Patrick Wright - On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain

On Living in an Old Country

Patrick Wright is the author of a number of highly acclaimed and occasionally also reviled books, including The Village that Died for England, Tank (described by Simon Schama as a tour de force), and Iron Curtain, which John Le Carr hailed as a work of wit, style and waggish erudition and one disconcerted academic described as maddening. Wrights first book, On Living in an Old Country is widely credited with having initiated a new understanding of the heritage industry. Its arguments were further pursued in A Journey Through Ruins, which reviewed the works of Margaret Thatchers governments through their impact on East London, and is now also reissued in an updated edition.

Wright wrote On Living in an Old Country while working for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations. After many years as a self-employed writer and broadcaster, he is now a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and a fellow of the London Consortium.

Andrzej Krauze graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1973. His early satirical drawings appeared in the Polish weeklies Szpilki (19701977) and Kultura (19741981). In 1979 he moved to London, where he continues to live. In 1981 he became a contributor to Solidaritys national weekly, Tygodnik Solidarnosc. Seven years later, he started drawing for the Guardian. His illustrations also appear regularly in New Scientist (London), The Scientist (Philadelphia), Internazionale (Rome), Courrier International and Medecine/Sciences (Paris), and in the leading Polish daily Rzeczpospolita, and the weekly Wprost. His character Mr. Pen, introduced in this books chapter on Mary Butts, now flourishes as a citizen of the world.

Praise for On Living in an Old Country:

Patrick Wright is a sensitive, ultra-thoughful explorer With a large torch and copious notes he invites the reader to a number of meandering guided tours well off the main footpaths.
Tom Nairn, The Guardian

A quite exceptional and richly rewarding book You wont feel the same about the Heritage Industry after this devastating series of iconoclastic reflections.
Colin Ward, Times Educational Supplement

Wright is a brilliant analyst of cultural meanings and has uncovered a central truth about the force of nostalgia in modern England.
Paul Addison, London Review of Books

In a rich and suggestive series of essays Patrick Wright explores the ways in which history itself has become the most powerful source of contemporary meanings about what Britain is and what it is to be British.
Stuart Hall

THE NATIONAL PAST IN
CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN

PATRICK WRIGHT

With drawings by

Andrzej Krauze

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Published in the United States
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Patrick Wright, 2009

Illustrations Andrzej Krauze 2009

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First published in Great Britain by Verso 1985

This edition published by Oxford University Press 2009

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ISBN 9780199541959

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Preface to the OUP Edition:
Heritage and the Place of Criticism

1. Introduction:
Everyday Life, Nostalgia and the National Past

3. Coming Back to the Shores of Albion:
The Secret England of Mary Butts (18901937)

4. A Blue Plaque for the Labour Movement?
Some Political Meanings of the National Past

5. Falling Back Together in the 1980s:
The Continuing Voyage of the Mary Rose

Afterword:
Everyday Life and the Aura of the Modern Past

Appendix to the Oxford Edition
Sneering at the Theme Parks: An Encounter with the Heritage Industry

Written between 1980 and 1985, the essays in this book set out to explore the presence of the past in British society at what seemed a pivotal and also startling moment of history. If I viewed the English scene with a somewhat dissociated eye, this was only partly because I had recently returned from Canada, where I had become familiar with a lingering expatriate imagery of the old country that hardly correlated with the politically riven country in which I was now living. The question of national identity had also been cast into sharp relief by the recent election of Margaret Thatcher, who promised a radical break with the past, while simultaneously invoking a traditional idea of British identity and even destiny to be restored.

I was by no means alone in pursuing the theme of this book. For many years, Tom Nairn, the Scottish author of The Break-Up of Britain (1977), had been investigating the spectacular attractions, or otherwise, of the British state, and calling for a different expression of Englishness. The extent to which apparently ancient traditions could be synthesised around political and other purposes in the present had been demonstrated in the essays collected in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rangers study, The Invention of Tradition (1982). Meanwhile, Zygmunt Baumans Memories of Class: The Pre-History and After-Life of Class (1982), had opened a number of interesting questions about the role of historical memory in the British labour movement.

I was also stimulated by the Cambridge historian J.H. Plumbs suggestive study