In the country at large, for better or worse, Andy Burnham is “King of the North”. But for many people in the English north-west the new Prime Minister is more like “King of the Wools”. Born in Aintree, raised in Culcheth and schooled in Newton-le-Willows, Burnham is a paragon of “woolyback” or “wool country” – that stretch of exurbia to the east of Liverpool that is compromised, in the eyes of echt Scousers at least, by being halfway on the road to Manchester. Our new PM’s political identity was forged in this Manc-Scouse buffer zone – in the words of the commentator Jonny Ball, he is the “Wool Mandela”.
It’s timely, then, that as Burnham arrives in Downing Street, a state-of-the-nation travelogue by a true-born wool now appears. The outgrowth of a Guardian column, Chris Moss’s Where Tourists Seldom Tread: Postcards from Bypassed Britain amounts to a handy, JB Priestley-esque survey of extra-metropolitan Britain at the dawn of the Burnham premiership. The neat part is that its author grew up in Burtonwood near St Helens, part of a north-of-Warrington sprawl that should probably now be renamed Burnham country.
Bookended by memoir-ish sections on this micro-region, Moss’s book also works as a wider recce into smaller-town Britain, the electoral Middle Earth Burnham must win over to have any hope of a second term. As Moss points out, in an introductory “manifesto for getting the most out of Britain’s tourist-free towns”, there are over 1,300 towns in the UK, home to 38 million of us. Between the pastoral fantasies of Tory lore on the one hand and the inner-urban bias of mandarins and modernisers on the other, Britain is overwhelmingly a land of towns and suburbs. Its political character should be understood in this light; it very rarely is.
Moss’s starting point is a polemical one. As he puts it, “When a person is tired of London, or Manchester, for that matter, they become more alive, more aware, more thoughtful.” Elsewhere there are more strident voicings of this post-Brexit impulse, which lies somewhere behind the devolutionary mood of the Burnham moment. After railing against the “satire of ‘Crap Towns’ – that very Nineties, London-centric josh that everywhere else was awful,” Moss declares: “The ugliest place in England for me is Belgravia, London, that haut-bourgeois ghetto of privilege and entitlement, where monotonous facades and security cameras sneer down at empty pavements… Belgravia is a dump.”
Despite this dart at the English centre, Where Tourists Seldom Tread is no grouchy jeremiad by a terminally parochial northerner. A former staffer at the London magazine Time Out and long-time resident of Argentina, Moss is coolly objective in appraising “Bypassed Britain”, showing traces of his cosmopolitan background in travel writing. He compares his approach to the “Martian” poetry of Craig Raine – the perspective of the alien (or in his case, returning exile) trying to make sense of unfamiliar places and things.
The result is a balanced exploration of the kingdom as a whole – Northern Ireland included – that does a pretty good job of being comprehensive, with one or two lacunae. Whittling down the 80 or so locations in his Guardian series to around 40, Moss includes several dérives around the south-east outside central London (Hounslow, Slough, Wokingham, Surbiton) and multiple chapters on the north-west and West Midlands (Walsall, Dudley, Crewe, Birkenhead, New Brighton, Colne, Nelson, Barrow, St Helens). He also finds time for stopovers in east-coast enclaves like Boston, Ipswich, Harwich and Jaywick, some of the strongest and most intriguing sections in the book. Consciously or not, this amounts to a focus on something like a “Reform belt”, comprising many of the areas that have tended to shade light blue in recent poll projections.
Moss does not offer much by way of explicit political analysis of these contexts. In the Jaywick-Clacton chapter, Farage is mentioned in broadly neutral terms. There are more opinionated musings on the “cosmopolitan roots” of Boston (Britain’s “most Brexit town” according to some metrics). But it would be a mistake to conclude from this that his perspective is a quietist one.
