Book of a lifetime: English Journey by JB Priestley

From The Independent archive: Helen Gordon goes rambling through many Englands with the famous polymath and finds his observations on ‘the lovely thickness of life’ still echo with great relevance today

JB Priestley was extremely conscious of time, and many of his works link past, present and future (Getty)

I first picked up a copy of JB Priestley’s English Journey in the offices of Granta, the literary magazine where I went to work after university. Later, when I began my novel, Landfall, with a woman sitting on a plane reading Priestley’s travelogue, it was this specific copy I had in mind: a battered, dark blue hardcover marked with ghostly rings from a previous reader’s cup of coffee or glass of water.

Published in 1934, English Journey is a rambling and often very funny account of Priestley’s travels through rural and urban England in the autumn of 1933. He visits sleepy villages and sooty industrial towns, surveys decaying shipyards and modern factories. He describes a country in the grip of an economic slump, struggling with high levels of unemployment, but also home to a landscape rich in what he calls “these vague associations” of history and art – a “shamelessly romantic” Lincolnshire sky reminds him of Turner, a Hampshire field of Hazlitt.

Alternately charmed and angered by what he sees (and when angered he was always charmingly blunt), he returns regularly to the problem of maintaining a vital provincial life – newspapers, theatres, local politics – in an increasingly London-centric island.