Future Works, a co-working space at the end of the Elizabeth Line, is a disconcertingly optimistic upgrade to Wernham Hogg, the paper-merchant setting of The Office. The program today celebrates its 25th anniversary — and still plays an outsized role in the national imagination when it comes to depicting the purgatory of worklife just outside the capital. “The last time something happened around here,” says one 28-year-old product designer with the deadpan voice of Martin Freeman’s Tim, “was when someone shat on the wall outside.”

But these jaded souls, once preyed upon by the likes of David Brent, are slowly being replaced. Now Slough is rallying around the entrepreneurs and thought leaders of Future Works in their bid to become UK Town of Culture in 2028, hoping to pip rival Guildford by pioneering the “creative expression” of a very different England to the one depicted by The Office.

“I’m a networker,” says 31-year-old Varun, one of Future Work’s entrepreneurs, sitting in front of multiple screens in an eerily empty room. As he launches into a pitch for his fintech startup, there are a few stray Brentisms (his favorite film is Will Smith’s The Pursuit of Happyness) but few other signs of the former regional manager of Wernham Hogg. Unlike Brent, he is a boss first and only. He has no real desire to be a friend or entertainer, and certainly no cultural hinterland that might entail an admiration of Ian Botham or an impression of Basil Fawlty.

“Being a founder can be lonely,” Varun confesses when I give him the chance to expand on his workplace philosophy à la Brent. He’s already found himself crying in the toilets due to the stress of running a startup. That angst is appropriate: Slough, after all, doesn’t exactly inspire the more whimsical, rural turn of England’s present comic imagination, with its hits like The Detectorists and This Country. Here you can find Europe’s largest collection of data centers, plonked in the midst of a place that both tops the country’s league tables for income deprivation, and is the most ethnically diverse local authority outside London.

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Downstairs, I try to see if I can find a few Gareths, or even a long-suffering Dawn. But like the notorious brutalist roundabout from the opening credit, many of these familiarities have been replaced. “I don’t think Brent would survive here now to be honest,” says Nilesh, who works as a financial consultant. “We’ve had to make a few tough decisions around firing people because of AI. And I don’t think he’d manage that because ultimately he’s a wimp.” And then there’s the town’s diversity, he says, referencing the scene where David Brent gets two Asian warehouse workers mixed up. “There’d certainly be more of that happening.”

Could the Slough of 2026 still produce a David Brent? It’s a question of national significance, given The Office’s role in depicting a certain idea of England, one that sulks outside the M25, and which is in theory home to most of us, with our dull jobs and deferred dreams. Its geography reflects Brent’s own ambitions. As he put it, “Slough’s a big place and when I’m finished I’ve got Reading, Aldershot, Bracknell.” Yet these sudden London hinterlands are now forming the vanguard of a very different English worklife. Here you can find the ominous megastructures of the AI revolution, bearing down on co-working spaces left to run the less exotic fringes of our globalized services economy, where an anxious churn — graduates, officer workers trying to reinvent themselves, newly arrived migrants — all muddle along together.

Slough, against the grain of its once-terminal drabness, now finds itself the champion of a lackluster kind of Anglofuturism. John Betjeman and his “friendly bombs” have partly got their wish, thanks to Berkeley Homes and logistics developer SEGRO, with many of the brutalist, run-down shopping centers replaced to create a new landscape of self-contained residential complexes. From a distance, some of these plastic mausoleums can be confused for one of the town’s many data centers, which have helped create a peculiar microclimate of isolated despair on London’s far-flung borders.

The irony of Slough’s recent transformation is that The Office rose to popularity in the ebb-tide of the New Labour years, a place where David Brent was left to roam in the mire of a lost future. On the eve of the millennium, Tony Blair pronounced his government had a “thousand days to prepare for a thousand years”. A timescale evidently rushed, as the country became plastered with call centers and the pastiche futurism of “pseudo-modernism”, one that produced a different kind of desperation to the crumbling postwar social contract it was intended to upgrade. For most people, Blair’s “information superhighway” still meant being stuck in an office somewhere like Slough.

And then there was Brent himself. The shock troops of New Labour were the middle managers and the Mondeo Men, those trying to straddle the blokey relatability of the Nineties with the prying managerial togetherness of “The Third Way”. Sue Nye, a Labour apparatchik and wife of the BBC Chairman who championed the programme, thought she was watching a true-to-life documentary: a mistake perhaps brought about by her familiarity with the office of then-Chancellor Gordon Brown.

Once Wernham Hogg had taken hold in the national consciousness, it seemed to pop up everywhere. When Blair visited Slough police station after The Office’s second series, he greeted staff and modeled a drug test with Brentian panache. And so the regional manager from Slough became a sort of pathology for a nation weaned on delusions of grandeur, run by a set of politicians supposed to be delivering the future but who secretly fancied themselves as rockstars, humanitarians, and your own best friend.

Now a version of the future Blair once promised seems to have finally arrived in Slough — albeit one with less comic potential. When Vineet Vijh shows me a script of his updated version of The Office, set in Future Works and co-written to boost the Town of Culture bid, it’s clear that Slough’s attempts to find its feet in this new world have ended up slightly hysterical. And in this it certainly manages to capture the country’s own changing comedic manners, less masochistic and self-deprecating, and more in tune with a different national preoccupation: trying to broker a safe and gentle way for all the different tribes that now occupy modern Britain to get along.

The humor is derived not from everyone being “trapped”, as they were in the Slough of the 2000s, but from what happens “when everyone is free”. Unsurprisingly, there is now no place for Chris Finch, Wernham Hogg’s blokey sales rep, who does not survive the updated sitcom’s desired shift from “office culture to 150 cultures”. He is now a LinkedIn influencer. Comic set pieces revolve around the office’s diversity, both in background and occupation, with running gags involving “pitches every Friday that might change the world” and “flash mobs of dancers” frustrating the efforts of the documentarians. Curiously, despite potentially thriving in such an environment, David Brent is missing entirely.

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“There is something I like to call Schrödinger’s Slough,” says Rob Deeks, a social worker and champion of the town, as I ask him to take me on a tour to see if the new sitcom really does justice to the town. “To outsiders it is simultaneously a drab, gray and dreary place, but then also a vibrant, growing and sometimes dangerous place that no one apparently wants to live in.” When I suggest he might be touching on the broader condition of England, he takes me on a whistle-stop tour: a 10-minute drive that takes in the playing fields of Eton, a busy mosque now serving one of the first estates built to home bombed-out Londoners, and a data center that wafts the smells of cremated plastic into back gardens.

For the town’s population, Deeks suggests this environment can create a peculiar unease, a sense that they’re living in a future that doesn’t really want them. “To be honest,” he says, “I don’t think the people living here have any idea what goes on in there”, pointing to a row of semi-detached houses that back onto a data center where the majority of England’s internet traffic is processed. “Slough is full of people who have just moved here or are just trying to get by. I think this stuff gets put here because you know they’re not going to make a fuss.”

Closer to the heart of Slough, I go in search of some more familiar set pieces from The Office, spots that might spark a bit of life into the town’s new sitcom. “No one goes out anymore in Slough,” say a pair of NHS nurses, implying that there would be no one left in Chasers, the nightclub from series one, for Brent and Chris Finch to chat up. “The people who work just seem to live in their own world, and then there are now lots of people here from places where drinking is not a big part of their culture.” Where would they set a sitcom in Slough now? The two look at each other bemused. “I’m not really sure. Perhaps you can try out the high street, which still has the odd character.”

Vineet Vijh at Future Works warned me not to go to the high street. He insisted it was not representative of his aspiring Town of Culture. It certainly contains past ruins from previous efforts at regeneration. There’s a boarded-up shop, with a flowery facade that reads: “Slough Celebrates Neurodiversity”. Graffitied onto it is an argument about immigration and the odd “Allahu Akbar” in a frantic scrawl.

Much of this will soon be replaced, with Berkeley Homes having bought up the shopping center, promising a residential-cum-leisure-complex it insists will make people want to “enjoy and actually visit Slough”. By 2039, those living in its penthouse will be able to view the Future Works by the Elizabeth Line, and gaze across the M25 towards the shimmering lights of Hounslow and Heathrow.

In the meantime, I spot an unlikely pair outside the derelict shopping center, a man who looks eerily like Chris Finch, who has just lost his patience at the job center. He’s with a woman wearing a black hijab. “Oh fuck off,” he screams at her before marching off. “Don’t worry about him,” she says. He’s just having one of his moments.” And sure enough the pair are suddenly back together, conspiring as they walk briskly up the high street. This odd couple are never going to win Slough its Town of Culture prize, but they’re certainly the makings of a more fitting drama than the one set in Future Works.

But less well known is the night the Queen also turned up at the West End’s Fortune Theatre. Bennett had a routine about an old worthy being turned on by hanging and flogging, still going strong on the cusp of the Swinging Sixties. That night, when he “half-said erection” on stage, Bennett writes in his latest diaries at the age of 91, might be the most risqué performance Her Majesty ever witnessed.

Over six decades on, Alan Bennett finds himself adrift in an England without the Queen — and one seemingly in need of relief from whatever 1961 was trying to send up. Enough Said is about Britain’s last literary national treasure getting old, and with it a sense of Englishness marching to its doom. This is a country floating off into the antithesis of Bennettland, where no one knows the local vicar and his famous monologues of quiet desperation have unfurled themselves into full blown howls. His old muses, those he termed “on the edges of emotion rather than their extremes, irritation rather than anger, melancholy rather than grief” have found a new voice.

Bennett’s people — the eccentrics, the repressed, those who slipped through the cracks into bedsits and cul-de-sacs from Harrogate to Camden — are now very much at the center of national life. But in 21st century England they are set free from the fustiness of his dramas. This is no country for Bennett’s wry world of letters to the Guardian or the sanctity of the National Theatre. Scions of England’s old artistic establishment which once embellished these manners, from Jonathan Miller to Maggie Smith, seem to pop up dead throughout Bennett’s pages with all the foreboding of bloated whales appearing on the beach.

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This set of diaries — his fourth — cover the years 2016-24. And, in theory, it’s a period rife with Bennett characters. There is Theresa May, the churchgoing would-be vicar’s wife who finds herself out of her depth and preyed upon by scheming old Etonians. There is the ambitious but hopeless Ed Miliband, rollicking around Hampstead to visit his mother on his bicycle, discussing the political “mess to be cleared up” with fawning pensioners. Even the working-class autodidact Joey Barton, “the difficult and sometimes violent footballer”, would, Bennett suggests on 19 September, 2016, “make a good character for something”. Britain’s Trump, he teases us in a brief February entry of that same annus horribilis, would be Jeremy Kyle, both “fixed permanently on self-seeking”.

In other words, all the classic Bennett material is here: the petty English grotesque with all its delusions and repressions. Yet amid it all, our most famous living playwright can’t quite seem to grasp the period. Even he has lost the classic drollness of his characters: Britain in the aftermath of Brexit is comparable to “Munich in 1938”. A Sikh family having a slap-up meal in a French restaurant is a “rebuke to Farage and co”. Unlike his anti-fascist diarist forebears, Hans Fallada interned in a Nazi lunatic asylum or a suicidal Walter Benjamin in transit, Bennett spends his time hobbling around cathedrals and fawning after John Bercow on the train to Grantham.

None of this is surprising. Bennett’s career, after all, may as well be a stand-in for the increasingly faulty compass of Britain’s liberal arts establishment: abandoning nuance or subtlety in its examination of daily life for a strange blend of spleen and whimsy. Having lost the feel for his life-long theme of “ordinariness”, whether through old age or distance or both, Bennett instead lurches for clumsy civilizational themes. “I owe everything to the state”, he writes mid-lament of the Brexit years, as if the problem with modern Britain is that we’ve abandoned our loyalty to civil servants and education boards.

These days, there is comically little to prop up this gentle England that once made Bennett. There are birthday cards from Rachel Reeves, encounters with Jon Snow, a cheerful immigrant railway worker hauling Alan onto the 9:20 to Leeds (he’s as big, Bennett tells us, as Idi Amin). When these self-consciously political titbits rub up against the gaudy, rebellious reality of contemporary England, the result verges on self parody. “The Christian Science Temple on Headingley Lane in Leeds… where on one of my solitary walks aged sixteen, I decided I was gay, has now been sold to Wetherspoons.” At times there is mere surrender: when Trump is elected after Brexit, the solution Bennett discovers is “to live without news: no paper, no TV, no comment.”

Why is Alan Bennett so popular? This is a question that seems to haunt him — and, with the deference he now attracts, a sense that the Bennett of 1961 might well have hated what he’s now become. The diaries betray a painful realization he has become a sort of literary Elizabeth II, a national treasure to prop up coziness and eccentricity, those traits so lacking in the country today. Admirers from Morrissey to interlopers at Leeds station lurk like sycophantic grim reapers, vaguely aware that some monarchal entity is about to pass forever into the annals of England. About to receive a retrospective at the height of the pandemic, with a revival of his seminal 1988 series Talking Heads, he regards the whole thing as out of step with the emergency raging around him. The National Gallery, upon making him a trustee, informs Bennett almost to his horror that he is “the man on the street”.

In settling on him, Bennett seems almost to realize that England has simply run out of ideas — or people — that define what really brings it together. The irony, of course, is that Bennett himself arguably helped launder the acceptable national character. At some point in the 21st century, he loses his touch. His “ordinariness” becomes mere twee and slightly camp, fawning to an increasingly tainted centre-left. Typical here is The History Boys, a 2004 paean to the idea of social mobility, northern multiculturalism and working-class autodidactism and which now feels as out-of-step with the present as Goodbye Mr Chips.

Far better to look for Bennett’s talent in Talking Heads, a now unthinkable feat of pessimistic television drama. Broadcast in the dying days of Thatcherism, each night the nation tuned in to watch monologues of Chekhovian bleakness about a nation apparently on the up. The theme here is one that still endures in 21st-century Britain, one that, as Bennett puts it in the introduction to the monologues, is the “valuable lesson that life is generally something that happens elsewhere”.

Here we get Graham Whittaker, the closeted homosexual living in a carefully ordained world of Harrogate tearooms, who nearly loses his beloved mother to a local spiv. Here we get Susan, a drinker and vicar’s wife, forced into Leeds to buy her booze and who ends up having a passionate affair with the Indian shopkeeper. And then there’s Irene Raddock, who lives alone near Bradford, lamenting the changes on her roads brought about by immigration, and penning furious letters to the authorities about the strange goings on of her new neighbors — until she is arrested and sent to prison.

The details may have changed, but the themes have not: quiet loathing, paranoia, madness, the loss of control in everyday life. To draw empathy from these downward spirals is the genius Bennett once achieved. A self-confessed snob in his early years — perhaps spurred on by his father’s aspirations of moving to Guildford when he was a boy — meant Bennett became attuned to the anxieties of the English upper-working and lower-middle classes. Yet he treated them with the sort of respect deserving of sad, regular people desperate for some control in their lives. The plight of these types seems lost in the latest diaries. Instead, we are surrounded by luvvies and arse-kissers, egging on the sort of wounded sentimentality that presently lies at the root of England’s inability to face up to itself.

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Enough Said is haunted by these figures. Miriam Margolyes calls from Australia, concerned she’s not done justice to her performance in Lady in a Van. Bennett drolly remarks on her penchant for crudeness and swearing, criticized in his own later scripts, as if tacitly acknowledging the monster he has spawned. Then, of course, comes the pandemic, a sort of bad Bennett pastiche in the hands of his inheritors. Captain Tom, a Yorkshireman himself, beguiles the nation with an act of Herculean quirkiness. The nightly news bulges with Bennett’s daily preoccupations: immigrant care workers, bossy village hall matrons enforcing the rules.

