ABSTRACT
By the beginning of the twentieth century, four out of five Britons lived in towns. Yet Stanley Baldwin, Conservative prime minister three times between the wars, described the ‘sounds of England’ as ‘the tinkle of the hammer on the anvil in the country smithy, the corncrake on a dewy morning, the sound of the scythe against the whetstone, and the sight of the plough team coming over the brow of a hill’.1 George Orwell, however, questioned whether it was possible to attribute the idea of nation to such a diverse country as England, not least because of its regional differences:
Then the vastness of England swallows you up, and you lose for a while your feeling that the whole nation has a single identifiable character. Are there really such things as nations? Are we not forty-six million individuals, all different? And the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in Soho clubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning – all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.2
