England’s menacing political undercurrent is present throughout but subtly evoked. Maconie takes a detour to Radcliffe, near Bury, in northwest England, because it was a Labour town that voted Conservative in 2019. He wants to visit there, however, because Christian Wakeford, the local MP, has defected to Labour.

Stuart Maconie is not inclined to rant or despair, and most of his observations are conveyed in a gentle and humourous way which makes one of the conclusions all the more powerful. He reveals both his parents died during the pandemic and he was unable to be with them in person.... "While I did all this, and maybe you did too, Downing Street was having Wine-Time Friday and Abba parties". Unforgiveable conduct I hope we all remember for years to come. As his guide, Maconie walks in the footsteps of J.B. Priestley's classic travelogue, English Journey, to explore our national identity and how it has evolved over the last century. On his way, Stuart takes inspiration from the people he meets at bus stops and train stations, cafes and corner shops. Nearly everyone I met there said 'this used to be a nice place' and that isn't as simple as bigotry - it's what happens when people don't think about how to develop towns.The six towns are very tight communities and you can tell that people have a real pride in coming from their own town. I'm sure that if anyone had mistakenly said that Lemmy from Motörhead was from Hanley rather than Burslem he would have put them right.

Maconie conjures up the contemporary version of that beauty through vivid snapshots of the cities and towns as he finds them. Chipping Campden, the Cotswolds village where Graham Greene lived, is “more likely to offer an antiquarian volume, an artisanal biscuit or an understated lithograph. Or, now, its designer shops and delicatessens crammed with cave-aged cheese, sourdough and intensely-scented Ethiopian coffee”. Deftly weaving history and politics, The Full English is a love-letter to England, written in Maconie’s inimitable style. Travelling through towns and cities, by Megabus and Avanti train, we meet a rich cast of characters and delve into the seldom-explored crevices of our national psyche.

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I did find a couple of places that felt unhappy and one of those was Boston in Lincolnshire - it seemed to be a great snapshot of the malaise that has affected Britain in the last few years and it was a reminder of how divided and fractured we've become post-Brexit. I remain an apologist for New Labour but there was a lot of misunderstanding about what would happen to towns like this with the volume of immigration when it came to sustainability. Maconie used to present his own solo show on Saturday afternoons from April 2006 until 29 March 2008, and is a frequent stand-in for holidaying presenters on Radio 2. He also hosts BBC Radio 6 Music programmes The Freak Zone, [4] on Sundays from 8 pm to 10 pm and Freak Zone Playlist [5] (formerly known as The Freakier Zone) on Wednesday night/Thursday mornings from midnight to 1 am. While at St John Rigby College, Maconie formed a band named (after several iterations) Les Flirts, [1] featuring Maconie on guitar/vocals, Nigel Power on bass and Jem Bretherton on drums. [1] [7] Career [ edit ] In January 2016 he became a patron of Warley Woods after a number of years being actively involved. [38] Politics [ edit ]

I didn't realise until I arrived that 'Stoke-on-Trent' is an abstraction. It was one of the biggest mysteries of all the chapters in the book and I was fascinated by it. Stuart loves a quiz, and is a Mastermind Champion, scoring their highest celebrity score answering questions on Modern British Poetry from 1900. He's on the North of England team on Radio 4's Brain of Britain, hosts new Radio 4 quiz My Generation and has triumphed in Pointless Celebrities on two occasions. It felt like there was a real difference between the night and day. In the evening you couldn't get a table at a restaurant but in the day you would be looking at shops that had probably been doing alright a few years before but were now closed." Stuart Maconie is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including: The Nanny State Made Me, Hope and Glory, Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North and a memoir Cider With Roadies. He is Britain’s best-selling non-TV-tie-in travel author and has written the official biographies of the bands Blur and James. Host of BBC6 Music’s Radcliffe and Maconie and The Freak Zone, he regularly deputises for other presenters on Radio 2 and 6 Music, as well as presenting long-running shows and documentaries for radio and TV. He writes for various papers and magazine and has a column in the Radio Times. Harris, John (13 June 2013). "The People's Songs: The Story of Modern Britain in 50 Records by Stuart Maconie – review". The Guardian . Retrieved 12 July 2013.a b Maconie, Stuart (2007). Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North. London: Ebury Press. ISBN 978-0-09-191022-8. Maconie’s arrival is one of the most memorable passages in the book. “On the tram, or Metrolink more formally, you come into Radcliffe over the dark, swirling Irwell and rows of terraced houses. It’s a Saturday dusk, always an evocative time, redolent of the theme from Sports Report and Doctor Who. The cobbled ginnels fan away full of scattered wheelie bins and pizza boxes and the little shops turn off their lights.” I’m a big fan. Because I think he is a rare example of someone who has almost disappeared from English cultural life. He was extremely popular with the reader in the street and also ferociously intelligent, well read, politically astute. I think, to a certain degree, he began to play to the stereotype of the gruff, no-nonsense Yorkshire man. There’s loads about the intelligentsia of the time – Graham Greene and Virginia Woolf – but there was a huge jealousy because he sold so many books. I just think he did so many things so well and so successfully. He engaged with ordinary people without talking down to them and he was a terrific writer. Politically, I am close to him in that he was a progressive, patriotic centre-left person. His sympathies were with ordinary working people in the north of England. I like him.” The end effect of The Full English is a vision of urban England divided into shopping quarters that have recently been gentrified (look! there's craft beer and upmarket Thai cuisine!), and rough places that have yet to be gentrified. Again, this is not really Maconie's fault, to be fair, but rather a flaw in the travelogue format and a gaping hole in England's social imagination. I thought this was an excellent book and I'll have to read JB Priestley's English Journey to see how this book compares with the original.

We are pleased to announce that Stuart Maconie's new book, 'The Pie at Night: In Search of the North at a b c d e f g h i j k Maconie, Stuart (2005). Cider with Roadies. London: Ebury Press. ISBN 978-0-09-189745-1. OCLC 890396204. In the book he doesn't shy away from some of the less appealing parts of the city but writes with a genuine warmth about the towns and the people he find there. Stuart Maconie's radio show with Mark Radcliffe on BBC Radio 6Music is in my opinion probably the best show on the radio, it's very funny and they play some great tunes. Maconie can be entertaining and informative and he's written some great books. Sadly though for me "The Full English: A Journey in Search of a Country and it's People" didn't work for me which is disappointing as I always look forward to a new book from Stu.

Where is England, anyhow? A vast cathedral of writers and musicians have tried to locate the elusive heart of a country caught in a perpetual tug of war between its grandiloquent past and uncertain future. Among the most recent is Stuart Maconie, the BBC broadcaster and writer. When he answers his phone, Maconie is, like all true Englishmen, waiting on the platform of a train station. It’s morning time and he’s in bright form, having spent a lively evening in Newcastle at a public gathering for The Full English, his engaging new travelogue, in which he retraces the reflective journey that JB Priestley took in 1933 for his book English Journey. Maconie was born in Whiston. [6] He was raised in Prescot, Merseyside. He was educated at St John Rigby College, Orrell and Edge Hill College (now Edge Hill University, Ormskirk.) [1] Maconie (right) with bassist Nigel Power