But all this is lost on Bennett, who seems to have lost any real sense as a dramatist for the English ordinary in the 21st century. And if the writer himself seems happier wallowing in progressive abstractions, what passes for ordinariness today has been shorn of its poignancy. Instead, we have set pieces like Gogglebox, where those that lived in Bennett’s imaginary world simply gawp and point at the TV. As for the National Theatre, the Guardian, the BBC — all these are plagued by a new deference, to the Lionesses and the NHS. But who, then, will define our new English ordinary, that inchoate, irrational blend of deference to Bennett’s old Britain and its howling new anger? After all, there are still Irene Raddocks and Graham Whittakers lurking in England’s towns and villages. It’s just that no one’s there to speak for them.

Reflecting on his lewd performance before Elizabeth II, Bennett recalls his father, in his “eternal trilby and raincoat”, taking off his cap before the Queen’s motorcade in Headingley in 1966. “Where the gesture came from I can’t think,” he writes. “But somewhere, almost a surprise to himself, he was a loyal subject. And the same I suppose goes for me.” Here is the most honest admission of something his diaries never quite confront in this new England. Soon, after all, we will have lost the last English dramatist capable, perhaps, of truly understanding that conflicted emotion without condescending it.

The one-hour journey down from London to this most famous incarnation of Middle England is a jarring transition from drab suburb to rolling green. And it was this Arcadian escape that once helped birthed a national joke: a provincial dreamscape of undulating Georgian townhouses and posh schoolchildren had somehow curated an unfathomable discontent. “The Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” were letter writers and moralists, the sort of people who once made sure the bins were collected and sex was kept in the bedroom. So damaging was the archetype that in 2009 the council forced a rebrand: the disgusted were encouraged to give up the act and become the “delighted of Tunbridge Wells” instead.

Ten years on, you have to blend the two to understand the local mood. The busybodying and spleen, now more in step with the national mood, is taking on the behemoth of British decline. “I am using what I would call an application of chaos theory to apply pressure on all agencies through an increase in media relations,” as Hawker confidently puts it. Southern Water is the target: the indebted utility that has paid out more to shareholders than invested in keeping the town’s famous royal waters agush. It helps that the inconvenience also touches on the town’s usual bêtes noires: infrastructure that cannot keep up with the steady flight to Tunbridge Wells from London and a nation that’s lost its common decency.

Residents have organized accordingly. Once the nation imagined them making jam and penning acerbic notes to the Telegraph. Now they’re organizing emergency relief. “It’s the lies, the lack of information and the lack of honesty,” says Mel Alesi, the parish councilor that runs Staplehurst Emergency Help Team, a sort of disaster-focused residential association that now hosts a 24-hour helpline for the things that keep the new Middle England up at night: pandemic, water shortage, the collapse of civic authority. Alesi proudly explains her body was quicker off the line than officials in nearby Maidstone, quickly delivering a private water supply they had been quietly hoarding in anticipation of the worst.

For 114 years, the Tories ruled Tunbridge Wells without ever really thinking about the place. The Lib Dems triumphing in mid-Nineties local election was, as one local journalist recalled, “marginally less seismic than the defeat of Rome.” On a Friday afternoon in the Pantiles, a Georgian promenade that is uncharacteristically thriving for an English high street, no one is particularly sad to see the old empire go. Like many towns in the south east, it’s now an extended suburb of London, where young couples rub up next to proprietorial men in corduroys who look like John Simpson.

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Up in the hills you can find the Conservative Club, what looks like a run down colonial villa gazing over its erstwhile patch. A photo of the former Tory MP, who lost his seat to a Lib Dem rout of the Home Counties in 2024, still hangs in a dusty frame. Yet it is Reform that now hosts its meetings here, having now tripled its local party membership. By the party’s local headquarters, next to a cottage where Thackeray once lived, two elderly burghers quickly disappear inside when I announce myself. No one in the local Conservative Party wants to talk at all.

In a place that never had to think much about politics — not for nothing is its town’s motto “Do Well Doubt Not” — what’s now unfolding is a new dynamic in British politics, where Reform and the Lib Dems, two parties that could as well come from different planets, find themselves battling for the middling soul of the country.

The idea of Middle England, as Joe Moran argues in his essay on the term, is one of the foundational myths of recent British politics. In an age when parties won from the center, discerning the sensibilities of the market towns and suburbs became something of a national sport. Class: A View from Middle England, a 1979 book by Jilly Cooper, was the first to popularize the term; the book’s forensic obsession with the vagaries of taste and class soon leaked into the politics. From the early Nineties onwards, somehow “Middle England” came to represent everywhere from Tunbridge Wells to Woking to Peterborough, encompassing grammar schools, aspiration, “Pebbledash People” and “Mondeo Man”, foreign holidays, family values and the sort of budding jobsworths who called up John Major’s famous “cone hotlines”.

The stereotype was always confused and shapeshifting because it was designed to be fundamentally apolitical, a “small-c conservatism” forever moving with the expanding middle classes. The concept, by those who sought to court it (and those who despised it) was always ripe for abuse. Philip Gould, reflecting on New Labour’s triumphs, settled on a suitably broad definition: “A rich vein of empirical common sense that has always been central to the British people.” It is exactly this sort of sophistry, Moran argues, that led to the “tenacious idea that the key median voters decide elections.”

In the country’s present upheaval, it’s an idea being tested to extinction by everything from recent immigration arriving into the shires to failing water firms. In their survey of Britain’s fragmenting political landscape, More in Common evokes seven political tribes — in response to the majority that now believe “the system is at fault” for the county’s decline. In practice, they range from “established liberals”, who believe in moderately reforming Britain’s existing institutions, to the “rooted patriots and dissenting disruptors” who seem on the verge of marching on London.

Taken together, the More in Common analysis is a spotters guide to voters in the towns and villages of the Kent High Weald — where neither of the two major parties have featured prominently. All the while, it seems clear that “Middle England” has now become little more than a centrist sop, bound together by docile slogans about family, stability and home. Now, though, all that’s unraveling, a portent not only for political volatility beyond 2029, but also for a corner of the country changing far faster than the old myths can cope with.

Ed Davey, the cricket-playing, bungee-jumping leader of the Liberal Democrats, has emerged as the last great defender of this apolitical calm. In the great tradition of Middle English politics, he has attempted to raise a big tent: exploiting the latent if superficial snobbery of places like Tunbridge Wells to form a sort of moralistic anti-populist front. “There’s just this massive space, call it ‘Middle Britain,” he told the New Statesman last September, “decent people who think Labour haven’t provided change but who are deeply worried about Reform.”

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I ask the local MP Mike Martin to dig a bit deeper. The former Army man, a Pashtun speaker who made his name calling out the follies of British strategy in Afghanistan, is both patrician and progressive, the sort of Tunbridge Wells hybrid who could inspire the town’s sixth formers to take their Duke of Edinburgh to the Donbas. “If you go out on a Saturday morning, the people look like me,” Martin tells me over the phone. “They’ve got two kids, they want a sensibly run economy, they’re socially liberal and internationalist and they reject the parochialism we are seeing from the Conservatives.”

His undeniable popularity comes with a caveat: everyone likes the idea of Martin, but no one I speak to seems able to explain what the Lib Dems actually stand for when it comes to keeping the water running and the “disgusted” at bay. “I don’t think that’s fair,” the MP responds when I put it to him. “It’s about being radical in a way that is also credible. And we’re not there yet, but I think we are moving in the right direction.”

A short drive from Tunbridge Wells is an ominous reminder of how vulnerable this vagueness now feels. For the last three months, the pretty market town of Crowborough has seen a coalition of public sector workers and retired investment bankers mobilize for weekly protests via an organization called Crowborough Shield. This is a community group that has trumped the old rigmarole parish politics and unearthed a mood — via legal challenges to the Home Office and self-funded community patrols — that feels borderline insurrectionist.

The sense of rebellion is jarring. This is a place where Arthur Conan Doyle once went to play golf and die. The morning I arrive, the Government has quietly been moving asylum seekers into the town’s army base, part of their operation to end the use of commercial hotels. Crowborough’s disquiet has curdled into outright paranoia. Walking up the hill from the station, the sight of a lone male sends pensioners scuttling inside. As they pass, vigilant Land Rovers give me the once over.

In the White Hart Pub at the bottom of Chapel Green, I meet Nick Jones, former scout leader, and founder of the Crowborough Watch. Another community-funded patrol group, its mix of school teachers, ex-bouncers and councilors has come together to put local minds at rest. “Last night on patrol, we found a woman quivering in a hedge,” Jones tells me. “It could have just been paranoia on her part, but the slightest thing now is unnerving because of the vacuum of information from the Home Office.”

To reach Crowborough’s new asylum camp, you have to travel through the very heart of this new Middle England. Management consultants in lycra jog past forbidden Tudor mansions that look out over manicured golf clubs. A road hazard sign reads: “Elderly People.” At the entrance to the new asylum base, you arrive at a newly built estate that aspires to the gentler Crowborough of yore. Walking back towards the unsold houses, one family approaches with a pair of huskies and a sullen toddler in a pram. They moved in November and have already had reporters knocking to ask if they’ll sell for £20.

I try to strike up a conversation about politics. Are the Conservatives still relevant in their spiritual home? “Everyone I’ve spoken to in Crowborough is voting Reform,” the mother says bluntly. Further up the road, a group of policemen are trying to encourage a YouTube streamer in a van to move on. Tomorrow, the town is preparing for a set piece protest, with rumors that everyone from Tommy Robinson to Rupert Lowe will turn up to steal the show. “You don’t really care unless it’s in your town,” the mum adds of the new arrivals. “I expect they’ll get bored of Crowborough and travel into Tunbridge Wells. They’ve got no idea what’s coming.”

Away from the camp, I seek out some of the town’s older residents, wandering down one of Crowborough’s winding private roads. The big mansions were built for people who wanted to drift off into the sleep of deep England. I find a smart, polite woman in a pink Gore-Tex jacket and black sunglasses out for a walk. Did she ever imagine the country’s present chaos finding its way here? “I think it was inevitable,” she says with rehearsed drollness. “Since Covid, those wilderness years, we all hoped our life would go back to normal but it hasn’t.” I ask her if she still believes in the Tory party, the shires, the old idea of Middle England. “I just like the middle ground,” she says. Does she think it still exists? “Probably not.”

Market stalls selling suet pudding and old copies of Hillary Mantel started shaking to the sound of Vera Lynn’s “There’ll Always Be An England”. At five past one, down they came: a swaggering, carnivalesque procession of red and white, horns and whistles. The Faversham middle classes, some who had adorned “Lefty” badges to make it clear they were most definitely not part of this spectacle, looked on with horror and trepidation.

“Some silly bint threw water at us,” said a gleeful, puffed-out man, holding aloft a billowing St George’s Cross that would not have looked out of place on the Third Crusade. Today he had come, like 100 or so others, because he was “fed up of sitting on his sofa and not doing anything while the country fell apart”.

This was the third protest in Faversham since the summer of flags, one which seems to have dredged up the town’s — and the county’s — deepest divides. Faversham lies just south of a no man’s land of Dickensian marshes. To one side are the Medway towns, gradually blending into London’s Zone-5 sprawl. To the other lies Thanet, a spiritually renowned corner of Kent made famous by David Seabrook, the crime writer and Proust scholar fascinated by its faded Carry On stars and strain of occult far-Right politics.

Since the 1900s, Faversham has attracted waves of Cockneys to its hop farm and local brewery — the oldest in the country — who have come to form a tight community in its villages and housing estates. It’s a settlement that one former resident likened to the mosquito trapped in amber in Jurassic Park, waiting to unleash the DNA of a long-forgotten East End into the Kent hinterland. Into this world, perhaps unwittingly, have come the recent “Down from Londoners”. This has led to an interesting if incongruous mix. Bob Geldof lives in a Benedictine nunnery, a stone’s throw from a council estate where jolly men in white vans toot horns at neighbors and discreetly sell them drugs. Flags — Palestinian, Union Jack and the Saint George’s Cross — delineate a sort of informal segregation.

The civic life of Faversham is dominated by a progressive set of Lib Dems and Greens, now bolstered by a parapolitical body known as “Faversham Against Racism”. It was set up to counter another group — “National Emergency Faversham Division” — which have helped organize this weekend’s march. Local politics are no longer about bins, but a battle for the town’s soul that echoes far beyond the Kent countryside. If you want to understand the forces unleashed when a political order dies, the two-party system fragments, and a shared reality collapses into future visions wavering between a multicultural paradise and all-out civil war, then visit Faversham.

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Inside Middle England’s reactionary shires

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Despite all this, locals still insist Faversham is still a lovely place. And they’re right. Yet it’s this undeniable charm that makes it all the more unnerving — even relatable — when trouble does flare: scuffles outside the artisan butcher, a Labour councillor’s window smashed in. A place that seems to linger between the Cotswolds and the start of a J.G Ballard short story about what happens when the precarious fabric that holds together provincial life in Kent life starts to unravel.

All this seems to have stirred something deep within the locals. Samantha, a gently spoken woman in her thirties, was putting up “international bunting” on the morning of the first protest back in October when one of the protestors accused her of being a paedophile. Something inside her clicked. A week later she was standing in a car park with three other strangers in the early hours of the morning, determined to put what had been unleashed over the summer back in its bottle.

“The Ninjas”, as they’re affectionately known, have so far taken down over 400 crosses of St George. In other parts of the country, councils have leaned on shady men in vans to take them down. But this highly sophisticated operation is not only done for free but against the will of Reform-run Kent County Council, which insisted the flags stay up. It sees them run decoys, share knowledge with surrounding towns and end up in standoffs on A-roads.“It’s just very upsetting to see lots of flags that were put up by an organisation of known fascists and racists,” says Samantha, who sees a fringe minority exploiting the grievances of the town. “I didn’t think that was who we were in this country.”

But in Faversham, this particular attempt to abate the tension doesn’t seem to have worked. “Lefty scum, off our street” chant the protesters as they sweep through town. “Fuck off” roars a plump, James May lookalike outside one historic pub. “I hope someone gives them a kicking,” he cries as the rearguard of protesting mobility scooters whizzes past. Up ahead, a crew from CNN are angling to get a picture of their leader, a smart man in a black peacoat, who looks like a guilty real estate agent about to go on trial.

It’s Harry Hilden, who, depending on whether you live in a Victorian semi or one of the town’s suburban estates, is either the devil incarnate or a local hero. He’s one of Faversham’s, and indeed England’s, more foreboding creations since last summer. God and Mixed Martial Arts are his hobbies; as a teenager he was jailed for gang violence, though there’s no evidence his later activism is anything but peaceful. Indeed, he’s amassed 11,000 Facebook followers, or half the population of Faversham, through a mixture of neighborhood-watch-style posts and Rupert Lowe impersonations, all leavened by a vision of England re-Christianized by AI-generated holy warriors. Just this week, he was in Poland on its independence march, and it’s this ritual of unabashed nationalism that Hilden now intends to bring to Faversham on a Saturday afternoon.

Local critics argue that Hilden is just a short-lived social media nightmare, destined either to be swept aside by Labour’s promised reform of the asylum system, or else nobbled by the authorities. But as we head to Acacia Court, a former care home and now asylum accommodation for unaccompanied minors that straddles one of the town’s estates, a more complex dynamic of support emerges.

On the estate, a sprawling monotone suburb that’s a far cry from quaint Faversham, families have gathered on their front lawns in support. “The community doesn’t feel safe,” says Dawn, 42, watching from her front lawn as a car emblazoned with “Stop The Boats” pulls up. “This is all happening because people don’t feel like they’re being heard,” she continues, alleging problems with older teenagers staying at the hotel “ogling girls” and asking locals to buy them alcohol. “We’re a tight knit community and Harry is standing up for us. I think he’s a local hero.”

