The man looks out at the Rollright Stones from his little wooden hut, with the weariness of wardens the world over. By the door is an honesty box (50p a person) and a glass jar with six dowsing rods for you to borrow. The trust he works for was established eight years ago to try to defend these once-obscure megalithic remains—now thought by some to be magical—on the Oxfordshire-Warwickshire border. Passionate paganists, satanists, pantheists and mere tourists threatened to overwhelm them with their hugs, kisses and sheer weight of feet.
I am here, in the English midlands, in a Tolkien-like quest for middle England. I wonder if I have found it in this very strange, but also strangely tamed, place. Many of the components are here: a rural dream, a hint of DIY, some voluntary work, a passion for tidiness, a scarcely hidden eccentricity.
When I pull up in the new lay-by, two solidly built middle-aged women volunteers, in baggy jeans and waxed jackets, are bending over to creosote the fence. The trust's brochures mention ley lines, witchcraft and druidism, as well as water-divining. To my eye there is little sense of magic left, but it may be different at dawn or dusk. A family wanders around the circle, with the youngest child always on the verge of ignoring the "do not climb" signs. "On a good day, we get 400 visitors," the warden says. How do they behave? "A few nutters, as you can see from the paint splashes on the stones." On the wall of his hut is a bleached-out CCTV photo of a young man suspected of paint-daubing: £1,000 reward. "They got him," the warden says. But why do it? "People are people. Why do they blow up 200 people in Madrid? Some have a grudge, or think they can change the world. Him, perhaps he'd had a row with his girlfriend the night before, and she was a pagan. Who knows?"
Have I found the grail? Middle Englanders, like the warden, often use crime as a social yardstick. Crime and Social Change in Middle England (2000) is one of the rare academic studies with "middle England" in the title. The criminologist authors Evi Girling, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks investigated Macclesfield in Cheshire, "this unremarkable, relatively untroubled, moderately prosperous English town" and former home of Brian Redhead, the long-time cheery presenter of the Today programme. The three researchers wondered what "people may be saying when they speak about crime." Here, and in most parts of England, they decided, people are not fretting about the detailed police statistics. In reality, their "crime-talk"—now almost as common as talk about the weather—touches on questions "to do with justice and welfare, inclusion and exclusion, the respective roles of citizen and state." Their "anxieties and aspirations" relate to "order, civility and respectability." Socially, these people often see themselves as "spectators watching dramas in which they play little part." Writing before any widely feared Islamist threat, the authors conclude that: "The antique dilemma between liberty and security arises afresh each time and in each place we encounter it."
"Middle England" has become a cliché, especially in political discourse. In March, for example, Plaid Cymru criticised Gordon Brown for presenting "a budget for middle England." Ruth Kelly's recent decision not to abolish A-levels was described by the Guardian as an "appeal to middle England, naturally conservative and cautious." The Daily Mail saw it the same way, though from a different angle, reporting that Kelly "made her first big policy declaration—dressed up as a reassurance to middle England."
Nor is it just party politics. Explaining the success of her comedy show Goodness Gracious Me, Meera Syal says, "The excitement was: hang on a minute, this isn't just Asians that are listening to it. This is middle England." And when the Daily Telegraph hired four poets to write epithalamia on the Charles-Camilla wedding, they described one of them, Pam Ayres, as "comic poet/priestess to middle England." Her poem, in full, was: "My mother said, 'Say nothing, / If you can't say something nice.' / So from my poem you can see / I'm taking her advice."
Clair Allison recently went to court in Salisbury and got about 2,500 local speeding fines (including her own) rescinded, because local 40mph signs were not clearly displayed. She had fought, she said, on behalf of "middle Englanders," adding that "we were not boy racers, tearing about a housing estate."
If middle England is a comfort blanket for the right, it is a hair shirt for the left. For many leftists, the term seems to have become a mere yah-boo aimed at anything that is disliked. But does middle England have a habitation, and not just a name? "It doesn't exist in Euclidean space but in the mind," says the eminent geographer and planner Peter Hall. The Essex University sociologist RE Pahl is currently researching theories of relative deprivation (poverty defined not as destitution, but as falling behind), of which the corollary is how to keep up with the Joneses, or the Shahs. Middle England, to him, means "estate culture and how you grade estates: all comparing cars and reading the Daily Mail. You can reach there by any means, perhaps you left school at 14, but it's all evened out on that estate." Such social gradings, he thinks, have largely overtaken the language of class (though personally he still favours a tripartite division into senior salariat, middle mass and underclass). The old class divide is replaced, as Clair Allison's comments also imply, by the divide between "people like us" and the rest.
