour.10 Simply entitled ‘Barnstaple–Exeter–Torquay, 76 miles’, 5
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it offered up a route that ‘crossed the country of Devonshire from north to south, from the Bristol Channel to the English Channel’. I decided that a May Bank Holiday Monday would be a fitting day for this first journey, with the kids in the back of the car. Once completed, I then began working my way first eastwards, and then northwards. I set out to try to immerse myself in a specific moment that came just a few years after the end of the Second World War. Along each route, I was intrigued by what those putting the tours together thought was worth seeing and what this suggested about the ways they saw post-war Britain during its rebuilding and reimagining. This meant doing the kinds of things that come naturally to a historian: reading all the different elements making up these multi-media guidebooks, which combined textual and visual clues, as well as exploring the material related to their production in the National Archives. Along some journeys I discovered contradictions and ambivalences in how modern Britain was thought about in 1951. But as well as trying to immerse myself in the past, I was conscious that I was attempting to retrace these routes in the present. Driving along the same roads just under 70 years after these books were first published I discovered what had changed and what had stayed the same. Rather than trying to write about all aspects of continuity and change, I embraced the limits the guidebooks imposed upon me. It is not only archives that creatively constrain. Itineraries also do. Each region was restricted to a small number of tours. Each tour directed me along this road, not that, and I chose to follow it in this direction, not that, flagging some places (to the exclusion of others) as worth seeing along the way. Rather than working against the constraints of a linear tour drawn up by someone else, I decided to work with them and stick as far as I could to the original route writing only about the landscape that lay directly along either 6
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side of the road. It felt like an experiment in following a series of tunnels, or wormholes perhaps, chosen by someone else. Working primarily with the landscape, I wanted to see what it suggested of the stories of post-war Britain. Those stories cover a range of what might be dubbed social, cultural, environmental, economic and political histories. But rather than privileging one of these lenses, I decided to start with the roadscape that I passed along and work from that. This does mean there are plenty of gaps. I intentionally only drove those roads chosen for me by those in the Festival Office in 1950, rather than all roads – and specifically the yet-to-be-built motorways – criss-crossing Britain. I focused on what I passed along the sides of these roads, only stopping to explore on foot occasionally. In short, I did not – metaphorically or literally – stop, knock on the door of a house, enter and adopt the methods of a social historian who might conduct oral history interviews with the inhabitants. Instead, when I did go on foot, I sought to work more with the methods of the environmental historian or historical geographer and to adopt what one historian memorably described as the ‘archive of the feet’.11 But, in reality, I did very little walking and rather a lot of driving. Adding the totals from all twelve journeys together came to a little over 1,300 miles, but sometimes I ended up lost or came upon a red ‘Road Closed’ sign and was forced to follow another route. Rather than adopting the ‘archive of the feet’ I chose mainly to follow the archive of the steering wheel and tyre tracks. This was intentional. These guidebooks were primarily aimed at motorists, with Britain offered up as a landscape to be driven through. And so I drove along the roads, sometimes alone and sometimes with others. I wanted the car not only to be the vehicle that I used to access past and present, but also an object of study in its own right. As well as thinking about the ways that people imagined the world in 1951, and exploring 7
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histories of continuity and change over seven decades, this book is also a reflection on our changing relationship with cars and roads and travel in general. Retracing twelve itineraries put together in the summer of 1950 took me to places both familiar and unfamiliar, making me think afresh about what Britain meant then and means now. Of course when I followed these routes it was not in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War but in years dominated first by debates and preparations for Brexit, and later the spread of a global pandemic. Starting close to my Bristol home, before heading first east, and then north, it became clear that the answer to the question of what Britain is, was as, if not more, complex than when the Festival Office first set out to answer it in 1951. It also quickly became apparent how much has changed in Britain in the course of the three score years and ten of a human lifespan.
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