Real England

where is it and what does it look like

Raymond Williams says somewhere that most people who live in it live in quite small towns, but there is next to no significant literature about same.

Of course he was writing before Midsomer Murders aired.

http://i1.trekearth.com/photos/64476/dscf1947scrsfr.jpg

^^^wiltshire apparently (i'm not sure i know where wiltshire actually is) < /the lex >

i don't know how the demographics break down now but i wd say that a significant majority at least want to live in quite small towns. also i suspect quite small towns are increasingly really dissipated cities.

Anyone bothered with Paul Kingsnorth's book on this very subject?

but y'knaa this whole problematic word "Real" - is this intended sarcastically, like is this thread about "what are the sort of people who use the phrase 'Real England' talking about?" or are we positing a defining core of Englishness that has history and still survives however tenuous?

i think it would be facetious to pretend the issue can be approached entirely unfacetiously

i was not aware of paul kingsnorth but now i see he has written a book called real england colon something else, i would guess it isn't the only book/treatise/pamphlet with similar title

work filter has thoughtfully blocked access to my first google search result, some blog with the delightfully making-me-want-to-stab-the-author subtitle "The Battle Against the Bland". i assure you guys if there is a Real England it is not battling against The Bland and that is an excellent virtue in itself.

oh right, that is the subtitle of Kingsnorth's book. okay then i will probably never read it since i infer from the book's post-colonage that the guy is a big douche.

the usual English attention to the wrong details

and some sadness for stuff passing that has not passed or was not what he claims it was before it passed

is john terry 'real england' dyou suppose

i infer from the book's post-colonage that the guy is a big douche.

― Agyness Dei (Noodle Vague), Thursday, 3 November 2011 13:24 (1 minute ago)

h but f, nv, h but f

basically i was looking at the squad list for peterbrough town and noticed ryan tunnicliffe and lee frecklington and thought maybe those names were shibboleths that uttered in a certain way might usher you into the innermost real england

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01185/arts-graphics-2008_1185572a.jpg

the city hobgoblin as a good place to start! (of course he said british not english, right, re the wrong detail)

"... heir to an immense fortune, gifted by nature with a mind susceptible of noble cultivation, and a body endowed with admirable physical powers with the wretched drunkard who died in a gaol at the age of thirty-eight, a worn-out debauchee and drivelling sot... " <-- i am this very second ensconced in the village that surnamed this regency rake, tho he mainly lived on the other side of shrewsbury

nigel farage isn't real btw, he speaks for only his own constituency, which is seldom more than symbolic

is there a real england that is incapable of any sort of assimilation into colonned literature? a planar england that resists signification or commodification by interlopers from other englands

south dublin iirc

leatherhead is a promotory over a large and brackish inland sea that is never spoken of

beneath the leylines, the true underground

"Winter, 1981: the headless, skinned bodies of two bears are found by the River Lea."

real england is all mates and and blood sausage and big bottomed birds reading thew newsie-wewsies

nah it's hedgerows and birds and complete lack of public services

Oh it's all about the public services nowadays; a bus to take you into town so you can spend all night trawling the happy hour bars, a streetcleaner to mop up your vomit from the pavement, a policeman to give you a place to spend the night. No-one needed public services when an evening's entertainment consisted of watching the sun set over a russet autumnal hedgerow, lulled into a reverie by the carefree birdsong.

http://www.photohistory-sussex.co.uk/UckFrisbyPiltdown03.jpg

"Searching for the Putdown Man"

is there a real england that is incapable of any sort of assimilation into colonned literature? a planar england that resists signification or commodification by interlopers from other englands

Interesting question which I wish I could answer.

I don't know if I would like that England even.

is there a culture that can't be commodified? and i have to be v. v. careful not to paint my cultures, or the cultures i've drifted along the fringes of, as the only real England. the problem is that the word is usually only spoken out loud by a certain kind of cultural capitalist, whose vision of it is just as tangential as mine. bullshit about fair play and honest toil and love of the land that i'd counter with a nation of sneak thiefs, factionalists and urban wastrels. the contestedness is always part of the Reality of the nation, any nation really.

for every sleepy Sunday C of E-attending agnostic Tory there's an apocalypse-welcoming hair-splitting anabaptist

Everywhere north of Enfield is basically a wasteland isn't it? Brrrr... Nothing there. Just a man collecting lumps of mud and putting them into a cloth bag.

yeah but the determination of that which is essential need not be a question of mere majorities

everybody shd read The Uses of Literacy to see how you can constructively get this wrong in a way that doesn't just mourn real heritage centres. obv Williams and E.P. Thompson and Stuart Hall too

the determination of that which is essential need not be a question of mere majorities

quite so, how about the British Isles then as a dumping ground/refugee camp/Wild West for Europe and parts south-east, over millenia, fuelling endless negotiation and conflict over territory, and that is the quicksand underneath Real England that we think of as bedrock?

look mate there's no need to get fucking personal, alright

btw if i was gonna put forward one Real England it wd be old photographs of works sports teams or outings or other ceremonial jollies

it would be the commie permawheezing mustachioed drunk one in tinker tailor, tho no doubt they'd have you b'leev it's smiley or haydon

wait haydon was the commie?