Mockery of middle England is almost identical with the sneers against suburbia, where by far the majority of the English, and the British, live. Politicians can seldom afford this metropolitan haughtiness, as they continue their pursuit of the semi-attached voters, living in the new estates of the realm. Elections often produce little cartoon figures who are intended to represent the elusive middle England. In 1997 it was Mondeo man (likeliest names, we were told, Gary or Barry) and his emblematic home was still in Thatcherite Essex. In 2001 there was a sex change. Women, it was noted, were more likely than men to say (or admit) "don't know" when polled on political issues. These were the swing sisters. The crucial middle Englander was now Florida woman (Anthea or Geeta, married to Rod or Ajay), who was defined intriguingly by her Orlando holiday destination, not by her home address: Disney dreams matter. Or else it was Worcester woman (likeliest names, Debbie or Paula). The pollster Robert Worcester, chairman of Mori, says, "I invented Worcester woman. Electorally, women outnumber men, the median national person is C1 [lower shores of the middle class] and the median age is 35-54. I looked at the map and saw the city of Worcester. This had to be the centre of the map." The fact that the name was eponymous, we must assume, was a happy coincidence.
Many, including Worcester and Pahl, define middle England partly by its reading matter: the Daily Mail or the Mail on Sunday. Totting up all 44,722 respondents to its surveys during 2004, Mori finds that, among national daily papers, the readership of the Daily Mail comes closest to the male-female population divide (47 and 53 per cent, against the national 49 and 51 per cent). The Guardian, by contrast, has a higher proportion of men, and its readership also tends to be younger. These two papers are like sparring partners, fighting over the soul of middle England. Each has the great merit of a clear ethic—although this does not mean that everything in the paper follows a predictable line. Who would have expected the Mail to point the finger at the presumed killers of Stephen Lawrence?
The Guardian is obsessed by its rival. As I write, the Guardian's website tots up more than 9,000 mentions of the Daily Mail since 1st September 1998, plus almost 2,500 for the Mail on Sunday. As a man-and-boy Guardian reader, I reckon that such mentions are on a rising curve—they seem to mean "people not like us." The Guardian-Mail confrontations over issues often turn on separating "popular" from "populist": a task almost as hard as defining middle England. The awkward truth is that what is popular, or even populist, is not always wrong. An iconoclastic polemic, The Future of Socialism (1956), by the Labour revisionist Tony Crosland, was as sacred to the Social Democrat "gang of four" as clause IV then was to their old Labour rivals. In it Crosland attacked Beaverbrook's Daily Express—roughly the equivalent of today's Daily Mail—for advocating more family houses and gardens instead of bright new council-built inner-city flats. The Express foresaw the future better.
The Daily Mail's annual Ideal Home show, dating from 1908, is middle England come to town. The organisers' breakdowns show two thirds of the visitors to be women, half aged 24-44, and 82 per cent middle class (social groups A, B and C1). When I go to the 2005 show, I find that the press office has pinned up clippings from such papers as the Western and Somerset Mercury, the Brackley and Towcester Advertiser and Jewish News. I go through the Earl's Court turnstiles among many mother and daughter couples. The daughters dress more casually; mothers' jeans are embroidered.
The theme is the Mediterranean. The first thing you see is the Mediterranean House, laid out by "celebrity designers" Colin McAllister and Justin Ryan, "from TV's How Not to Decorate." It is all purple, black and pink. In the living room, black hand-dyed carpets, black and purple walls, black and purple wing-chairs with brass studs; even the cocktail glasses have purple-tinted stems. In the bedroom, the carpet is hand-dyed "outrageous magenta pink"; the tables are black metal. "We've been motivated by Princess Grace of Monaco and the Cannes film festival," Colin and Justin announce. "Think Coco Chanel and Pierre Cardin… Think Hello magazine… Think drama to the power of ten with a style factor of 1,000." Or you could think "Hollywood brothel." Middle England gone gaudy.
Today, Granada's This Morning programme is broadcasting live from the Mediterranean Village. Linda Barker has designed the Spanish villa; Allied Carpets has sponsored La Maison des Quatre Saisons; savastore.com has sponsored the Venice show house, with a shiny black gondola parked in a sliver of water alongside. Even on a quiet day there are long queues to get into each of them. Dreams, dreams, dreams.
I pass a poster which asks: "Is Croatia the new Marbella?" Despite this, Tony Pitt tries to tempt me with a house on the "Costa Blanca," south of Alicante. He is lightly but evenly tanned, his hair gently grizzled, his eye contact unswerving. He tells me he served for 23 years in the army, then went into the Royal Parks police and the Met, but he and his wife weren't seeing enough of each other. "So we released the equity on our Welwyn Garden City house, moved to Spain, and everything took off." The two of them now work for a property company. He gives me a sales pack, with a yellow plastic Spanish fan, taped with user instructions: how to display it to say "I love you," or, failing that, "I remember you." Costa Blanca inspection tours are offered at £75 per couple.
