Why do we try so hard to make our country ugly and dirty? Hedges and roadsides are full of litter, sometimes even swept up into the trees by the wind.
Brave and determined souls try to clear it away but within weeks their work is undone by carloads of yahoos who scatter cans, crisp-packets and plastic bags as if they were huge unpleasant animals moulting as they went.
A special committee seems to have ruled that petrol stations shall be hideous – especially when amidst countryside – and that storefronts, from supermarkets to charity shops, shall be marked out with garish colours and aggressively ugly lettering.
New houses, likewise, must have tiny, mean windows and be built too close together, unsoftened by mature trees.
Trees themselves are endlessly menaced by house-owners who see them as the enemy, claiming they block the light or that their roots are destroying their foundations.
Comfortable suburbs, whose front gardens once frothed with blossom and glowed with spring flowers at this time of year, now display nothing but glum hardstanding, where we park our imported cars.
Complaints of this kind have been growing since the 1930s, when figures such as the poet John Betjeman mourned our love for electricity pylons and grim concrete.
Another great poet, Philip Larkin, wrote in 1972:
‘It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;/
Despite all the land left free/
For the first time I feel somehow/
That it isn’t going to last’.
He added miserably:
‘And that will be England gone,/
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,/
The guildhalls, the carved choirs./
There’ll be books; it will linger on/
In galleries; but all that remains/
For us will be concrete and tyres’.
Philip Larkin, one of Britain’s best known modern poets, lamented the loss of the countryside
This week, another powerful voice describes the spreading mould of modernism and ugliness, and tries to explain it.
Theodore Dalrymple worked for years as a prison doctor and learned in detail how deeply our governing classes have surrendered to selfishness, spite and greed. He has become one of the most acute voices describing the vandalising of Britain by an alliance of fanatics and idiots.
In a short, bitter and painful book, An Englishman’s Home Is His Car Park, he describes a recent visit to the once-handsome English city of Worcester, in the past an unspectacular but enjoyable treasure house of the things that help make us English, that glorious unplanned slow growth of a prosperous, reasonable, generous society. Now it looks as if it has been bombed by somebody (though it hasn’t been) and rebuilt by oafs.
Dr Dalrymple travelled to Worcester to accompany his wife, who had been summoned there to take part in a jury. In some ways, it is a little like a 21st-century updating of J B Priestley’s still-fascinating, English Journey, of 90 years ago.
Worcester, in the history of this country, is one of those places where hard-working, inventive and independent people prospered, sought and then protected their freedom, and hoped to leave behind an abiding monument to this gentle civilisation.
The Dalrymples decided to make a sort of holiday of their visit, as English people would once have done in their home country: a few days among picturesque streets and old churches, staying in a charming beamy old hotel, perhaps ending the peaceful day with an English dinner of steak and kidney pie and a bottle of red Burgundy before climbing the creaky stairs to an irregularly shaped but comfortable bedroom overlooking the Cathedral close.
No such place now exists, of course. The days of beams and pies and irregular rooms is over, replaced by health and safety and portion control, and windows you cannot open in case you decide to do away with yourself.
They toyed with the idea of going to the theatre and there was one, but the old provincial repertory was no more, or perhaps on holiday somewhere else.
Theodore Dalrymple worked for years as a prison doctor and learned in detail how deeply our governing classes have surrendered to selfishness, spite and greed
Rubbish is left to tarnish the landscape in a woodland near Ripley in Surrey
Worcester was in the past an unspectacular but enjoyable treasure house of the things that help make us English
The theatre offered a (subsidised) show which promised to ‘have you laughing till you wee! From menopause to mansplaining no subject is safe’. Or perhaps they might have enjoyed an evening of jolly discussion about ADHD with an ‘ADHD coach’.
Dr Dalrymple had hoped that the city might have retained some of its former gentility. But if you turn your back for a moment in this country, such things evaporate.
‘There was no question of gentility in the centre of Worcester as we took our evening stroll: decline and degradation came more to mind,’ he says.
Among the tattoos and the piercings, it felt as if the old and the middle-aged had been confined to their homes under some sort of curfew, though the truth was probably that they had decided to stay in their distant suburbs.
‘Many of the young men are of foreign origin, south-east European or Middle Eastern. There is a lot of hanging around. English is but one language among others on the street.’
Read More
PETER HITCHENS: How ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ could lead us down a VERY dangerous path
How and why do young men from Aleppo, or Basra, Sofia, Belgrade or Bucharest find their way to such places as Worcester, a place they probably know even less about than the average inhabitant of Worcester knows about Latakia or Mostar? What do they make of it when they arrive? Can they be happy or at least contented there? How has this most peculiar transfer of population happened, and how will it end?
Yet all observant citizens know that it has happened, over many years, and that the one thing certain about it is that they were never asked if they wanted it.
There is a touching description of an evening’s Bingo, an activity Dalrymple once despised but now finds civilised and heartwarming by comparison with the sour, selfish desolation all around.
Oddly, Dalrymple is totally unreligious. Yet his account of the conversion of a former church into a pub is disturbing. He feels as if a Black Mass, with some grisly sacrifice, might take place at any moment.
Well, perhaps some people do gloat when churches are turned to such uses, which mock their former purpose
Britain’s whole landscape is shaped and infused with more than a thousand years of Christian belief. I suspect it will not long survive the death of that religion.
That is why cathedral cities such as Worcester, which cluster round the fortresses of the dying faith, seem so especially bereft in this age of Godlessness. But Dalrymple also suggests another reason for the hollowing out of what was once admired by the world as one of the most free and settled societies on the planet.
He wonders if the frenzied modernisation of everything, the crazy 1960s love affair with concrete and glass, the obsession with tidying and sweeping away the old and illogical, is based on our national decline,
Even though we are no longer a great power, officialdom decided, we could at least be modern, like America. And those now in charge of our heritage – councillors, planners, ministers – have come to hate the elegant, well-proportioned and pleasing past, because they know they are no good at beauty themselves. And, as they cannot create it, they are relieved to see it go.
Maybe he is right. Some explanation is certainly needed for the desecrating and scouring of so much loveliness.
An Englishman’s Home Is His Car Park – Slovenliness As A Way Of Life, by Theodore Dalrymple, is published by Gibson Square.