Travelogues in this vein tend to fall into two broad categories: on the one hand, cosy, radio-presenter-ish jaunts by the likes of Bill Bryson and Stuart Maconie; on the other, angrier, more plangent critiques by malcontents like Ian Nairn and Owen Hatherley, a tradition that leads back through Priestley himself to the ur-text of British radical geography, William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1820s). Though he is at pains to argue his collection is “broadly hopeful”, Moss’s book is firmly in the latter bracket. Alongside his manifesto, there’s also a “new charter” in the section on Newport, site of a bloody Chartist rising in 1839, comprising a series of emphatic bullet points: “replace the House of Lords with a house of the people”; “introduce proportional representation”; “relocate the entire civil service outside of London”. This political credo is strikingly similar in tone – and often in content – to the “ten-point plan” for British reform in Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain, the 2024 book by Burnham and the Liverpool mayor, Steve Rotheram. Perhaps there is such a thing as a “woolist” political DNA.
Away from these rallying cries, there is in fact much in Moss’s book to suggest that we should read it – and the political backdrop behind it – as a cause for hopefulness. Rather than heaping praise on Thatcherite, “Big Society”-style local initiatives outside the state, a typical chapter in Where Tourists Seldom Tread will instead survey the ruined infrastructure and hidden heritage of a neglected locale and suggest ways of reviving it. “Doncaster could be Bath,” it suggests, plausibly. In Gateshead (dismissed by Priestley in his English Journey as “planned by an enemy of the human race”), Moss quotes a gallery director pleading that the town “can be like Brooklyn”. In Ipswich, down by the docks, he sighs: “The Europe-facing ports might have their new moment sooner than expected. Ipswich, the oldest town, could be great again.”
Meanwhile, though this is in many ways an anti-guidebook, Moss is good at digging out the secret delights of his locations. Here, too, there is an ethical undercurrent. As he puts it in his introduction, “We fly too much around our climate-crisis-threatened planet…Overtourism is destroying everything… Unknown destinations are all around us.” In a country where familiar hotspots like St Ives and Whitby are being ravaged by the holiday-let market, there is radical value, for Moss, in pointing to more marginal sites of interest: the seminal railway history of Crewe, the echoes of Verlaine and Debussy to be found in an unlikely corner of Boston, the rich musical heritage of the West Midlands (in his chapter on the area, Moss includes a playlist of Black Sabbath, Judas Priest and Led Zeppelin, with a sprinkling of Goldie and Amar). In the end, Moss is the perfect tour guide for Burnham’s Britain because he has the wanderer’s knack of always being open to the possibility of change. Nowhere is this more apparent than his description of Warrington, dead centre of Burnham country in every sense:
I think Warrington is seen as boring by most people, at best. The west Lancashire plain is flat and here it has been mostly paved over. There is neither grinding poverty nor auspicious wealth. Manchester and Liverpool are almost exactly to the east and west, respectively. They drain the town’s workforce, ingest its disposable income, ignore it equally. But Warrington is a portal between the Cheshire fields and one of the most built-up areas in Europe, and between the south and the north… Warrington has always been halfway to elsewhere… I’ve sometimes wondered if it was a sense of constant traffic, in all directions but inward, that turned me into an inveterate traveller.
There is a misleading stereotype that our new Prime Minister is an “authentocrat”, that he is boxed in to a clichéd version of northern identity that is limited, backward-looking, and will ultimately prevent him from dragging a nostalgic nation into a brighter, more adaptable future. In fact, he is surely more like his fellow woolyback Moss – an idealistic traveller from a bypassed “portal” place in small-town Britain, somewhere halfway to elsewhere, the kind of place that will decide what kind of country we are going to be in the years to come.
Alex Niven is editor at the Alameda Institute and the author of The North Will Rise Again (Bloomsbury)
Where Tourists Seldom Tread: Postcards from Bypassed Britain
Chris Moss
Guardian Faber, 336pp, £20
[Further reading: Fecund, eclectic, and freaky-deke]