A team of young women are decorating a house, in a Heart FM competition. The winner gets £2,000. Each has chosen a life motto: "Smile and the world smiles with you" (Helen); "Just get on with it" (Tracey); "Seize the day" (Lori). Helen's "worst job" was "delivering telephone directories with my mum." Gay's "proudest achievement" is contriving, as a single parent, to work, run a home, be mother to three children, "and managing to remain sane (just)."
The show's exhibits are a complex mixture of striving and relaxing. The London School of Investment says: "Get Educated! Get Active! Take Control!" Inspire Decor sells mottos to put up on your walls: a still of Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany's, with the quote, "I never thought that I'd land in pictures with a face like mine." Part of the striving is about defeating speed cameras. "I've got the stats," the salesman for Safeplate announces. The Safeplate spray "reflects the photo flash of cameras" and "gives a clear undetectable proven protective finish" to your number plate. But everywhere also tempts you to relax—after or before striving. Join the queue for the free makeover by the London College of Beauty Therapy. Or try the patent massage chairs with little automatic pommels, or patent massage beds with multiple positions which ease neck pain, back pain, leg pain—all the pains of middle England life. The cat can have a relaxing time, too, in a suede-lined cat-sleeper called Winks.
As a political idea, middle England was copied from middle America, which is, by contrast, undoubtedly a real place, geographically and socially. Time magazine always has an award for man or woman of the year. On 5th January 1970, it honoured both sexes: man and woman of the year were "The Middle Americans," otherwise known as the silent majority. Student rioting on 1960s American campuses resulted, not in revolution, but in the election of Richard Nixon as president. The middle Americans, Time reported, "in the bumper sticker dialogue of the freeways," answered "Make Love Not War" with "Honor America." "In Minneapolis they elected a police detective to be mayor… By their silent but newly felt presence, they influenced the mood of government and the course of legislation." Everything that happens in America happens in England 30 years later. In 2002, Middlesbrough elected former detective superintendent Ray Mallon ("Robocop") as mayor. Left-wing suspicions of middleness don't fade. When Bush defeated Kerry in 2004, one Guardian headline was "Small-town morals win the day."
Sam Francis was a columnist on the hard-right Middle American News until his death in February this year. In one essay he wrote: "Middle American radicals are essentially middle-income, white, often ethnic [but not black], voters who see themselves as an exploited and dispossessed group, excluded from meaningful political participation, threatened by the tax and trade policies of the government, victimised by its tolerance of crime, immigration and social deviance, and ignored or ridiculed by the major cultural institutions of the media and education." Yet, he argued, they were the "core population group providing America its essential history, culture and identity." Francis gave his intellectual influences as James Burnham, Machiavelli and Pareto, all analysts of elites. He managed to get himself expelled from the ultra-conservative John Birch Society. The "drive for 'diversity,'" he said, "was just rationalisation by US elites to cloak demand for cheap labour."
I suspect that Sam Francis was not a nice man to know. But he doesn't pussyfoot. Part of his identification of middle-ism fits the English phenomenon. For example, white flight—and some brown flight—from English cities is little discussed, but it exists. Stratford-upon-Avon could be one candidate town for the capital of middle England. When I reach there on my quest, I see scarcely a non-white face in the street. At the Swan theatre, I watch a very obscure Elizabethan play. "Colour-blind"—that is, highly colour-conscious—casting means that there are more black actors on stage than visibly ethnic minority members in the audience. Curiously, the first act of the play, Sir Thomas More, is largely about Londoners rioting against foreigners, which then meant French, Dutch and Lombards. Stratford itself is swelling out in all directions. It is handy for escapees from commuter-distance, strongly multiracial Birmingham or Coventry. New flats overlook the racecourse. On the Banbury Road the sales flags of Bryant, Kier and Persimmon flutter bravely over a large new estate of redbrick detached houses.
Middle England may be best thought of as a clutch of pieces in a social jigsaw, rather than one continuous place. This is how it seems if you look at Mosaic UK, a census-based analysis developed by the spatial analyst Richard Webber for the Nottingham company Experian. This breaks the country down by postcode (14 or 15 households) and, for each, weaves together census material, credit ratings, family expenditure, car ownership and other specialist surveys. All households are then allocated to one of 61 types, which are combined into 11 larger groups. These groups include Happy Families (Darren and Joan, 10.76 per cent of UK households), Suburban Comfort (Geoffrey and Valerie, 15.1 per cent), Welfare Borderline (Joseph and Agnes, 6.43 per cent), Blue Collar Enterprise (Dean and Mandy, 11.01 per cent) and Grey Perspectives (Edgar and Constance, 7.88 per cent). Within Suburban Comfort, the six sub-types include Small Time Business and Sprawling Subtopia. Somewhere between these two, Richard Webber tells me, he would expect to find emblematic middle England (though both types together add up to only 6.01 per cent of households). They flourish notably, he suggests, in small towns like Havant, outside Portsmouth, or Gillingham in north Kent; or, on a larger scale, in Milton Keynes. "Places where people have the choice of lots of jobs. They may not have much education; they may drive white vans. But they are optimists; they borrow money; they have never belonged to unions."
