Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie, Ebury, 352pp, £11.99, Week Bookshop £10.79 (incl. p&p). “Going in search of Middle England” has become something of a publishing staple, said Euan Ferguson in the Observer. “You know the sort of thing”: a “treasured” writer or broadcaster – Bill Bryson, Jeremy Paxman – “will get off a train in some emblematic town” such as Tunbridge Wells, Bath, Surbiton or Slough. “They will note down the small ads in the newsagent’s, visit the funny or winning or pathetic little museum and have a pint with the locals.” The resulting travelogue is usually “diverting enough”. But Stuart Maconie’s addition to the genre is a notch above: “illuminating, quirky, saddening, fun, often angry, and always intensely readable”. He has been compared to Bryson, but he knows his subject better. “Thus, amid the travels, we get mini-essays on Vaughan Williams versus Elgar, 60s architecture, geology, the British food revolution, Oxbridge myths and realities, Tolkien’s Birmingham, bad public art, Nick Drake, Larkin’s angst, stoicism, proper ice cream.”

Maconie’s meanderings are likeable enough, as he travels around cheerfully “free-associating”, said Christopher Hudson in the Evening Standard (London). But it might have worked better as a documentary; over 350 pages, it starts to seem “interminable”. Adventures on the High Teas “is far more than an entertaining rag-bag of trivia”, said Craig Brown in the Mail on Sunday, though “it is a shame that its daffy title promotes this suspicion”. The book is certainly funny and beguiling (“Nuneaton, he points out, was home to George Eliot, Larry Grayson and Mary Whitehouse”), but it’s also perceptive, listing the “telling symbols” of the country today: concrete car parks in the middle of pretty towns; Polish waitresses; “little knots of smokers round patio heaters in pub gardens”. All in all, it “amounts to a time capsule of England as it is now”.

FIRST POSTED APRIL 9, 2009