The Faversham protest is redirected by police, away from a thin gray line singing in gentle harmony outside the asylum accommodation. Just up the road, a family of four come out on the lawn and watch the counter-protest. “Those upper-class idiots don’t understand what’s happening up here,” says the father, an easy-going man with a beer belly. They would have joined the protest, but they’re worried about their jobs. Is their support for the protest just about the asylum hotel? “I think everyone is just fed up,” says the father. “I expect Reform will win the next election and get a grip on immigration, but then they’ll find another way to screw us over.”

Around the corner just outside the asylum accommodation, CNN is trying to interview Paul Golding, a former BNP man who has a grimmer prophecy. “I believe violence is inevitable against what’s happening to the English,” he tells the flustered-looking American reporter. In the background, “MissusKent”, another political influencer who has emerged since the summer, is singing what sounds like Lily Allen if she were interested in mass deportations.

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Hilden addresses the crowd. “Be more like Poland!” he tells the small gathering. “You can see how much they love their country in their eyes.” Hilden has his fans. “I got to shake his hand!” says an excited young boy with his mum. As that cynical father implies, across the estate this is about more than Reform, whose rise people here seem broadly indifferent to. Rather, it’s Tommy Robinson’s march on London in September that changed everything. And if Robinson, in Britain’s fraying multicultural settlement, is now regarded as a “community leader” for sections of the white working class, then Hilden can perhaps be seen as the local chapter of that new interest.

It’s a response to the rise of other sectarian political influencers, who now speak for Britain’s multicultural tribes as the old Westminster system collapses. And stylistically, it’s no different. Whether it’s Akhmed Yakoob in Ladywood, or Harry Hilden in Faversham, both waver between bolshy street-level provocation and cozy community sermons built on vague appeals to family and faith. Taken together, it’s a quasi-theocratic, communal identitarianism bubbling up from the provinces, and which Westminster politics has no means of mediating. Here the democratic individual has been subsumed into the post-democratic “interests” of the local community, mobilized along ethnic and religious lines in an attempt to assert their interests in anticipation of the coming collapse of the present political establishment.

All the while, politicians are doing their best to harness these new forces. Hilden has already met with the local MP, the shadow-cabinet member Helen Whately, to discuss the communities’ concerns. Meanwhile the local Reform Party have established their own links, as they seek to overthrow Conservative power in a seat that’s almost always voted Tory. “I think they want his credibility, his connection to the local area,” says the mayor Josh Rowlands, who himself has met with Hilden in an attempt to lessen tensions.

But Rowlands is bleak about the new political landscape that has emerged since the summer. “I think it will take something really bad until something is actually done,” he says. “National politics still doesn’t really understand what’s happening in places like Faversham.” Considering the rise of someone like Harry Hilden, it’s easy to see what he means. Still, back in the pub by the station, there’s a fun and jovial mood. Some of the marchers are knocking back pints, and a crowd is pouring in after Faversham beat Sevenoaks 4-0. “If they had just left the flags up, people would have eventually lost interest” says one of the market stall owners.

But it’s too late for that. “I can tell you this movement has just begun,” Hilden proclaimed on social media the day after the protest, addressing his message to the council and Faversham Against Racism. “Why don’t you start actually working for the common people of the town, and not the people who bring wealth into it and fit your little messed up Left-wing agenda. Then all these marches will stop.”

Where does the mystique come from? No country has ever allowed the journey of an American traveler to so decisively articulate its soul, not least a softly spoken Iowan with a penchant for silly place names. The mid-Nineties, as Alwyn Turner notes in A Classless Society, showed no signs of a Bryson lurking on the horizon. This, after all, was an age seemingly desperate to escape a cloying parochialism and rediscover itself in time for the new century. “John Major hankers after a Darling Buds of May Britain circa 1955,” lamented a Times leader a year before Bryson’s travelogue, “its relevance to the increasingly nasty and brutish world that so many of today’s Britain endure is something of a mystery.”

Two decades on, the reverse seemed to have happened. For if it seemed like we were edging towards Cool Britannia and Blair’s “New Britain”, the decade’s most memorable speech ended up being Major’s evocation of thick-set insularity, with its “warm beer… and old maids bicycling to communion”. Starmer’s recent party conference speech offered his own version of this collective reverie, with his “half-time oranges” and fence painting. Yet the Prime Minister could barely compete with Bryson’s more enduring take on Major’s whimsy. For it is his formula of curmudgeonly humor and nostalgia that has come to set the terms of the nation’s search for itself over the recent decades.

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Our literary travelogues are an incongruous paradox: both tomes of national reckoning and overindulged almanacs stuffed with historical curios and serendipitous encounters. H.V. Morton’s In Search of England is a triumph of the genre, a book that wavers between religious experience and the triteness of a National Trust leaflet. J.B. Priestley, another inspiration for Bryson, went off again 10 years after Morton in the midst of the Great Depression with his motorcar and driver, at a time when the National Government feared communist insurrection. He discovered three Englands which both inform and overshadow Notes From A Small Island, the synthesis of which, to this day, no traveler — not even Bryson — seems able to truly comprehend.

The first of these Englands entranced Bryson with the eternal mystery of parish spires, hedgerows and village eccentrics. The second, he found tricky and drab: the towns and cities, their “left behinds” that even in the Thirties, like now, seemed lost in the shadows of the 19th century. But it was that last England that irked Priestley and indeed Bryson the most. In 1933, it represented the burgeoning ersatz of the American century: an unfamiliar, seemingly impenetrable world of suburbs, modernist experiments and individuals set free from the grasp of both provincial and industrial England. It was a place that Priestley anxiously regarded as belonging “far more to the age itself than this particular island”.

But today there’s a new third England, one which looms over the national psyche and would give Bill Bryson a nervous breakdown. It is defined by a mixture of the new arrivals of the last two decades, who have added 60% to its population growth; the critical mass of the population who live increasingly free from the old hearth of media and institutions; the generation under 30 who have spent their formative years online and to whom even Bryson’s pick and mix of patriotic fare seem alien. For any would-be traveler, this Britain can be glimpsed in its fastest changing places: Peterborough, Reading, Leicester, the suburbs of Birmingham, London’s periphery.

The nation’s popular cultural establishments, shorn of any real interest in understanding this New Britain, now serve as a cozy escape. And Bill Bryson is the patron saint of this increasingly oblivious cult. To reread Notes From A Small Island today is a bit like discovering the Rosetta Stone for deciphering the origins of every fleeting phenomena that has worked to distract us from a Britain in the midst of wholesale change. From the whimsy of “Keep Calm and Carry On” (Brits, Bryson tells us outside a shop in Windsor, are “great at pulling together”), to the self-aware griping of “Very British Problems” and the geriatric charm of a Richard Osman thriller. This is what Bryson, after all, clings to: the queuing, the self-aware eccentricity, the playing up to type, all fueled by the wistful determination to recover a happier trip to the country he took as a young man in the Seventies.

Unsurprisingly this disguised trauma tips his affection for England into a self-parody, one that has become perversely useful as a stand-in for any national reckoning. The Nineties, like the Britain of 2025, was obsessed with brokering and mediating an understanding of Englishness. This was a foreshadowing of today’s parlor game, with novelists and columnists eager to reconcile Britain’s lost prestige and power with a new identity for the 21st-century future. Inevitably it ended up as a drive towards the lowest common cultural denominator. Julian Barnes’s parody of the decade’s penchant for existential taxonomizing, England, England, was published at the height of Bryson mania. The Isle of Wight, crammed with the nation’s symbols and icons, is transformed by Barnes into a theme park for tourists and emigres, an upgrade of the old nation shorn of its divided soul and reborn for a Global Britain. Plotting this New England, market researchers compile a list that could have fallen out of Notes From A Small Island: emotional frigidity, thatched cottages, black cabs.

The theme park’s purveyor was seen by critics as a stand-in for one of the decade’s opportunistic spivs, a Murdoch or an al-Fayed. But the ultimate purveyor of Britain’s cozy, post-national handrailed theme park was Bryson. Tasked with this fantasyland gatekeeping of bonhomie and repression, the writing in Notes From A Small Island offers the drearily familiar criteria for our own way of seeing the country now: England’s landscapes are “stunning, peaceful, beautiful and very nice”. Cities, the small bits we get to see, are always impenetrable with “sprawl”. Human beings, especially those still living, barely feature.

“The trouble with English towns,” we are told, arriving on the shores of Dover before the journey even starts, “is that they are so indistinguishable from one another.” Rather than a point of interest, such gripes always seem to deliberately peter out. The disappointment of a village on the Dorset coast, once enchanted by childhood memories, is resolved by a rant about the car park and bad pub food. There are English voices, but only as catchphrases, faint caricatures muttering anachronisms from the past. Bradford is so distressing that Bryson has to stop the trip and briefly go home.

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As Blair took power and enacted his New Britain, one where the nation would be “young again”, the reading public only became more obsessed with Bryson’s England. In hindsight, its greatest cultural achievement was to launder England’s reactionary provincial impulse, one which Blair and the modernizing vision of New Labour sought to lance, into a sort of folksy, politically sterile jamboree. Notes remained a bestseller for the first two years after New Labour’s victory. Then, 1999 saw Bryson unleashed on television: bearded, squat, a gentle lisp, like a child’s cartoon bear for adults, holding their hand as he tried to explain post-industrial Liverpool on the eve of the new millennium. The remit for the nation’s newfound cuddly and erudite uncle steadily expanded. In the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, he was tasked by BBC News with trying to explain why a pair of teenagers had gunned down 16 of their classmates.

A similar ploy tried on Australia in 2000 failed: Down Under was poorly reviewed. The soul of Oz, apparently, was too irreverent to be deciphered by a prying American tourist. But back in Blighty, Bryson’s now decade-old travelogue had transcended the sum of its parts. In 2003, while Britain was invading Iraq and the country was being plastered by the “pseudomodernism” of New Labour’s wave of civic building, the book was voted as most representative of the nation in a World Book Day poll.

For Bryson, national treasuredom and its lappings ensued: honorary doctorates at half a dozen universities, including the Chancellorship of the University of Durham and the Presidency of the Campaign to Protect Rural England in 2007. Detractors, like James May, were few. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand,” he told viewers of Top Gear in 2004, “it’s beardy, sanctimonious, patronizing Americans in tartan trousers coming to England and trying to persuade us to turn it into a museum.”

But nothing, not even Top Gear, could touch Bryson’s rising star. By the end of the decade, he had partnered with the monarchy to present Icons of England, a collection of essays featuring everyone from Kevin Spacey to Benjamin Zephaniah, which further taxonomized an England that had become even more unfamiliar for most people over the preceding decade: village shops, canal boats and even a Majoresque evocation of the “mist”. Notes from Little Dribbling, the sequel, came in 2015 at the behest of the publisher, and apparently the nation. This almost-reluctant journey, via the “Bryson line” through the middle of the country, seemed to take place in a world he now quietly resented. The British, he noticed in the Lake District, had begun to behave in “quietly disgraceful ways” when no one else was watching.

He was the country’s last acceptable reactionary. His gripes were those of a smoldering old colonel (bad manners, litter, an inability to recall the nation’s basic facts), while he took refuge in the matriarchal decency of Angela Merkel and the “shared experiences” offered by Fiona Bruce and Huw Edwards. Blithe anti-Americanism, in an age of populism, seemed the most acceptable way to complain. The biggest change among the British, he told Stephen Sackur in a Hard Talk Interview, one where he was bluntly accused of wanting to preserve the country in aspic, is that they had become more like his countrymen, “quite self-centered in a way they never used to be”.

And still, amid England’s current woes, Bryson endures as the nation’s whisperer. “This is still a country that’s pretty devoted to decency and common sense,” he assured us after being pushed for some “Bryson Positivity” in a recent Times interview promoting his latest re-release. But this could only fall on deaf ears. England, after all, is still in thrall to Bryson’s pastoral whimsy. Nearly every bestselling travelogue in the past decade has concerned itself with the rural, the pastoral, a cult of anodyne heritage that has turned the old broadcasting establishment into a sedative. Yet at the root of these obsessions is one of the country’s unspoken anxieties we still refuse to reckon with: will there always be an unchanging national character passed down through the generations and its national touchstones, with its recognizable set of quirks, idioms, eccentricities and jokes? Or is it fading into the future of a new country — that of the third England we have always quietly feared and never really wanted? Thanks to Bill Bryson, we still don’t really know.

The inaugural Thatcher Fest is not exactly an ancient Grantham tradition. “It’s just a way of getting people into the town,” one Conservative councillor soberly explained. The festival’s events apparently offered something for everyone: Edwina Currie, Giles Brandreth, a drag queen doing a bit about Section 28. “Are you worried about protestors?” the leader of the council was asked by local news. “No I’m not, I want to know are they bringing in money, and are they spending it in the pub and the hotels?”

There were no protestors, but something the town found even more uncomfortable: a quiet trickle of devotees from all over the world. At 2pm we gathered near her statue. A dozen in all: a corporate vice executive from Dusseldorf; a young Tory boy (“he’s furious about the rise of Reform,” explained his attendant mother); a squat, belligerent woman from Sichuan who had, as she was keen to show me on her phone, been working on an amateur translation of Carol Thatcher’s memoir into Mandarin.

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This was the most immersive of the festival events, a psychogeographic retracing of Thatcher’s childhood steps: fields where she might once have tobogganed in snow; the Methodist hall where her father once preached; the walk to school where she would spend the twice-a-day half-hour hike contemplating Grantham and its incarnation of England. Walking up the hill towards Thatcher’s old grammar, the market town was resplendent, triumphant in its autumnal color, offering us for a briefest of moments that crucible of nostalgia and memory that once informed her vision of the country.

The historian David Cannadine certainly believed this was the case. “Thatcher’s social vision for Britain,” he wrote, “was in many ways Grantham writ large.” It was only through this time and place that her seemingly contradictory vision of the country could be properly understood. Her father’s shop was squarely on the High Street, literally in the twilight zone between well-heeled aspiration of England’s provincial bourgeoisie and the degradation of a nearby slum. It birthed an almost revolutionary conception of class and society: both hierarchical, with its “Burkean reverence” for petty provincial officialdom, but also one enterprising and disruptive, through which the “Victorian values” of hardwork, thrift, self-reliance and independence still ruled. Altogether, Thatcherism represented a paradoxically modern expression of an old moral order, one that continues to shape the ethos of 21st-century capitalism.

Cynicism toward Thatcher’s fondness for Grantham has reigned supreme in recent years, alongside a fondness for Peregrine Worsthorne’s quip that in “setting out to recreate the country of her father” she ended up creating the country of her son: dodgy businessman and sometime coup-plotter Mark. “Reheated Thatcherism” is now the ultimate insult in British politics, used to prod at a dying Tory corpse and undermine Reform’s push for power. But what this ignores, amid the apparently revolutionary temper of British politics, is the extent to which Thatcher and Grantham, as they exist today, still articulate our desires and revealed preferences.

As the walking tour indulged in this Thatcherite mythos, there was a reverential mood — a sense that, in an era of looming upheaval, this was the last Prime Minister to seep out of the dour realm of scripted politics into the collective consciousness. In 50 years’ time, there will be no nosing around the streets of Durham in search of Blair’s youth, no life-size recreation of Keir Starmer’s bedroom, as the local museum once did for Thatcher. Our own politics, indeed our inner lives, are still entranced by the contradictions of her vision. In the end, most Britons still hope to live quiet lives in market towns like Grantham, with their historic centers and abundant suburban shopping centers. We want good schools and meritocracy. We want prosperity and security, enterprise and community, history and an enduring relevance to the outside world.

Behind the scenes of the Grantham festival, a struggle to represent these interests was taking place. “If we lose Grantham,” Gareth Knight of the local Conservative Chairmen’s Association tells me, “I’m not sure what we have left as a party.” During this year’s Lincolnshire County Council election, Reform took 44 out of 70 seats, part of a quiet realignment of defections and local contests taking place across provincial England. Then, in July, came yet more symbolic defections, including former town mayor Graham Jeal, the man who’d worked to bring the statue of Thatcher from Westminster to Grantham.

