Arthur Aughey reviews Real England: The Battle Against the Bland by Paul Kingsnorth over on Open Democracy.

“The bulk of Paul Kingsnorth’s book is a cry for his beloved country, an England becoming ever more inauthentic (I suppose this is the correct term) because of the relentless pursuit of growth. As the ‘globalised, placeless world spreads’ and ‘the spreading plastic of the consumer machine’ grinds with homogenizing force, the people of England are being turned into ‘citizens of nowhere’.

His book tracks the struggles of those ‘fighting the cause of the real England’ – from the struggle to keep up the traditions of ‘real ale’ in the ‘traditional English pub’ (and not in the traditional English pub, which like traditional fish and chips, can often mean a corporate simulacrum) to the fight to maintain the amazing variety of English apples against the drab uniformity of Fuji and Golden Delicious, neither of which are indigenous to the country.”

Read the whole review here.

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