SPOILERS

nah think he was the aesthete on a protest against the yanks more than anything else, wasn't the dude ciaran hinds played proper lefty in stated methods tho

the sparking point of Real England is where the plummy port-swilling foxhunter runs up against the chippy millenarian work-dodger and we drink each others' health and promise ourselves deep down that one day our kind will crush theirs

the phoenicians sailed up round to albion to trade tin for spice before the romans had even got out of bed, and if they weren't trading with aboriginal pre-celt and pre-pict inhabitants, then it was certainly aboriginal+1: an island of proto-druid shopkeepers since time immaterial

stonehenge is actually a kind of cashpoint machine

xp

oh, Roy Bland. yeah Bland is the angry Puritan I've been talking about, defending his country so's his people can crush the effete Squire class one day

but mark, who's to say the aborigines hadn't hopped off the boat from Boulogne just ahead of the celts themselves and so on and so forth??

irish close to turks dna-wise iirc

i think that's exactly what mark is saying, tbf

Of all the Tribe of Tegumai
Who cut that figure, none remain
On Merrow Down the cuckoos cry
The silence and the sun remain

xp he's called smiley, he has to be of outlander extraction

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2007/07/17/chalkhomer460.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8Xw7LplzFws/TpDJGHBmFGI/AAAAAAAAArE/CCJlpL9TMeU/s1600/yeo+valley.jpg

^ I wasn't at that FAP

clun forest all-mercian jug band champions, tractor runs on wattle and daub

never get away with haircuts like that up in the Danelaw

Calzino, I bow to you, peas are non- negotiable in mac and cheese.

damn right!

I go a bit mad sometimes and add spinach or kale. Not very real england or real america

woke and cheese morelike

next you'll be telling me Popeye was woke!

spinach-munching, olive oil loving

I made some woke sauce this morning (spinach/capers/broccoli) and feel I could climb Mount Woke and then run a woke-a-thon, it's good stuff

popeye was obvious wokewashing from Big Spinach, behold this non-woke icon: https://dmrqkbkq8el9i.cloudfront.net/Pictures/1024x536/1/0/5/37105_desperate-dan.jpg

Viz did a hilarious "Desperately Unfunny Dan" tribute, in which everyone hates Dan and find his show-off strongman tricks very predictable and tedious and they all just tell him to fuck off!

u have to admire his hoof-to-horns culinary ethic

iirc he had a proto-steampunk slaughterhouse train with a fully automated cowpie production line a few carriages long. It seemed very complex and lacking in credibility even by cartoon-world standards!

i knew user mark s wouldn't be able to resist the siren call of desperate dan

British argument of the week. pic.twitter.com/l1c02UvxeM

— No Context Brits (@NoContextBrits) December 22, 2025

ulp

“How’s your dad taking the divorce?” pic.twitter.com/2Ho2kHVN1N

— No Context Brits (@NoContextBrits) January 27, 2026

never really had a pie & mash, I hope I get the chance before it's too late (I'll pass on the jellied eels unless someone here convinces me)
we of course have something called Shepherd's Pie in the U.S. but I don't think it's the same

The pie and mash crisis: can the original fast food be saved?
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2026/feb/03/the-pie-and-mash-crisis-can-the-original-fast-food-be-saved

Shepherd's Pie is totally Real England btw.

ah okay, I thought it was some faux version

nobody is eating traditional cockney pie and mash any more because it's fucking awful. I love a good pie and mash but the shit they serve in those places is not that. worst pies you've ever seen drenched in gloopy, tasteless slime on top of watery mash. just absolute shite. this was in Manze's as well, supposedly a classic place, although it was the Walthamstow one which is closed down now

I'm not qualified to comment on Cockney pie and mash but it's always looked as grim as the Colonel describes, plus good pies are freely available and mash is delicious done right but it's not hard to do right

I dunno... yeah there's nothing remarkable about this dish but there's something about the combination of minced beef pie with the mash and liquor and a sprinkle of vinegar that can make it great. I ate this for the first time in decades during a recent visit and it was delicious and just as I remembered... transporting me back to my London childhood. But yeah obviously in the 21st Century this food is a hard sell.

I have seen two different "foreigner in the uk" youtubers go to try pie & mash and while both are generally positive about almost everything they both very much did not enjoy the pie & mash. Apparently you're supposed to drench it in vinegar for some reason.

vinegar makes most things better tbf

and this american did a good video explainer on jellied eels and why they are nowhere to be found these days (it's not because they are absolutely disgusting apparently)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2m-XjK5NPw

(xp) Right.

"foreigner in the uk" youtubers

I just saw a woman on Insta have a go at Buckfast and it did not go well for her

Did she fight someone?

Did she fight herself?

Well if there's no-one else around...