If Thatcher’s vision for life in Grantham remains, the methods have had to change. A statement issued by the local Reform Party regarding the festival, amid its recent triumph, is both celebratory and distancing. “Mrs Thatcher,” it read, “is now an important historical figure rather than one that informs the challenges of 2025.” A new “post-liberal conservatism” is apparently the cure for Britain’s malaise: “One that spends its money wisely, backs domestic industry, and rebuilds resilience — not the managerial state that meddles in every aspect of life.”

When I asked Jeal to expand, he talked only of the excitement of this new endeavor. “It’s like working for a startup,” he says during a 30-minute phone call in which he mentions the word growth 22 times. “I think that Reform is clearly attracting people who have never voted before, so there’s a whole new constituency coming forward.” In this, Jeal’s pitch is similar to one Farage has tried out from the Welsh Valleys to the Dorset shires: a blend between lowering corporation tax for small businesses and rebuilding state capacity. It is, as sociologist Dan Evans describes, the most important class divide of the 21st century — between global and family capital — expressed in the “frenzied fear of falling from the lower middle class”.

Despite this more statist pitch, Reform has nonetheless just dropped its £90 billion program of tax cuts, after stern criticism by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Despite this, the party’s supposed profligacy offers the Conservative its final, desperate line of attack. To old Tory voters, it’s seen as a “statist, Left-wing party”, says Gareth Knight, among the few aspirational burghers left in Grantham who still cling to the familiar brand of grocer-shop accounts. It’s the Labour areas of the town, he insists, that Reform is sweeping up — and for the Conservative Party to survive here, it’s about tying Reform to the statism, and indeed, the old snobbery, of Thatcher’s distinction between those in the town “who drew salaries from white-collar employment and those who did not”

What of Labour in Grantham? In the last election, they came second, despite Reform eating up most of the Tories’ losses with a 20% swing. Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about Grantham, and indeed Thatcher’s recollection of the town, is its industrial heritage, which Reform is now trying to court. Its munitions factory saw it targeted by the Luftwaffe, and full employment continued well into the Sixties. Today, light industry still exists in Grantham and the rest of South Lincolnshire. One notable example is the area’s niche in garden conservatories: typical, perhaps, of its provincial aspirations, yet one crippled by high energy costs. But symbolically, at least for Reform, its mix of entrepreneurism, state enterprise and market town aesthetics is a way of bridging a new divide between the old Tory establishment and the Grantham’s disenfranchised blue-collar workers.

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Confronted with this rising coalition, the local Labour Party shares one thing with its old rivals: if Thatcher is capable of uniting a Tory Party potentially entering its death throes, she’s even better at bringing together an increasingly irrelevant Labour. In the Grantham Railway Club, at the “alternative” Thatcher Fest, a rejected scene from a Ken Loach film unfolds. Billy Bragg’s “Thatcherites” is strummed out by a pair of greying folk-rockers. The audience is similarly frail and nostalgic for misery and hardship. A portly, bearded retiree presents me with poems of fastidious bleakness from his travels across the Midlands via buses and estates. “Could this be about Grantham?” I ask. “Yes, of course,” he says. The German corporate vice-president has turned up from the walking tour with a half pint of Madri, surveying the scene with the sort of morbid curiosity reserved for an amateur museum exhibit.

The local Labour Party chairman, Rob Shorrock, a teacher at the local college, offers a dose of realism on Farage’s hoped-for realignment. “At least one of the Reform defectors told me he voted for Blair in 1997. They get excited at anything.” The railway connection to London, he insists, is the real growth opportunity. “There’s also a shortage of skills,” he says, underpinned by the belief that a dose of pragmatic investment of infrastructure could yet breathe life back into an old Blairite instinct.

But Grantham seems to have moved beyond such trite solutions. When I asked one festival speaker about Thatcher’s legacy and her desire to “separate the person from the politics”, she sent back a ChatGPT response of nonsensical buzzwords. That seems appropriate not just for Labour in Grantham, but for the Government’s whole understanding of how to remember the Iron Lady and her legacy. Which begs the question you end up asking everyone at “Thatcher fest”: what would the grocer’s daughter herself make of her town now? The answers vary, from tour guide Dr John Manterfield (“lack of respect, a loss of independent shops”) to the Tory Party chairman (“the success of Right to Buy, the good grammar schools”). But Shorrock, outside the din of geriatric protest, likely gives the most fitting answer for the country at large: “It still doesn’t quite know what it wants to be yet.”

Southsea is where England peters out into a languid seaside boredom. A place once built for convalescing naval officers and Victorian holidaymakers is now home to a churn characteristic of provincial England in the 2020s: pensioners, bored teenagers, the unemployed, and the largely male migrants who have arrived, both legally and illegally, since 2022.

In July, a man staying at the Royal Beach Hotel was charged with attempted rape and voyeurism in the Portsmouth town center. Since then, a weekly protest has become a regular Friday night fixture. Yet whether or not Courtney’s pursuer really was staying in the hotel is ultimately beside the point, mum and daughter both insist. In fact, the protests weren’t just about the attempted rape, or Courtney’s stalker, or even the resented owner who had “sold his soul” in a deal with Serco and the Home Office to cash in on Britain’s small boats crisis.

Instead, the protest was about the direction of the town itself. Since the hotel had converted in 2022 to house asylum seekers, something very strange has been happening across Portsmouth. In fact, something very strange has been happening across England.

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At the start of the summer, Westminster feared a repeat of last year’s violence, as the small boats kept coming and Keir Starmer seemed helpless in their wake. What has happened instead is one of the odder turns in the country’s decade-long populist experiment. As the days got warmer, anti-migrant protests involving tens of thousands, at over 70 sites, formalized grassroots and localized opposition into a national movement that, in the words of one Labour MP, transformed Britain’s asylum system into “moral and political matter”.

The sense of forever protest has been further been normalized by “flagging”, the unofficial regalia of Britain’s rising provincial malaise. This has since manifested itself in other ways, from vigilante patrols in parks to community litter picking. To quote the “Weoley Warriors”, the group that kickstarted the flagging trend in Birmingham, the idea is “to show… local communities that all isn’t lost and they are not alone”. It’s a sentimentality so amorphous that it could be courted by everyone from the Prime Minister to social media influencer Tom Skinner.

Britain’s political establishment, unable to assert any sense of control or direction in this emerging new England, has reacted with a mixture of opportunity and panic. In Epping, for instance, the council leant on the Town and Country Planning Act to close the now-infamous Bell Hotel. That could yet embroil the Home Office in legal disputes with dozens of other councils, notwithstanding yesterday’s judgment that, for the moment, the Epping migrants can stay.

With the Government’s policy now to move Britain’s tens of thousands of small boat migrants into private accommodation the only viable alternative — and one which has inspired this summer’s most successful protest in Waterlooville — a once-unthinkable precedent for localized extra-parliamentary action has therefore been established. “These protests are not interested in conventional party politics,” says 43-year-old Barry of the Portsmouth Patriots, the protestors’ unofficial compère and looking rather like a teacher who’s lost control of a rowdy school trip. “It’s gathering momentum on its own. It’s doing it all by itself.”

Yet it’s also clear that the grassroots howls on the English streets, and the spontaneous wave of flagging, has nervously upended Westminster’s old means for understanding the forces of populism. Nigel Farage’s inner circle, which once bulked at Rupert Lowe’s fondness for “mass deportations”, has now borrowed the phrase in an attempt to ride the new mood. Just this week, it unveiled a new policy of detain and deport, complete with a mocked-up airport departures board featuring Eritrea, Afghanistan and Somalia.

Even the Labour party, rhetorically at least, has conceded to this new reality, pivoting from the outrage of last summer and opting for the model of Starmer’s now-forgotten party 2024 conference speech, one which decried the violence before moving onto a Blue Labour pastoral about the sense of insecurity stalking small-town Britain.

Such language has come to quietly set the Government’s tone. Stephen Morgan, for instance, the Labour MP for Portsmouth, has tried to hedge: acknowledging that his constituents had joined “out of frustration” — before decrying their exploitation at the hands of the far Right. Birmingham Mayor Richard Parker, asked to wade into the war between the flaggers of a long forgotten Birmingham suburb and the local council, glibly described the bunting as “uplifting”.

This uneasy dance between rising provincial populism on the one hand, and Britain’s anemic political establishment on the other, comes with a sense of unpredictability: both for a Reform Party eager to harness the anger, and a waning establishment keen to both appease and soothe its outpouring. In a country increasingly lacking any common hearth for political mediation — either through its media or culture — the spectacle of protest and flag has unveiled a fearful and increasingly ambiguous new front.

In their 2021 book Technopopulism, Christopher Bickerton and Carlo Accetti argue that our populist era has created a new political logic, one which mixes the rhetoric of populism with technocratic fixes to ensure, amid the illusion of anti-establishment upheaval, ample opportunities for existing elites, and indeed even challengers, to preserve their authority while maintaining the basic contours of the status quo.

At the forefront of this new political logic is a cynical appeal to both technocratic competence and the idea of the “popular will” — an empty sop for political parties marooned between the chasm that now exists between politics and society. The outcome, Bickerton and Accetti argue, is a kind of confidence trick, a “permanent campaign” that, if dealing with particular policy problems, ultimately obscures the more existential issues that underpin them.

Certainly, this framing takes us closer to the unspoken dilemma at the heart of British politics as politicians vie to control the public mood: can Britain’s malaise be solved solely through tackling illegal migration via technocratic wheezes? From reforming the ECHR to reviving the Rwanda plan, it’s an approach increasingly embraced across Westminster. Yet as the protests and flags suggest, and Courtney and her mum do too, fights over hotels have morphed into something more existential: the anxious, fragmenting drift of life in 21st century England after two decades of a failed economic consensus driven by a policy of mass migration.

Portsmouth is the epitome of this new politics. A city transformed over the last two decades, its port and industry have been replaced by a Blairite emphasis on higher education, creativity and public service. All the while, a cadre of property developers have turned the city into a kind of halfway house, converting its dwindling housing stock of Victorian villas and former social housing into HMOs (Houses in Multiple Occupation). All told, Portsmouth today has roughly double the national average of such properties.

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This transformation of the city has turned the fading Blairite vision into an ironic receptacle for new residents, an increasingly insecure realm filled by downwardly mobile laborers, lower-middle class private sector workers; unemployed migrants; and now, via the hand of Whitehall, asylum seekers.

“The hotel has become a symbol of discontent with the government, over the level of migration and general unhappiness with how things are going,” says George Madgwick, Reform’s leader on Portsmouth Council. His response has been to ruthlessly exploit the city’s summer discontent, leaking a series of stories to the press over the council’s alleged attempts to “cover up” the identity of Royal Beach Hotel rapist.

“100% these protests will mark a seachange in driving out Labour,” Madgwick emphasizes. “I’m saying that because of what I see on the ground. I’ve never seen anything like this.” When I asked the council’s Labour leader if she agreed, she didn’t respond. Either way, Madgwick’s strategy feels especially fitting in Portsmouth. After all, the city is also at the forefront of moving asylum seekers into private accommodation, with the council describing it as a “sanctuary city” as far back as October last year.

And, sure enough, the most recent weekly protests moved on from the Royal Beach Hotel to the council offices. On the eve of this new demonstration, I again speak to Barry of the Portsmouth Patriots. “We don’t just want them to close hotels, we want them to stop using HMOs to house migrants,” he tells me. “The city has completely changed, it started a decade ago but since the pandemic it’s completely exploded.”

How will the group’s tactics change to reflect this new focus? “We have discussed protesting housing,” Barry says, “but we don’t want to do it down residential streets. But I am worried that if things don’t change soonish, people’s patience will start to run thin.” Other observers are also skeptical about Reform’s ability to control the discontent. “I can see a situation where individual houses start being protested against and it could turn nasty,” says Mark Zimmer, a former Reform candidate and now a member of Ben Habib’s Advance UK. “Reform and the other actors jumping on it don’t understand the fire they’re playing with.”

To prove his point, Zimmer takes me to a quiet residential road of terraced houses, where an HMO has upended this erstwhile suburban retreat. The sight of visitors investigating a rumored “illegal HMOs” draws out an interested group of neighbors. “This used to be a nice road,” says Diane. But, now she continues, no one has any idea who lives there, with the house in question occupied by Deliveroo drivers and other itinerant workers.

One night, Gary, who has lived in the street since 2019, was threatened by a man from the house who thought he was spying on him. The residents are supportive of the ongoing protests in Portsmouth, but now have their eye on a bigger prize. On 13 September, they say, they will travel to London to join a Tommy Robinson rally for the first time.

That South Coast suburbanites are openly aligning themselves with someone like Robinson is telling. As Bickerton and Accetti warn, in time technopopulism only heightens the conflict between the popular will and mainstream politicians: until both are hollowed out of all meaning. It seems clear, anyway, that the flags and protests will test the logic of Westminster’s political confidence trick. Even for Reform, courting the unrest may only serve to accelerate the system’s unraveling.

The day after this latest protest, I ask Courtney’s mom Sarah what she hoped to achieve from the ongoing protest in her city — now set to continue amid the Government’s use of HMOs to house migrants. “It’s not about victory,” she tells me, “it’s about having no faith in politics or government to keep girls on the street safe. Everyone needs to actually vote Reform to see if [Farage] is going to do what [he says].” When I ask what would happen if Reform failed to restore the Portsmouth she once knew, Sarah paused. “I don’t think I’m ready to answer that.”

Bedford, they had all been told by the police and local authorities, had been getting better, despite its post-pandemic troubles with crime and civic drift. But no one believed them. And now they were willing to listen to a man with a successful YouTube channel. For the next eight weeks, McCormack plans to self-fund a private security scheme in Bedford to guard the high street. The private security firm would act as “scarecrows” to deter vagrants and sex pests that had come to plague the town.

“Is there a danger,” asked one elderly woman in the crowd, “that we are bringing more shame on people who are already vilified? Do we have a long-term plan to help them?” Eyes rolled. “This is what I like to call suicidal empathy,” answered McCormack. “I care more about the working people of this town than criminals and drug addicts.” The crowd nodded in agreement.

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This was the start of Project Bedford, a model of civic renewal and regeneration for Britain’s provincial malaise that McCormack has described to one American podcaster as a potential “political coup.” To put it differently, it’s the ethos of “you can just do things” brought to a small English town, where a broader national schism of mistrust and cynicism has manifested itself in angry shopkeepers and radicalised dads in Ralph Lauren shirts.

But this wasn’t just about men in high-viz jackets guarding the Lidl carpark. The stories shared at this beleaguered caucus pointed to some deeper cosmic disturbance in the natural order of a boring English market town. Shoplifters chased away with shovels, pedophiles using their business’s wifi to download unspeakable things, a lady who had locked herself in a cupboard, because the police wouldn’t come to deal with a man pursuing her. This was a moral degradation for which the hollow and mimsy hallmarks of modern English civil society — with its neighborhood policing plans and community outreach initiatives — seemed unable to resolve.

On first impressions, rumors of civic collapse seem hard to believe in Bedford. “Somewhere in England,” was how evacuated BBC broadcasters referred to their new home during the Second World War. In trying to remain anonymous from the Luftwaffe, they had inadvertently stumbled on the perfect description of that parochial yet reassuring dullness you can still find by the banks of the River Ouse. This is an atmosphere that, over its 1,000-year history, has nurtured everything from Pilgrim’s Progress, the deepest work of devotional introspection in the English language, to what will soon be Europe’s largest theme park.

Bedford is the spiritual middle of middle England. A town of 100,000 people, equidistant from both Luton and Milton Keynes, it now finds itself in some unwilling struggle between those two archetypes of modern England. At some point in the Sixties, its post-war architects lost interest in the idea of Bedford as a quaint county town, burrowing a concrete shopping center right through its central hearth. Today, it’s home to a closed Marks and Spencers, haggard South Asian Deliveroo drivers, and delirious alcoholics. The town and its surrounds, Victorian suburbs, new build estates and genteel hamlets, tend to avoid the place altogether. Visitor numbers to the town center have fallen by half a million a month.