Experian is a subsidiary of GUS Ltd, which owns Argos and Homebase, and ran the country's largest home catalogue business until selling it to the Barclay brothers. Mosaic UK was intended for retail uses: if you want to revamp a pub, is it in the right district for an upmarket design, or should it evoke the Rover's Return? Both the Labour and Tory parties subscribe: after your focus groups have helped to decide key issues, which streets within swing constituencies should you target? The police and other parts of the public sector are also beginning to use Mosaic. It is fascinating to trawl through. You could say that it is a substitute for long-lost personal knowledge of localities.
Richard Webber warns me: "There are no average neighbourhoods any more." Between Stratford and the Rollright Stones, I pass through more small towns and villages with new estates on the outskirts. Mothers bring their four year olds back from nursery school. The Horseshoe Inn advertises Cypriot night and Mexican night. The Self-Drive Hire Centre offers a Drive-In Barber's and a Nail Bar as extras. Along the road I avoid dead pheasants and live squirrels. I turn off towards Chipping Norton, the very model of a quiet Cotswolds town.
Seven bikes are parked outside the coffee shop opposite the classical town hall: Kawasaki, Royal Enfield, Norton. It is like a conclave of special delivery couriers. Inside, the day-outing riders are politely eating cookies and almond slices. None of them will see 40 again, and some are past 50. I pick up the Chipping Norton News. "In our near-classless town," one article begins, jokily, "one person looks down on everyone else": it is the crane driver at the big nearby building site. Under the alarming headline "Robbery in town," I find that the retired policeman who was first on the scene at the 1963 great train robbery in Buckinghamshire now makes a hobby of reminiscing to groups like the Chipping Norton Rotary club.
The only true middle England, it seems, is one that you invent. It is pick 'n' mix. In Class, Self and Culture (2004), the Goldsmiths College sociologist Beverley Skeggs announced the arrival of the "choosing, self-managing individual." People, she argued, now need to "make one's life a work of art," with women as the main makers of taste. She interprets the junk term "lifestyle" as a hunt for cultural "prostheses": add-ons which redefine who you are.
In 1876, among the bleak fields of North Oxfordshire, Flora Thompson was born into a life of respectable poverty, and wrote about it in her classic memoir, Lark Rise. There was a place for everything, and for everyone. In 2005, as I drive towards Bicester (which was one of Thompson's nearest market towns), other cars start to crowd around me. This is the way to Bicester Village, a flourishing "retail outlet," now ten years old. From the car park you walk into the "village street." Shops offer end-of-line Karen Millen, Nicole Farhi, Jaeger. Through a gap between shops I can see Bicester's old church in the distance. People are dressed in their Sunday best; some have come for half a day to look round; there is a sprinkling of Indian, Japanese and Chinese families. A lunchtime queue forms at Carluccio's. There is a job board just along from Starbucks. There are 62 jobs on offer, full-time or part-time: Samsonite floor supervisor, Salvatore Ferragamo store manager, Burberry stock room assistant, Tommy Hilfiger sales assistant. This is the new middle England economy.
But it is at the Welcome Break service station where the M40 joins the A40 that I sense I have found middle England. This must be the chain's flagship, with its high, arched silvery roof. Beneath it, all the options are on offer, as salesmen in cufflinked shirts sit and eat their sandwiches or children wave their spoons from the café's high wooden chairs. Kiss your partner in the photo booth and win a romantic trip to Rome: "Most romantic wins." Create your own portrait in the next booth, charcoal or pencil or pen-and-ink style. The Red Hen eatery offers "freshly cooked food—where breakfast meets lunch." On the book display: Dick Francis, Joanna Trollope, Maeve Binchy, JK Rowling. For the worried middleman, there is The One-Minute Manager. If he is staying the night alone, there is Teasing Charlotte and Jennifer Rising, the soft-porn covers only partly screened by a translucent plastic strip.
Middle England, as a phrase, gets tangled up with middlebrow, middle market and middle class. But as a place, it is something you confect for yourself. No one lives here. But then no one lives at the Rollright Stones, at Bicester Village or at Disney World, Orlando, either. To spur the peasantry into rebellion, the unruly priest John Ball had his own dream: "When Adam delved and Eve span / Who was then the gentleman?" Middle England dreams differently, but it, too, rocks the old, established order.