Tangential but I saw a Chinese influencer do a video about Milton Keynes with a "WOW an American style city in the UK, how charming!" vibe. The comments were almost exclusively Brits asking if he was taking the piss.

loool

I had an eel pie once at F. Cooke on Broadway Market many years ago when it still existed and it was fucking vile. The "liquor" was essentially chopped parsley mixed into, as far as I could tell, a cup of cold water

jellied eel is fine tbf (you have to thread yr way round bones but no more than say a pig knuckle)

but pie with liquor is NOT in my experience remotely worth seeking out, whether eel or mince (it doesn't help that i dislike malt & wine vinegar)

when i was a kid parsley sauce was what you routinely had at school with cold sliced ham por with breaded fish -- the problem zone there was either v fatty ham or v crappy fishfingers. as an unexciting comfort food that's wildly superior to liquor, i do have a distant nostalgia for the specific taste of parsey sauce, which i assume arrives in powdered form (viz no rouz was involved)

yeah we used to have it as kids on the regular, mostly with breaded fish as you say.

Just watched Slade In Flame :)

Parsley sauce is wonderful with ham if made from the ham stock, butter, milk etc. It is not good made with water and served with beef and onion pies and lumpy mash. My experience of P&M shops is that their menus are obstinately narrow, the food is served unattractively, they are not open in the evening and they are unlicensed; it would surely not take much imagination to make them more appealing.

might have a try at making it well this weekend

I like chimichurri at bit but this parsley sauce & 'liquor' don't sound super appetizing

my rule with jellied eels is that if something, visually speaking, makes you want to vomit. Then don't bother trying eating it.

wise words

boil in the bag cod & parsley sauce was a mainstay of my childhood diet
never ate parsley sauce with anything else, or even considered it could be lol
"green liquor" sounds like cockneys were necking absinthe with their pie & mash

I have parsley sauce ptsd from those boil in the bag horrors ....never again!

We only had cod & parsley sauce a few times when I was growing up but there were plenty of other Bird's Eye boil in the bag monstrosities. Paella, pork balls with sweet & sour sauce and rice, chicken curry that was so orange it'd stain worktops and even plates.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HAgWzTnXQAAzc42?format=jpg&name=medium
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HAgWzTlXMAEE1uJ?format=jpg&name=medium

Real Glasgow Turkish Barber shop

that’s an asshopper if i ever saw one

you still have time

https://i.postimg.cc/gj4p04VM/Screenshot-20260211-191311.jpg

"I’m obsessed with bar livestreams. All the drama of a night out - from my sofa"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cn9z0d9pd2xo

jesus christ

Good stuff, gonna check this out

sounds a much better option to the real pubs where I live!

It probably belongs more in the "peculiar headlines" thread, but I was struck by this story:
https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/dad-told-police-lets-it-33398205

The headline is DAD TOLD POLICE 'LET'S GET ON WITH IT' AFTER THEY LOOKED IN HIS SPIDER-MAN RUCKSACK, which gets odder the more I think about it.

Get on with what? A football match? Did he try to force the police into his rucksack? Was the rucksack full of porn, and he wanted them to have an orgy? Is the mention of Spider-Man a subtle class signifier?

The actual story makes a lot more sense. "Thomas Mee was caught couriering more than £100,000 of cannabis when police pulled him over with his two young children in the back of his car. It came after his half brother Taylor McArthur, known as "Billy the Kid", got him embroiled in a lucrative drug supply enterprise."

I also wondered why a man called Taylor was nicknamed Billy the Kid. Given that his name was Taylor. But that's because he's a crook and he wants to confuse the police. So it makes sense. If your name was Billy, you wouldn't use Billy as a criminal nickname because it's the same name. You'd call yourself James or something. My criminal pseudonym would be "James The Other Man". When the police ask me if I am James The Other Man I will say "no".

I learn from the story that 1.73kg of ketamine is worth between £34,780 and £69,560, which is fantastic. I'm surprised more people don't sell drugs. That's a lot of money. Can the NHS solve its money problems by selling drugs? Google suggests that the Medellin cartel earned £400m a week during its heyday, which is £21bn a year. That's only one-tenth the budget of the NHS, but the NHS has the facilities to mass-produced ketamine legally. A bit of maths (£240bn divided by 70m people) suggests that the NHS costs everyone in the UK roughly £3,500 a year. That's the equivalent of 170gm of ketamine, so if the NHS could sell 500gm of ketamine to every man, woman, and child in the UK per year it would make a huge profit.

I may have mentioned it before, but I've decided to run as a councillor for Reform in the next elections. My plan to transform the NHS will be to create a huge demand for drugs. I will do this by making life in the UK so miserable that everyone will crave drugs all the time. That is my economic plan for Britain. Think of how much stronger the UK economy will be if everybody has an extra £3,500 a year. That's 752 pints of beer. Or three season tickets for Manchester United. It's important to use examples that the general population understands.

But what about healthcare? People can use the £3,500 to start to save up for private healthcare. It will be AI-driven private healthcare. AI-driven private healthcare, with a multi-tiered subscription plan. Problem solved.