Walking through the old center, you can still feel the spirit of the curtain twitcher, the bossy parochial council, that stifling and sinister provincial mystery that promises to hold the place together for eternity. Now it’s been put to the test, with disorder so hallucinatory and surreal it appears like a paranoid apparition for a town that once dreamt of being in The Sunday Times property supplement. The morning of McCormack’s meeting, I watched a topless crack addict barrelling through a shopping arcade filled with families and their toddlers licking ice cream. A mid-morning frenzy of lolling eyes and semen-stained trousers.

Further up the high street, there was more disorder. “Someone causing trouble with a knuckleduster,” said one bystander with morbid glee. Two police cars had pulled up outside the Natwest, and in the ruckus a suspect was bungled away. In the brief return to normality, the topless man took out his pipe, rubbed it on his wobbling belly, then lit up in relief.

McCormack’s plan is popular. Nearly everyone I spoke to welcomed the scheme, with many noting that Milton Keynes already has its own private security run by My Local Bobby. The firm is increasingly operating across the country, after its success guarding central London and its affluent suburbs. But McCormack’s vision is less the preserve of a flashy neighborhood watch, and more of a market town populist driving a wedge in the ongoing war over perceptions of reality in Bedford — between the people who live here and those tasked with running the place. Between those who say things are getting better and those who believe it is not.

In the aftermath of his event, John Tizzard, the local police and crime commissioner, accused McCormack of “exaggerating and spreading misinformation about the town’s decline,” arguing that official statistics showed that crime was improving. During McCormack’s meeting, a patrol car made a point of crawling past, promptly dismissed by attendees as a pathetic sop. McCormack is now in a public spat with Tizzard, who he has called a “weak man”, who must resign.

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Speak to locals and it’s clear whose side they’re on. One shop owner, who runs one of the town’s longest-running stores and didn’t want to be named, said he had “stopped engaging” with officers — “if I tell them how it is,” he said, “then I’m scared I’ll get arrested.” Mark, a construction surveyor who has lived in the town for 35 years, shared a similar loss of faith. When I ask him to explain how the town has declined, he thinks long and hard before bringing up the former England rugby player and policeman Martin Bayfield, who used to work for the local force. “The problem is we don’t have people like him anymore,” says Mark of the six-foot-10-inch former officer. “Everyone knew Martin, and no one wanted to mess with him.”

This war over reality when it comes to civic decay is now playing out on the national stage, with Nigel Farage recently launching Reform’s latest “Britain is Lawless” campaign. Among other things, Farage points to erroneous statistics that exclude shoplifting, or else that fail to weight for high crime areas. In Bedford, one excellent example of revealed preference is the local mayor, now more than happy to lean on the philanthropy of a YouTuber.

“What does the mayor think of all of this?” a young man sneered during the meeting at Real Coffee. A large, jolly Dickensian man, the Conservative Tom Wootton, stood up and bellowed across the room. “In a few years time, less than three miles there’s going to be eight million visitors. We’ve got a short window and a short time and we’ve got to make it work.” He’s referring to Universal Studios Great Britain, a planned 700-acre theme park and resort complex just outside of town, one supporter claims could bring 28,000 jobs to the local economy.

It’s this looming deadline, to restore Bedford into a gentle site for tourists, that adds an unsettling urgency to McCormack’s campaign. Given his bleak outlook, five years seems a long time for a government he sees as pushing us towards state collapse a la Venezuela. And with Reform’s newfound councils discovering the legal and professional limits of their promise to overturn Britain’s provincial decline, it’s one McCormack believes could come to a head in Bedford.

“The grievances of the colonies against the King were the same as we have now,” he had previously told an American podcast. When I ask him in the more sobering setting of Bedford high street if he’s serious, he doesn’t back down. “If enough people are angry enough we could look at the playbook of the Velvet Revolution,” McCormack says. “An entirely peaceful revolution no shots were fired and it brought down the Czechoslovakian government.” And could that start in Bedford? “Maybe, maybe so. I think we have enough reason to say that the Government is now illegitimate; they have no mandate. I’m going to walk up to that line and hover around it.”

All the while, the people of Bedford remain elusively discontent. Before I left, Mark took me on a tour. The night was drawing in, and wandering through the town center like lost shoppers are scores of vagrants who line the boarded-up shops. “No one really knows where they’re coming from,” Mark says. And then we see a scene that sums up the war over reality taking place here in Bedford. There, outside what was once Clinton’s cards, is one of the council’s “Rapid Response” vehicles. Inside are two security contractors from South Asia, one with his feet on the dashboard, slowly herding a merry huddle of drunks through the derelict shopping center in a bemused, ineffectual daze. “We love them,” says one of the drunks.

The last place Mark showed me was a lamppost outside a Greggs. It’s the spot where Thomas Taylor, just 17, was stabbed and stamped on by four youths and “left for dead” at the start of the year. That day, the front page of the local paper had the latest details of the trial. One of the 18-year-old killers had habitually carried a ten-inch knife, even into the Job Center across the road. On the lamppost were no flowers, just a black piece of tape to mark the spot.

Up by the station, there’s a day-tripping exodus in search of a different kind of salvation. They’re heading to Woodbridge, officially Britain’s happiest town, just 10 minutes away on the train. “They’re building an Anglo-Saxon longship,” announces a 60-year-old American Air Force veteran as the train moves from the torpid Ipswich sprawl to rolling Suffolk green. “Today I just feel like I need to touch its wood and feel its magic.”

Down by the riverside, droves of bewildered Ipswich families waddle through this arcadian dream. The 7th-century ship is being rebuilt there, carefully watched over by Georgian houses shrouded in blossom and stern solitude. The last time this idyll was disturbed was in 1915, when a lost German Zeppelin dropped an incendiary bomb on an old lady. “I hope you’re not going to write more nice things about us,” snaps an unnervingly well-preserved woman in her 70s, when I ask for the secrets to the town’s happiness. “We don’t want everyone moving here.”

Thirty miles south of here, Matthew Parris once decried Clacton-on-Sea as a festering boil of resentment on England’s eastern hinterlands — whose reactionary politics would hold back the inevitable progress of 21st-century England. But 30 miles up the coast, in Woodbridge, the columnist ignored an equally retrograde mirror to English modernity. It hosts barely 8,000 people, but Woodbridge is the platonic form of a burgeoning middle-class dream. Forged in the popular consciousness during the so-called “posh turn” of the 2010s, it envisages a new aesthetic for national legitimacy, one now luring a wave of professionals desperate for a glimmer of old England — or indeed escape from a new one. Welcome, then, to a retrograde revolution, one that could upend politics as fundamentally as Reform’s march on England’s post-industrial towns.

While the demographic story of the decade has been about immigration into Britain’s cities, an overlooked trend is this steady scale of internal migration towards rural areas. Countryside semis are now the strongest performing property type, as house price growth in rural areas has started to outstrip Britain’s towns and cities. No wonder. People living in the countryside live longer, are more economically active, happier and less lonely than those in Britain’s cities. It’s a flourishing Woodbridge flaunts: Santa Monica packs of women in lycra power walk past crooked Elizabethan shopfronts. A red phone box has been converted into a Happiness Hub.

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But this is more than just an escape to the country. Speak to the locals, rather, and it feels almost atavistic — a kind of broadband-powered Merrie England, dovetailed by three-day working weeks and evening saunters through the churchyard to yoga. People here explain their world via euphemisms from Sunday Times property supplements. Nice community, good schools, good walks. “Classic Britain, how it should be,” says Greg, rather more pointedly, standing in overalls next to a shipping yard full of forgotten boats. “It’s hard to imagine that’s over there, and that this is here,” he says, pointing beyond the shimmering haze of Sutton Hoo, the Anglo-Saxon burial site on the River Deben, and out towards Ipswich.

Greg’s life before Woodbridge, in the England he left behind, is recalled as one long regret: a purgatory of drabness. Stuck in lorries and delivery vans orbiting Birmingham, Leicester, Newcastle. A life punctuated by motorway stations, Wetherspoons and random acts of extreme violence. In Sparkhill, his delivery van was attacked by a gang of ski-masked youths. Two years ago, he broke down outside Woodbridge, “the safe haven” as he calls it. He hasn’t left since.

The town council here reflects a mix of Greens and Liberal Democrats who dominate local politics in the area. It’s a progressive ascendency that has coincided with an influx from London, dramatically reshaping the standard fare of provincial politics. Out have gone the stuffy cabal of port-colored county solicitors, replaced by middle-aged Gore-Tex progressives. One disgruntled local describes it as nothing less than a “woke coup”. Overnight came climate emergency declarations, bee cafes in rewilded fields, and a Black Lives Matter banner hung on the 16th-century shire hall (the latter lasted just two days before being torn down by assailants in a white van).

Yet as Greg’s eagerness for a safe haven implies, Woodbridge is no less reactionary against the state of modern England than the Reform vote set to dominate the headlines. The New Middle England Ed Davey has said he wants to win over — one formed of Lib Dems and Tory turncoats — share the same concerns around the scale of immigration as the rest of the country. The local party machine, built around Nimbyism, is the scourge of Labour radicals set to arm themselves with new planning powers. But it’s also an effective expression of mistrust and paranoia over further encroachment of what increasingly feels like a different polity altogether, squatting in Ipswich and the growing London swell.

Labour’s proposed devolution changes — the reason elections here are delayed — would see councillors overshadowed by a beefed-up mayoral authority. Locals fear this centralization of devolved power is a ruse to help Starmer build his New Jerusalem of 1.5 million homes and net-zero infrastructure.

The area has already had a taste of this New England. A suburbanizing march from Ipswich has already started to take shape. The city, one of Britain’s fastest growing, has reached its boundaries, and a planned 82% rise in the housing stock conjures visions of the daytrippers staying for good. So too Labour’s plans to triple Britain’s solar capacity, already reshaping hundreds of acres of surrounding countryside. Then there’s Sizewell C, the new nuclear power station, a symbol in concrete of the upheaval reshaping the area.

“People have committed suicide in Leiston [near Sizewell C] because of how their village is changing,” says the Lib Dem county councillor Ruth Leach, still wearing her name badge as she tucks into a bacon roll by the riverfront. It’s a Saturday morning, and the road from Ipswich is already heaving with a fleet of polished vintage cars, battered vans, and 4x4s, the latter reverberating with Kurdish pop. Robin Sanders, the jovial mayor, full of bon mots and local anecdotes, takes a darker turn when forced to consider the town’s future. “We are a frontline on the cusp of huge change,” he says. “My concern is, in 20 years time, we will just become part of Ipswich.”

Harnessing this anxiety was the Lib Dem strategy behind yesterday’s elections — a prelude to the inevitable upheavals of 2029.  Theirs is a populism of the village hall, with gains promised from Devon and Gloucester to the Surrey Downs. The formula of this new politics is Reform with an Aga, a reactionary localism hostile to Westminster’s desperate attempts at nation building, leavened by deep contempt for the political establishment and fired by fears over England’s future. Tellingly, Ed Davey bears a striking resemblance to those reassuring busybodies who’ve mounted a civic defense of Woodbridge against New England.

Yet where people like Eamonn O’Nolan differ from the Right is in their vision for the future: less Anglofuturist dynamism, more the Sunday Times property supplement taken to its logical extreme, mixed with a heavy dose of climate apocalypticism. The former mayor was immortalized in 2019, after being arrested in full mayoral robes alongside George Monbiot during an Extinction Rebellion protest, an action he insists was supported by the town. “People have no imagination for how bad things will get,” he says from the Cherry Tree Pub, reflecting on the threat of climate change with the same wistful owl-sad eyes as on that famous day in Whitehall. “People are going to die, they’re already dying,” he tells me, as farmers and teenagers gather by the bar, oblivious to their fate.

O’Nolan’s solution? A provincial autarky of “living within our postcode”. Services to be fully localized, food confined to Suffolk farms, energy secured via micro grids. Cars would be discouraged, the rivers would run clean and the refitted cottages would once again wallow in pre-industrial arcadia. Is this realistic? Perhaps not, but it’s preferable to what O’Nolan sees as being tethered to modern England’s “growth obsessed” 21st century, with Woodbridge dragged into a homogenized “masterplan to overpopulate the area” — all without any consideration for the local way of life.

O’Nolan says this steady descent into overpopulation, civic indifference and a “growth-obsessed” model of living is already overshadowing his town. He says I should travel to the housing estates slowly mushrooming into the soulless torpor characteristic of new-build Britain. Heading east, deeper into Suffolk, I find Rendlesham, where Anglo Saxon Kings first encountered Christianity. Over the last two decades, it’s expanded into a generous housing estate. Georgian pastiches dress themselves up in garden center attire. Retirement flats look like conference stays in a motorway inn. “It has the atmosphere of a town built in the desert to test a nuclear weapon,” says a resident of one nearby village.

Once upon a time, Rendlesham’s developers imagined a “self-sustaining settlement for the 21st century” replete with theatres, sports facilities and bustling community spaces — in other words, a second Woodbridge. But this vision has gone the way of another archetype: Northstowe, Britain’s newest town, recently singled out by Labour as an example of a flailing developer-driven model in need of “kickstarting”. Rendelsham’s latest development plan, ahead of a new wave of building, quietly laments “a lack of community cohesion and infrastructure”.

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On the edge of the village is the vanguard of England’s house-building march, a new Persimmon estate and a desperate pastiche of Surrey serenity. Fathers power-hose their brand new Mazdas, their tidy lawns bordering an ancient forest where scholars believe Beowulf was first performed, and where UFOs have apparently been spotted.

Steve is one the new buyers. He’s a retired ambulance driver from near Chelmsford, an Essex emigre. “It’s not a nice place these days,” he says of his old home. “They want to fight you, stab you, sell you drugs or all three.” He and his wife are the oldest on the estate and love it. Houses — according to the estate agent — are not being bought with mortgages but inheritance and relocation money. A bored policeman stops by and they talk about chaffinches and woodcocks. Anything that evokes the old home before it became part of the London spread. “Eventually,” Steve jokes, “all the property in these parts will run out, and if you want to get away, you’ll have to move out into the sea.”

Back in Woodbridge, the evening dawns. By the river, locals fantasize about the day the 7th-century replica ship will carry them off across the Deben to the National Trust Valhalla of Sutton Hoo. For the rest of us, it’s time to go home. From the magic dusk of Woodbridge, we emerge to a feral night in Ipswich.

Apocalyptic preachers spar with homeless drug addicts (“Demons bro,” explains one of the evangelizers). Boozy farmers out on the piss peacock past packs of Kurdish teenagers. Recently arrived young migrants from Africa stand in doorways of dead retail, looking bored and disappointed. “What the fuck is going on up there?” mumbles an old bloke catching the bus out of town, as a strangled howl echoes past the faded Victoriana of the Corn Exchange.

Leaving Clacton-on-Sea, Matthew Parris lamented it as a symbol of a “Britain going nowhere”. The future, he claimed, lay in turning your back on the “nostalgic and fearful” of the periphery, places alien to the buzz and potential of Britain’s cosmopolitan, glass-towered hubs, gazing out into the 21st century. But now, Britain’s middle classes have taken up that forbidden mood, carrying it into the market towns and villages. Here, politics is a matter of being left alone, to dream of another England.

What’s it like living here? I ask two men skulking off to the pub through the graveyard, past a pair of Lithuanian builders drinking cans. “It used to be a lovely English village,” says one. “Now it’s a fucking shithole and I can’t wait to get out.”

That night, the local branch of Reform UK met to plot their revolt against this New England. In the seedy light of the local working men’s club, the rebellious bourgeoisie of Essex shook hands with their exiled London counterparts: retired City bankers, tradesmen, medical students, laborers, and a softly spoken NHS worker from India. On stage was a map depicting the theatre of war: Barking and Rainham and Havering, the gap between London and shires, and the new fault line of British politics.

“The people gathered here are terrified for their children’s future,” explained Philip Hyde, a veteran of Havering politics, before taking to the stage with his mic. “You won’t believe the things I’ve been researching,” he teased his sullen audience. A litany of misery poured forth: cuts to police; IMF reports on public sector austerity; bankrupt councils; young families being raised in collapsing flats. A new mosque planned in Romford. A cavernous pause was left to allow the audience to groan. “We’re the bloody minority around here now,” someone heckled from the back.

Just 40 minutes away on the tube, Westminster is facing the prospect of a seismic revolt. Should Reform hold its polling momentum through 2029, a thick seam of light blue will reorder the old electoral map, spreading from the suburbs of East London, across the safe Tory seats of Essex, and out towards Nigel Farage’s holdout in Clacton. Barking and Dagenham — a Labour stronghold — is set to fall too. Here, amid the inter-war housing estates, the proportion of the white British population has fallen by 51% in two decades. The last election saw a 17.6% swing to Reform, and a slight Labour drop.

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The defeat of the BNP in 2010, then the 2012 London Olympics, were supposed to remake the area into a confident multicultural district. Now, though, Reform’s revolt is set to be levied by two forces well beyond the comprehension of that long-lost decade. Demographic anxiety in the face of historic mass immigration has unearthed the folk memory of an exiled cockney diaspora, forced even further into the Essex shires. Old notions of class are increasingly redundant in these shifting hinterlands. Mass migration and downward social mobility have created a quasi-ethnic voting bloc, one that regards the British state as defunct, broken and entirely alien to its interests.

At the Rainham working men’s club, Hyde’s romp through national decline had driven the audience into an embittered fugue. Midway through an excoriation of the council, the master of ceremonies was interrupted by an angry mother. During a protest in Whitehall after the Southport stabbings, she claims her son was jailed for 13 months simply for standing there. “Where was Nigel Farage when they were sending innocent boys down for nothing?”

“Bring back Rupert Lowe,” someone heckles in the ensuing fracas. The tension’s been brewing all night: between a party in search of professionalization and a lagered-up, pissed-off crowd. The bickering is only broken by a young man, taking to the stage and seizing the mic. “There’s no point squabbling,” says Kai Cunningham. “Reform is our only chance. The country is broken. Barking and Dagenham is broken, and all the lefties need to hear us say it’s broken, and realize we’re still here advocating for our country.” The loudest cheer of the night bellowed out.

Cunningham is representative of the new Reform. Twenty-one years old, confident, brisk, cheeky: fluent in both the fall of modern Britain and hope of its renewal. He has seen something like it with his own eyes. Jordan Kukabu, a friend from school, was stabbed in the heart with a machete outside Dagenham Heathway Station. “If I had gone down that route,” he says, as we walk past the day after the meeting, “I could have ended up like him.” A boxing club turned him around. Then came a political awakening while undergoing basic training in the army. At night, in the barracks, Cunningham would watch “atrocities taking place across the country” on his phone.

A plan was hatched. A degree in law would get Cunningham credibility. It would force those in Westminster to take him seriously. “We need more white working class men going into education, because let’s be honest, no one is going to listen to some bricklayer from Dagenham.”

Should Reform win — either in upcoming council elections or in 2029 — the party will inherit an area on the brink of even greater change. On the council website, a video of drone shots shows the up-and-coming district in the shadow of the London skyline: neo-Georgian municipal buildings, built in the days of Fifties full employment, overshadowed by a burgeoning vista of tacky high-rises, their garish plastic facades glowing in the estuary sun. Thousands of jobs are promised for a population set to jump by a half in the next decade.

But walk the streets below and a parallel city emerges. Britain’s fastest changing district, it’s ground zero for the historic wave of migration now set to define Britain’s 21st century. Every year, 18,000 people come here, and another 18,000 leave. “I have no idea who lives there,” says Cunningham, pointing to one of the newly built high-rises. At street level, arrivals from India, Nigeria and Afghanistan shun the worn-out shopping parades and high-street shops, opting instead for thriving open-air markets: an unnerving hum of a fringe non-place in a new global city. Transient, eerie and mysterious are how other locals describe it. It all speaks of a demographic upheaval so vast, says one social worker from nearby Ilford, that the state can barely conceive of the pace of change.

Glimmers of the past remain. The Becontree Estate — once the world’s largest social housing project — still offers a stubbornly suburban image of privet hedges and satellite dishes. Here are the cues for Cunningham’s vision of renewal: he speaks of his father and granddad’s generations, stretching back to the Ford Factory that opened back in 1932. They enjoyed simple things: a job, a home, a place to raise a family. Can Reform restore this? Cunningham mentions the party’s policy on apprenticeships, but there’s some deeper grievance, one beyond the exhausted sparring you see on Question Time. “It upsets me when people say they’re leaving, that they’ve got no one around anymore,” he says, recalling the family and friends that have packed their bags. “But there’s a younger generation that wants to stay and put up a fight.”

The loss of young people like Cunningham irks both the local party and its grandees. “Really, that’s the sort of young man we should be attracting back to the Labour Party,” says Jon Cruddas when I tell him about our tour. The former local MP is currently writing a social and political history of Britain through the lens of Dagenham, exploring how the “dynamics of modern capitalism” ran through the area. Here, he explains, was the Fordist utopia that inspired Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, then the steady unraveling of social democracy across the 20th century. The prospect of having to conclude his book with a Reform victory would be grimly ironic, especially for a man who’s helped keep the area Labour against the odds. The seat was supposed to fall with the Red Wall in 2019, but a hyper-local political machine kept the bricks here intact.

Cruddas became the area’s MP in 2001, at a time when 40,000 local manufacturing jobs were in the process of disappearing. The next two decades formed an almost moral crusade to stop the area from being forgotten completely. He once tried to get Ed Miliband to watch Fish Tank, a film set on an estate in Dagenham that might, as Cruddas puts it, explain crumbling class constituencies, worklessness and the importance of human flourishing. “He told me it was too depressing to watch.”

Cruddas sees Dagenham in almost novelistic terms: a place at the vanguard of change, seeming doomed to exist beyond the comprehension of Westminster — until all it can offer is hubris and warning. For him, it all started with the 2001 census, which failed to pick up on demographic change ahead of the BNP’s short-lived local triumph.

Now another reckoning is coming. “What’s at stake in the area is not just the future of the government, but the future of the Labour Party,” says Cruddas. In some sense, No. 10 understands this. Blue Labour, forged in the area, has been courted by Starmer, hoping to cobble together a coalition of Britons who want security, community and common sense. At the helm is Dagenham veteran Morgan McSweeney, rolling out set pieces once reserved for Nick Griffin. That involves the basics — repairing potholes, civic pride, neatly tailored patriotism (this time with an eye on the Donbas) — all glossed up with deportation spectacles and lively graphics on social media.

But Dagenham is not just a political lesson in staving off Right-wing populism. Just like Huxley’s interest in the area, a quieter, more tangible dystopia is being formed in this hinterland of London. Here is a vision of a radically different 21st-century Britain, an upheaval slowly emerging round its towns and cities: precarious work, ersatz apartments, a churn of neighbors, all gazing out over a solemn, unknowable sprawl, offering barely an echo of the lively, globalized, multicultural Britain promised to the country in the Blairite pomp.

Down by the river, you can find this new Dagenham being built on the ruins of the old Ford factory. Cranes tower over the estuary horizon, tending to a highrise village of 3,500 flats, part of the 50,000 planned for the area. Here, the place seems trapped by the weeping Thames sky, the dismal orbit of the A13. The end not just of London, but of the world itself. “Dagenham is home to a proud and diverse community that reflects the industrious and pioneering spirit of its heritage” boasts the construction site billboard. “This place is driving accelerated support for Reform,” Cunningham says. “On the doorstep we have a simple message that works well: improve the lifestyle of the people here rather than just adding more.”

In 2025, faced with a disastrous start, Labour seems finally to have heard Cruddas’s concern for human flourishing in Dagenham. Last year, a Demos essay by Chris Naylor, the former chief executive of the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham, portrayed it as the platonic form of the New England coming into being. This, he wrote, is a place where “vast changes in expectations, the erosion of trust” in politics meet the decline of “old world power paradigms” and collide with “new technologies” and ”rapidly changing demographics”.

But if Naylor’s essay is an accurate reading of Dagenham as it is, and Britain as it may yet be, its purported solutions also offer a warning for Starmer. Here the administrative state’s buzzwords around hubs, community engagement and multicultural success run up against reality, one that may yet spill over to rout not just Labour, but the entire Westminster establishment.

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One issue is money. The local council is in worse financial straits than bankrupt Birmingham. The relocation of Smithfield and Billingsgate market to Dagenham Dock, and the arrival of 2,700 jobs, was recently scrapped due to rising costs. Amid that epic demographic upheaval, meanwhile, locals are increasingly resentful of how many foreign-born households are given social housing — especially when the wait for a four-bedroom home here is 67 years.

Outside an abandoned pub, Chloe, in her early thirties and pregnant, walks carefully with her two year old near the indifferent hum of the A13. She spent six years on a council waiting list for a house, while living in a “rat-infested flat” where the rent rose to nearly $2,000 a month. “I was basically the wrong color,” she says wryly. “It’s not just English people, but second- and third- generation Asian and black families that are fed up and want to leave. I don’t want to sound awful, but it’s just not England around here anymore.”

Walking back to Rainham, certainly, there is a sense of exodus. Gated bungalows, guarded by stone lions and Union Jacks, dream of Deep Essex. In Orchard Village, the regenerated estate where Fish Tank was filmed, Mia*, a data and systems manager, points out the flats of people who’ve left: for Chelmsford, for Billericay, for Basildon. “You’d like to see Nigel Farage’s party around here to be quite honest,” she says. Hailed as a regenerative success after being rebuilt in 2009, the estate has drifted back to the despair Ed Miliband once ignored. “I feel sorry for the young people around here now,” says Rob, semi-retired, wearing his knackered Tesco outfit, rolling a cigarette in a stone patio full of gnomes. “I just can’t see a way to get on, have a life.” He’s never voted, but next time might well pick Farage.

The train takes you away from Dagenham and towards Rainham once more. Silent rows of new houses line the tracks, stretching out into the expanse of the silent Thames marshes until they become part of the forgotten landscape itself. Back on the high street, not far from Rainham Hall, I meet Greg*. A small business owner, he was a reluctant Reform voter at the last election. “The change I see in the area frightens me,” he says. “When people don’t know what the future will look like, they can do strange things.” As we talk, in the dusk of the spring evening, there is birdsong and daffodils, traces of the village that was.

*Some names have been changed.

Roving bands of career burglars stalk the area. “They come every day whether you’re inside or not,” explains one local man from behind his wheelie bin. “They don’t seem to care.” Everything is up for grabs, the man tells me, from Amazon packages in doorways to the Lexus in the drive.

Brazenness is hardly surprising. Hadley Wood is one of countless British communities effectively abandoned by the protective arm of the state. In 2018, the area suffered 65 break-ins, a criminal romp that nonetheless failed to stir the short arm of the law. Such an experience now marks suburban life in the capital, with the Met failing to solve a single crime in 160 residential areas of London over the last three years. “The police gave up on this area years ago,” one shrugging resident explains.

Such is the national mood. Trust in the police is at an historic low, with crime recently surging to the fourth-biggest issue in the country. Yet in this vacuum of order, Hadley Wood offers one potential solution. For £100 a month per household, a firm called My Local Bobby will be your private police force, patrolling the lanes and back alleys, responding in 30 seconds to a break-in and even picking your wife up from the station in the dark. I spotted them myself, crawling by in patrol cars as I strolled the empty streets. Behind them, meanwhile, is a team that’ll privately prosecute criminals through the courts, with a conviction rate of 100%, a service recently used by Reform UK after the alleged assault of a police officer at Manchester Airport.

Welcome to 21st-century Britain, where the state increasingly struggles to carry out its basic functions, and where private players now rush to fill the void. Nor, of course, is this merely a function of law and order. Rather, the phenomenon of My Local Bobby represents the loose thread of a fraying social contract. When the state is no longer capable of carrying out its basic functions, after all, why wouldn’t Britain’s narrowing band of middle-class taxpayers plump for something better?

The recent budget offered a grim reminder of this future zero-sum reality facing public service funding in England. Much of the tax revenue raised over the next few years, alongside additional borrowing, will be geared towards funding the NHS: a short-term spending splurge ahead of promised reform that’ll anyway peter out by 2025. This, it seems, is already happening at the expense of other public services. Despite Labour’s mission to “take back the streets”, the Met is set to lose another 2,000 officers amid yet another budget cut. That’s off the back of a decade in which police funding has already fallen by 20% in real terms.

Between the squeezed belts and the unsolved crime, it’s little wonder post-austerity Britain has conjured an alternative: My Local Bobby. Run by David McKelvey, the erstwhile detective’s career in the Met ended after a mob boss put a bounty on his head. These days, the man described by a former colleague “as a force of nature” runs Britain’s most successful private policing force from an Essex office. “There is demand for our services on a daily basis” right across the country, McKelvey tells me. When his team meets with prospective clients, he reports “a general sense that crime and anti-social behaviour is out of control and no one is doing anything about it”.

McKelvey claims to provide an “old fashioned” alternative to modern British policing, and one now being promised by the home secretary. In the busy streets of West London, where his team has its most established presence, he says his officers now respond to incidents before the police nine times in 10.

This is a style of policing that deliberately harks back to the foundational principles of Robert Peel, all the while shunning the odd mix of desk-bound surveillance and bureaucratic inertia that bogs down officers in the 21st-century public sector. My Local Bobby uses officers on the beat and local eyes and ears to provide intimate knowledge of the streets around them. That helps them catch shoplifters, seize drugs, break up fights and even prevent knife-wielding men from attacking the public — all armed with just body cameras and the training to conduct a citizen’s arrest.

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“Most people just want a uniformed presence back on the street that gathers intelligence and catches criminals,” says McKelvey. “It’s not rocket science.” It’s certainly an approach that’s popular: British businesses and residents will soon spend £10 billion on private security, even as the Home Secretary has promised “a named officer for every community”. It nonetheless seems beyond the present capabilities of the public sector. In Devon and Cornwall, for instance, it recently cost £1 million to pay mostly overtime officers to patrol a crime hotspot for just 15 minutes once every three days.

That surely begs a question: why is it now so hard for the police to perform their most basic functions? For McKelvey, alongside the many other former and serving officers I spoke to, the answer amounts to an unprecedented institutional crisis. Between low morale, a defunding of specialist units, and a generational loss of talent, to say nothing of a “Spanish Inquisition” culture that leaves officers now “afraid to arrest suspects”. A worrying focus on “low hanging fruit” around communication offences hardly helps either, bemoaned one serving officer, even as they lament leadership that wanted to “solve societal ills” instead of busting criminals.

“Small teams [are] given autonomy and allowed to solve problems,” adds Dominic Adler, a former detective constable who now writes excoriating critiques of modern British policing on his Substack. “That’s the police I joined, not the bizarre bureaucratic behemoth that couldn’t find its arse with a map that exists.” Indeed, Adler continues, the current crisis is about more than staffing or austerity. “The post-Blair legal consensus was the knife that went into the police,” he says. “Theresa May and austerity twisted the knife and killed it.”

The upshot? A day-to-day experience of working in the police that Adler compares to Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil: leaving the station to arrest people involves satisfying a dizzying number of rules, regulations and procedures. This, Adler adds, has cultivated a procedurally obsessed management that resembles a “colonial police force made up of elite imperial seniors leading baffled local levies who can’t be arsed to point out the emperor is naked”.

For Carl, a former policeman who now runs My Local Bobby’s patrols in North London, this reality only struck him once he’d left the force. After spotting a man with a number plate down his trousers in North London, he and his team spent a week surveilling a burglary team across the South East. “We were watching them as they were breaking into houses,” Carl says, “phoning the police and saying, ‘look they’re going in now, you’ve got to come!’”

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When the police eventually arrived, the burglars got away. Now outside the force, Carl’s freedom to pursue ground intelligence across North London has resulted in the arrest of numerous burglary teams, in partnership with the police. But this is essentially a privately-funded outsourcing of the Met’s old operation, which for its part has all but defunded its burglary investigation teams across London.

Beyond Hadley Wood, and back towards London’s inner suburbs, community WhatsApp groups abound with rumours of the help available to more affluent neighbours. Yet if these private efforts are successful on their own terms — My Local Bobby helped cut vehicle crime in Hadley Wood by 38% — communally financing can be tough, even humiliating, for those who can’t afford it. One man in Fulham describes how a neighbour, who chose not to pay for the road’s private security team, discovered that they were contractually obliged to stand by as his house was robbed.

Paul in Shoreditch has a similar anxiety. He describes how the end of his road has turned into a “hotspot for crack addicts and drug dealers” that left residents afraid to venture out after dark. What followed was a three-month struggle that saw him deal with the council, write to the Met Commissioner, and eventually enquire about the services of a company called Shoreditch Security: which ultimately gave residents a quote of £1,000 a week. At the time, this proved too much. “We all pay taxes and extensive council tax,” Paul says. “We should at a basic level already feel protected.”

And if that raises the ominous prospect of a nation wracked by two-tier policing — with some describing My Local Bobby as a return to the 18th century tradition of “thief-takers” hired expressly by the wealthy victims of crime — there are other fears too. Many private officers are veterans of the Metropolitan Police, but Londoners have occasionally worried about the blurred lines around who can legally use force. Certainly, some private guards seem happy to throw their weight around. In 2023, for instance, an anti-Ulez protester was allegedly run over by a man hired to defend the controversial cameras.

Of course, none of this would matter if the actual police worked as intended. If it did, even by McKelvey’s own admission, outfits like My Local Bobby wouldn’t have a market. Yet speaking to one officer of 20 years, now on the verge of leaving, reform seems unlikely. “We’ve lost sight of who and what policing is for,” he tells me. “Its present state appeals to a tiny elite minority who only understand how bad it is until they get their car stolen. We need to start again. A total root-and-branch redrawing so we can return to the original reason it was set up: to gather intelligence locally and nick people.”

Back in Hadley Wood, locals now seem blissfully unaware of the growing tensions of the 21st-century English social contract they’ve managed to leave behind. For the world beyond Hadley Wood, however, officers predict something far grimmer: a growing mix of private security alongside failing institutional forces and an appetite for public vigilantism. “There’ll be a situation where the police really lose the streets,” Adler warns, “and the public will look at the Government and say, ‘what the fuck’s actually going on here?’” In Hadley Wood, and other suburbs of North London, a quieter form of that reckoning has already begun.

Hidden away from the din of excitement, I ask if he regrets not standing to be an MP. He mumbles something about the Tories shafting him in 2015, about the work he is already doing. And then a pensive silence.

It was, as we now know, scenes like those outside the Rifle Volunteer that prompted Farage to change his mind and stand for election. In his press conference last week, Farage mentioned the weekend he spent first in Skegness and then Ashfield. “Something is happening out there,” he warned. But what exactly? As the election circus pitches its tent in Clacton-on-Sea, a far better yardstick for Reform’s chances nationally — and Labour’s chances of building a dynasty — can be found in Ashfield, the home of Reform’s only current MP.

Squatting between Nottingham and Mansfield, Ashfield was once surrounded by coalfields. These days, it’s Amazon warehouses and quiet industrial estates. There are things called Library Innovation Centres, a planetarium built with Levelling-Up money and streets where people die 10 years younger than the rest of the country. In response to the statement “there is no political party I actually like”, only one constituency was more in agreement.

Come 4 July, it will be a three-way fight. For Reform, it is one of their top-10 targets; for Labour, a chance to prove they can win in a place where people still talk fondly of Boris Johnson. To complicate things, there’s also an independent candidate — Jason Zadrozny — who came second to Lee Anderson, then a Conservative, in 2019. A Brexiteer sympathetic to the 70% who voted Leave in the constituency, Zadrozny is, depending on who you ask, either a “corrupt nonce” or the “best thing that’s happened to Ashfield”.

The crowd gathered to see Farage and Anderson give a taste of Reform’s base in the area. “The red wall,” a Reform strategist tells me, “is not a geographical location but a feeling.” Many here dismiss cliches about the “left-behind”, the “somewheres”, and older disaffected working-class voters. Here middle managers, accountants and dentists rub along with builders and former miners; on age too, first political memories range from Arthur Scargill’s 1984 visit to Nigel Farage’s appearance on I’m a Celebrity. If this group is indeed united by a feeling, it is one of a nation on the brink.

“He says in public what everyone is thinking in private,” a woman in her 30s tells me when I ask her to explain Anderson’s popularity. “There are parts that used to be traditional. But now its kebab shops, vape shops, it’s completely lost its identity.” Suhael, in his 40s, points to people queuing up to take photos with Farage. “My friends would probably sneer at this,” he says. He, by contrast, is drawn to Reform’s hard-line stance on immigration: “I worry for the country’s future, particularly in terms of integrating newly arrived migrants. We came to this country for its Britishness but I feel that’s under threat.”

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It’s a feeling shared by the tweed-jacketed Zoomers gathered to see Farage. “If you live in clown world long enough, then a backlash among the young is inevitable,” says Robert, 25, who plans to stand for Reform against Angela Rayner in Ashton-under-Lyne. He is representative of one of the more interesting polling developments that has got Farage looking ahead to 2029. Among 18-to-24-year-olds, Reform stands at 12%, with much made of his Zoomer-savvy social-media presence on TikTok. But it’s a phenomenon that only gently chimes with an electoral breakthrough on the continent, where a much bigger cohort is voting for Le Pen’s National Rally, Geert Wilders and the AfD.

I ask Farage if this is a continental model for his latest insurgency. He describes Europe’s Right-wing populists as “trailblazers”, but insists that “we want our own island brand”. Robert seems to agree with Farage when we discuss Jordan Bardella, the 28-year-old president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally: “We are more controlled and less extreme in our views. We present them in a more positive way.”Sat in the Costa Coffee in Sutton-in-Ashfield, Jason Zadrozny rolls his eyes when I mention the gathering outside the Rifle Volunteer. After winning 28% of the vote in 2019, he is convinced he can become the populist doge of Ashfield. “People here have given up on party politics,” he says. “People are so angry with the Tories and are just voting Labour to get rid of them.” And this extends to Lee Anderson, with whom he has a long running feud. He claims Anderson begged him to join the Tories alongside him, bringing with him the strong connections to local businesses that has been the bedrock of his populist localism. He refused. He has since had to apologise for calling Anderson a “moron” in a council planning meeting. “Lee is an angry man pointing and shouting. He’s stuck in an echo chamber on Facebook.”

Zadrozny is leader of the council and one of the most successful independent politicians in the country. His localism is in many ways an end-of-the-pier tribute act to the ambitious but now seemingly tokenistic era of Johnsonian levelling up. An ice rink, a manufacturing centre and an observatory are his achievements (Anderson, he claims, didn’t want the latter which he described as “woke”). And he seeks a slither of that coalition who voted for the former prime minister in 2019. But such success is also overshadowed by allegations of corruption and cocaine possession, charges he insists are at the hands of embittered Lee Anderson’s supporters. “It’s like the Olympics; every four years they try to outdo last year’s accusations to bring you down.”

Out in Ashfield’s suburbs, meanwhile, Labour are busy knocking on doors of what desperate CCHQ strategists are calling “Whitby woman”. This is the older, home-owning Tory, let down by immigration, turned off by Sunak, and apparently enticed by proposals such as national service. Retaining her vote is key to stopping the annihilation of the Conservative Party.

Rhea Keehn is the Labour candidate trying to rub salt in the wounds by winning them over. A compliance officer who admires Harriet Harman and Yvette Cooper, she seems over eager to prove she will not go native in Westminster. “National politics, done locally” is her catchphrase, something she riffs on as she consoles elderly ladies who have had ornaments stolen from their front garden. Occasionally, between campaign speak, she will go off-script and say things like: “Smuggling gangs are mugging Britain off.” “I’m deeply proud to be British,” she makes a point of telling one woman after a long and painful conversation about immigration that stretches back to Tony Blair. Keehn is unable to convince her to vote Labour.

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Do the people of Ashfield understand Labour’s vision for the country? Keehn and her fellow canvassers insist they do. And their endless list of Tory failures goes down well on the doorstep. “There’s toxic waste in Mablethorpe!” shouts one angry woman from her bedroom. But the name of the leader rarely comes up. In fact, it is hard to find anyone in Ashfield who likes Starmer or knows what his Labour government will actually do. “He seems to be like the others,” says one mum on the doorstep. “I can just tell there will be a lot of talk, but no follow-through.”

Come election night, Morgan McSweeney, the grand strategist of Labour’s campaign, will have a close eye on Ashfield. His manual for this election is Electoral Shocks: The Volatile Voter in a Turbulent World. It is a book that explains the political landscape of places like Ashfield: where partisan party affiliation is dead, folk memory of party politics is non-existent, and apathetic voters respond collectively to mass immigration and financial shocks. A big Labour win not just here, but also in 2029 and beyond, will be a test of the McSweeney project, which holds that the populism and apathy that defines Ashfield is not a product of “anxiety” in response to growing “openness’” of the world, but a measure of Labour’s disconnect.

And this is not just a disconnect to the “red wall”, but to the entire electorate. In Ashfield, after all, we can see extreme reactions to national problems that have only deteriorated since 2010: housing, immigration, the NHS and the cost of living. “Politicians don’t like coming here,” says Rob. “It’s too much a reminder of reality.” But they will have to come. Not just in the next few weeks, but over the next decade. For understanding the reality here is a precious political resource. In it lies the energy behind what are now the two defining movements in Britain’s politics: the future of its populist Right, and Labour’s plan to ensure it doesn’t have one.

Travelling around the borders of London’s outer periphery, there are many scenes like this. Here is English Suburbia with its mock Tudor housing, cosy box gardens and high streets embellished with the faint traces of Victoriana. Once it dreamt of eternally sleeping between the city and the country. Now it finds itself in the throes of a quiet upheaval.

Over the past decade it has become an unlikely receptacle for one of the country’s more decisive demographic and socioeconomic changes. Record immigration into London and its surrounding areas, as well as a millennial generation unable to become home-owners, have defined an exodus that has brought London with it. Driven by the long-term trend of gentrification in the capital and the post-pandemic rental crisis, they are arriving in places such as Worcester Park, pitching up with their flat-pack furniture, overdrafts and low expectations.

And so a wave of building, hoping to mop up these emigres from the capital, has also begun to redefine these areas. Clustering around the train stations, high streets, converted libraries, churches and even hospitals are the sites of many of the country’s newest housing developments. “Have you ever been to Japan?” says one elderly resident of Harold Hill in London’s Zone 5, standing next to a dribbling fountain outside the newest set of flats. “It’s like bloody Tokyo over there in the morning,” he says, pointing to the station that marks the end of the Elizabeth Line.

“I wish we could just stay as Essex,” says Dan, a sales manager, outside the Tesco next to Harold Hill’s newest development, a stone’s throw from Amersham Road where Thatcher once did PR for her right-to-buy policy. “You have a situation now where those born here can’t afford to buy houses. They’re being pushed out of the area entirely by people wanting to live in London. It’s not right. There’s just no sense of community here anymore.” And what of the mayor, who with the recent Ulez expansion seems to be extending the capital’s political control into these areas too? “Sadiq Khan is a fucking wanker. He shouldn’t be telling us what to do out here.”

This is a growing sentiment on London’s outer periphery. In a pub down the road from the line of would-be renters in Worcester Park, those who missed out on a room come face to face with a mood that is distinctly Ballardian. Khan’s Ulez policy, perhaps symbolically, has split the area in two, half in the domain of London, half in Surrey. “Some of the best news I’ve heard all year,” says one man, when there is mention of the improvised explosive device that gutted a Ulez camera in Sidcup.

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Travelling east, towards London’s Kent border, I go in search of the Sidcup vigilantes, who’ve also been caught on camera chopping down Ulez cameras with angle grinders. This used to be the land of Mondeo Man, the Thatcherite archetype that had escaped the confines of the traditional working class into a realm of propertied affluence. On the train down from London Bridge, the capital’s sprawl slowly transitions into the markers of that semi-rural home owning dream: allotments marked with Union Jacks; gardens strewn with abandoned paddling pools; the debris of family life laid out on synthetic lawns.

“We had to sell two cars, and we’ve been left out of pocket,” says Steve in a cafe on the high street when I ask about Ulez. But the policy teases out deeper emotions: this is also no longer “a place that felt leafy and green, like in the countryside”, says his wife Linda. They first moved here in 1994, and when asked about the changes, they insist it’s still a nice place to live — it’s just become a lot more “busy”. The couple now find themselves holding the line against these trends, resisting the developers who are carving “beautiful old Victorian houses” into flats to fit the cosmopolitan wave of single-owner occupancies, a trend that has seen the ONS predicting one in seven people could be living alone by 2039. They have already turned down numerous offers on their house. “It’s sad,” says Linda. “It seems like soon there won’t be any houses for families to move into left.”

Outside the café, I find some of the arrivals now living in the rented properties that are starting to redefine Sidcup. A trio of international students from Nepal studying at Ravensbourne College near Greenwich look slightly confused when I ask them whether Sidcup has met their expectations of studying in one of London’s universities. “We have just arrived and we are exploring the area,” they say. “We cannot believe how expensive it is, even to live outside of London.” Nearby I find Chloe, a self-employed painter-decorator who is also renting. My questions about the local community receive a decisive answer. “I’ve been to places where everyone’s friendly, but walking down the high street everyone has a face like a slapped arse.”

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The same mood permeates the Surrey town of Sutton, where recently built apartment high-rises tower over a high street still marked with the quaint signage of an English market town. This is another area stuck between two competing visions of life on the edge of the London metropolis. Articles in local newspapers have even appeared interrogating the question: “Is Sutton in London or Surrey?” Down the road in Epsom, speculation on Reddit about plans to turn London into a mega-city of 20 million people has touched a nerve, prompting a flurry of articles expressing horror at the idea of the Surrey town losing its identity.

“It’s a bit like Blade Runner but without the science fiction,” says Richard on the high street when I ask him about life here. A reference to a hyper-technological dystopia might seem a bit far-fetched for a town whose main attraction is the National Trust property Morden Park Hall. But he is really talking about his living situation: a small room alongside two dozen strangers in a converted care home. Politicians are already trying to court this discontent, hoping to disrupt the Conservative rule in these areas. “The Surrey Shifter” has appeared on the lips of Liberal Democrat and Labour activists seeking to attract millennials who now find themselves in these Tory suburbs but are locked out of a stable home-owning contract. But even among the new arrivals who have tried to inherit London’s suburban dream, there are difficulties. “The mortgage has gone through the roof,” says Daniel in his late 30s, who recently purchased a semi-detached property near Epsom. “Moving out at this rate is not exactly off the cards.”

These changes on London’s periphery touch on a more existential question about England itself. Will its future generations be able to replicate the stability of the traditional suburb, or will they inherit something entirely different, a place increasingly dictated by upheaval from the global-facing metropolis? England’s futurists, stretching as far back as H.G. Wells, have always toyed with this question. In his short story, “The Argonauts of the Air”, Wells foresaw Worcester Park as an Edwardian village which had nonetheless become the rural setting for one of the capital’s spaceports. “The London Citizen by the year 2000 a.d.”, he went on to predict in a 1902 essay on the growth of cities, “may have a choice of nearly all England and Wales south of Nottingham and east of Exeter as his suburb”.

Today, his vision resembles something of an Anglo-Futurist fantasy. Journeying towards the end of London’s various commuting routes, it is instead the writing of the Georgian reactionary William Cobbett that touches on the local discontent. A great defender of English arcadia, in 1830 he foresaw the expansion of London as the “great wen” — nothing more than a sebaceous cyst, poised to gradually leak its urban discontents into the shires of England. And, looking at areas already conquered by London sprawl ends, this rings true. “Epsom is becoming the new Croydon,” says Matthew, one commuter in his 50s when I ask him where London ends and the Home Counties begin.

Faced with the end of the metroland dream, Labour have explicitly stated a desire to build on the green belt surrounding the city, a prospect which delights many faced with an endemic housing crisis. But further expansion into this area will inevitably rub up against an already existing sense of de-gentrification on London’s suburban periphery. In recent years it is the geographer Phil A. Neel who captures the changes to these areas best, struggling homeowners and gig-economy workers who find themselves lost in the “foothills descending from the summit of the megacity”. In Neel’s understanding, those on the edge of these urban centres are defined not by the cultural and economic stability that once came with suburbia, but instead find themselves increasingly at the whim of the global city and its “obscure machinations”. And nowhere is this more transparent than in this zone of disquiet that now orbits the capital. For here, New Britain has gone in search of a new home, bringing with them a question that seems to increasingly define these parts: where exactly does London end?

These days, the bloody-mindedness remains but has long since given up on the rebellious politics of 2016. Little has changed after Brexit. Westminster and anything associated with it — London, politicians, tourists, journalists — are despised. Alternatives such as Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish independence party, are seen as a joke. In fact, everything is a joke: spurning my predictable questions about life in the area, one gentleman does a 10-minute skit about how he’s been smuggling migrants from Calais on an old fishing boat and leaving them on the telegenic beaches for second-home owners to deal with.

Tourism has helped to create a sort of neo-feudalism in this era, warping the rental market for existing residents, and trapping locals in a seasonal economy of unreliable incomes and unresolved resentment. The prosperous parts of Cornwall have become “a giant theme park”, as one punter describes it, leaving Redruth as one of its many servile outhouses, lying beyond the gates of Poldark-cum-Surfing Land.

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In another age, Redruth was one of the wealthiest towns in the world, its copper playing a part in everything from the Industrial Revolution to Britain’s naval hegemony. That economy fell into decline in the late-19th century, long before the rest of Britain’s manufacturing base. The result is an eerie hodge-podge of industrial marvels, social deprivation and abandoned mining infrastructure. On the high street, next to some of the finest 18th-century architecture in the country, stands an abandoned Wilko.

But, in the last few years, an opportunity for recovery has presented itself. Now, it’s the area’s lithium, discovered in “globally significant” quantities in 2020, that could yet realise some of those visions of abundance and revival: the rare-earth element is essential to the production of batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. Come 2026, Cornish Lithium will soon start extracting the gold of the green industrial revolution. The company estimates that 7,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) can be produced a year, alongside the 20,000 from 2028 provided by rival companies Imerys and British Lithium operating down the road in St Austell. This would, however, still leave Britain dependent on some of the world’s biggest producers in Australia, China and Chile, with such schemes only partially covering the 80,000 tonnes a year the UK is predicted to require by 2030.

Despite these deposits, both companies have had to jump through hoops merely to survive. But having previously relied on angel investors and crowdfunds, a package of £67 million announced in August from the UK’s Infrastructure Bank placed the project in the national interest. When Emmanuel Macron declared that “made in Europe” should be our continental motto, lamenting that a Europe without a serious industrial policy risked being left behind by the changing tides of globalisation, he was talking about the viability of quixotic projects such as lithium mining in Cornwall.

“I’m acutely aware of the sad state of the economy in the area and the potential to make a difference,” says Jeremy Wrathall, the founder of Cornish Lithium, when I speak to him the next day. Wrathall trained at Camborne School of Mining, now underwhelmingly known to the area as the “Pool Innovation Centre”. The name change is symbolic of some of the local cynicism about the project, a relic of the area’s previous attempted makeover from industry and mining to services and tourism.

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But Wrathall is well-rehearsed to shrug off such doubts about the return of mining to Cornwall. He laments the “inbuilt scepticism” towards the rejuvenation of the UK’s mining industries. Cornwall, unlike other sites in Europe being touted as potential sources of lithium, has a history of mining. One comparable site in Portugal is currently battling locals who fear the opencast mine will destroy the village. Wrathall’s method is slightly more benign. This is less mining, more extraction, pulling lithium-rich brine from the springs beneath the 280-million-year-old granite sheet Cornwall sits on. Beyond the usual suspects of rent-a-gob environmentalists and ardent Nimbies, it’s difficult to find anyone overtly opposed to the project.

But there are also factors beyond his control. For all the rhetoric about deglobalisation, the allure of cheaper lithium abroad will endure, particularly without a proper homegrown industry to sell to. While rhetoric about restoring Britain’s industrial capacity is in vogue politically, it is estimated that £100 billion would be needed to set up a sustainable electric-vehicle industry. BritishVolt, the most recent attempt to construct a domestic lithium battery factory went into administration in January. When I raise this with Wrathall, he falls back on the sort of quiet idealism that remains in pockets of the old mining country. “Our project transcends politics,” he confesses. “We don’t want to let people down.”

Here lies an almost mystical appeal to the project. Britain has a strange relationship with its mines. Dirty, exploitative, abundant — the petri dish for both our industrialisation and our first revolts against capitalist excess. From Conrad’s Nostromo to the post-Thatcher nostalgia for the demise of the coal industry, mines are a catalyst for the history-making seams that run through the nation: pride, self-sufficiency, rebellion. Romantic tosh, perhaps, but it’s a mood you can unearth quite easily when visiting an area where tourism, welfare and the faint promises of 2016 have been left to fester.

Nowhere can the faint glaze of revival be better felt than “Heartlands”, built on an old centre of Cornish mining at Robinsons Shaft. It’s a surreal non-place of conference meeting rooms, environmental hubs educating visitors on the woes of climate change, tourist tit-tat shops flogging Cornish language books, and a mining-themed tearoom. Were lithium extraction to start up just a stone’s throw away from the site, it could cast a welcome shadow over this failed offering for Cornwall’s future.

It’s a feeling suggested by many of the locals: “We’ve become a nation of numpties unable to make anything ourselves,” says a local businessman preparing for a drinks reception in one of Redruth’s reconverted buildings (ahead of a local arts festival which he describes as a “load of wank”). For all the regeneration that has taken place here, there are some wounds that Britain’s “creative” and “services” industries cannot heal.

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The return of mining, however, must rest on more than just symbolism. On the outskirts of Redruth, Stephen Barnes, the town’s mayor, reveals the stifling hold these old mining shafts still have, not just on the town, but on its visitors too. In the summer months, they lure in the tourists with plumes of dark smoke blown through the old chimneys. For a brief afternoon, the landscape is once again dotted by working satanic mills. Yet the new lithium mines offer not just an escape from England’s nostalgic doom loop, but a different socio-economic settlement. The jobs initially created would number only in their hundreds, but Barnes believes it would be a way of “restoring pride”, and make a start in lifting stagnating wages away from the exploitative grips of the tourism industry.

Back in Redruth high street, the potential tragedy of all this expectation materialises. At present, the hope of the UK setting up an electric-car industry to compete with the subsidised might of China and the US is a struggle, if not a fantasy. And so too is the idea that lithium mining alone might set the area on a path to abundance and innovation. That’s not to say the quiet longing is not there.

Next to the town’s landmark statue of a miner, a Metro station has appeared, like one of those AI-generated engineering marvels shared by dejected Anglo-futurists on the social-media doomscroll. A map shows a high-speed underground train traversing the old network of mining tunnels underneath us. It’s an art installation, erected for the festival that starts tomorrow. But for a moment, it’s also a flicker of belief under grey skies on a late Friday afternoon, as the pubs open their doors and the high street once again starts to empty.

In a local competition organised by the developers, schoolchildren presented contending utopias: green arches adorned with solar panels; a tram to ferry residents between parks and leisure centres. It got the adults talking, too. The town, it was proposed, would have its own community-based energy company. This would be an “innovation market town”, capable of sustaining local employment in an eco-idyll of tree-lined cycle lanes and allotments, a sustainable suburbia for 21st-century England.

Nearly 15 years on, the dream is dead. Visit Northstowe today and you are greeted by a Portakabin community centre that, as one local suggests, looks like a “pop-up STI clinic”. Bored children on bikes circle aimlessly, and a steady stream of cars forms an exodus from the leaden townscape of roofs and sky. There is, as one terminally bored 14-year-old tells me, “absolutely nothing to do”. No shops. No leisure centre. No green arches or trams. And certainly nothing that would give this place a collective hearth: a high street, town hall or a pub.

At the entrance to the town, I meet Richard of nearby Cambourne, who takes daily walks through Britain’s newest town to “try and work out what it all means”. Surveying the sprawl of identikit new-builds that stretch into the distance, he pronounces: “I have come to realise that this a soulless place built for a new generation of soulless people.”

Were it not for Michael Gove’s own fit of master-planning ambition, the absent soul of Northstowe might have gone further unexamined. Cambridge 2040 was announced at the end of July, a pipe dream of Scrutonian aesthetics and early 20th-century Californian boosterism. Gove envisaged an annexe of up to 250,000 “beautiful” houses around the nation’s most valuable innovation real estate.

Tied up in this lofty ambition is an urgent necessity. Cambridge is the dusted jewel in Global Britain’s future economic crown, its fastest-growing region held back from becoming a powerhouse by a shortage of lab space and housing. Yet Northstowe, a half-built eco-modernist outpost on the periphery of this vision, offers a foreshadowing of future problems for developing this area: water shortage, unsold housing, a failure to build at the pace and scale desired. Two decades on and Britain cannot even give birth to a modest new town, let alone a Victoriana Silicon Valley in the East Anglian Fens.

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Housing will be one of the biggest issues of the 2024 election, a protracted British crisis now as old as the days when Brown first dreamt of Northstowe. And the proposed solutions are nearly as old. Building “beautiful” houses has been discussed in Tory circles for years, most prominently with 2019’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which mouthed the rhetoric of a “conservative” built environment that has wafted around the party’s attendant think tanks for years. But talk aside, its achievements were minimal. And meanwhile, a donor-driven relationship with property developers (in 2021, a fifth of Tory donations came from the sector) has kept them in the driving seat, carpeting England with unimaginative, and all too often poorly built homes at a rate of about 200,000 a year. The few exceptions to the rule, such as the King’s Poundbury, have already become unaffordable, by virtue of their marked difference. Northstowe therefore stands as a monument to the new-build Britain we’re left with: a vision unfulfilled, undesirable, unloved.

Yet the facts of supply and demand are intractable. Whoever wins the next election will have to build, both to accommodate the record numbers living with their parents and new arrivals to the country over the coming decades (new immigrants are expected to form 57% of new households in the next 20 years). Keir Starmer has not ruled out building on the Green Belt, and has unveiled plans to allow local authorities to buy land cheaply for development to “tilt the balance of power” away from landowners. Sunak, meanwhile, has already been urged to consider a generation of new towns in the upcoming Tory manifesto. New developments on the scale of Northstowe therefore seem inevitable. But the question remains of what we build.

You would hope, then, that Northstowe would be a compulsory stop on the 2024 election circus. A warning for new-build Britain, the poorly conceived and ill-executed end product of what a housing arms race might plaster across England. Does either party have the political will or skill to stop this happening?

Something of an answer lies in the last time the country was forced to build at scale. The post-war building boom was unprecedented in Europe, creating 22 new towns that became home to 2.7 million people. Northstowe’s predecessor, Milton Keynes, now feels like an infrastructural marvel from a more confident age, the post-war equivalent of the Victorians’ Crystal Palace. It was conceived in 1967, progressing (unlike Northstowe) through the austerity of the Seventies to offer its new population an idiosyncratically English hodgepodge of the garden city movement and the car-friendly suburban utopias of Fifties America. Its legacy has always attracted a seam of snobbery: a “bland kitsch, Thatcherite reality”, wrote the architecture critic Owen Hatherley, “the non-place it was planned to be”. Despite this, Milton Keynes grew and grew, and has become one of Britain’s most economically successful cities. Now, by way of grim irony in 2023, both the scale of its conception and the pace of its execution seem a much needed luxury.

No surprise, then, that the Milton Keynes “development corporation” model has been invoked by both parties in their attempts to confront housing, the Tories in 2018 and Labour earlier this year. But such a model demands a vision beyond mere house numbers. And this is what haunts Northstowe. Unlike Milton Keynes, the fact that it is “driven by developers”, as one councillor told me, has left it open to the vagaries of Britain’s long-term economic malaise. The pandemic has been widely blamed by developers for slow operation, but this didn’t prevent Savills gushing in November 2021 that the site of a town centre represented a “significant milestone”. But two years on and there is still nothing that might offer a sense of place or identity. A tangle of contracts and obligations compels developers to wait for houses to sell before delivering on promised infrastructure and facilities in stages (dependent itself on “market conditions”). Let them come, then build it, is the future of Northstowe.

Amid the Yimby call for housing at any cost, this model poses a warning, accentuated by the proximity and symbolic contrast between Cambridge and Northstowe. The former, a city trying to escape stagnant Britain via an Anglo-futurist mix of historical prestige, accelerated building and scientific innovation. The other: already more of a relic than Cambridge’s honey-gothic landmarks, tethered both spiritually and contractually to a decade of economic stagnation and political amnesia. A visionary piece of planning that has turned into a housing estate without a pulse or purpose.

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There are faint idols to its old conception of an “eco-town” in its fledgling trees, sparse allotments and bike lanes to nowhere. But half-built sustainable suburbia places its residents, and the surrounding area, in new-build purgatory. House prices still demand around £150,000 above the national average, deterring the mass influx of future arrivals needed to complete the town in haste. While its present residents wait, the lack of infrastructure has pushed them into nearby communities, enraging locals and only mobilising them against future developments around Cambridge. To solve the housing crisis, we don’t just need more houses, but new places where people want to live.

I get lost as I try to leave, and spend an hour frustratedly wandering around this surreal array of building sites and newly christened homes. “What god cannot do does not exist,” reads a sticker plastered on one front door. Electric cars buzz by like bloated, dull insects. Here is Britain’s most recent lunge into the decade of change and construction ahead: and it’s a purgatory between the built and unbuilt, the desired and the unsatisfied. Northstowe has inadvertently been burdened with all the disappointment of a country that has failed to plan for its future. But it will endure as a symbol, a visual reminder of our politics’s failure to execute any sort of aesthetic or functional vision for Britain.

The by-election in Selby and Ainsty, 50 miles south of Sunak’s estate, is part of the reason why. Mention it to the attendees and they grimace. On Thursday, Labour will have a chance to overturn a 20,000 majority and lay the first meaningful stone in the path to a Tory electoral apocalypse. Two weeks ago, the race was compared to a coin toss. But since then, a great pilgrimage of shadow ministers and Labour activists has flooded the Yorkshire town, hoping to pull off the second-largest swing to Labour in electoral history. This would be the sort of decisive victory not seen in Selby since the days of the English Civil War, when a Royalist rout spelled the end of King Charles I’s rule in the North. The bookies now have them as favourites to win.

Selby, however, as both Labour and Conservative canvassers confess, is a “weird constituency”. It takes in pockets of poverty and comfortable Country Life villages. It is an area of contrasts and contradictions: a beautiful Norman Abbey within a stone’s throw of a high street garlanded with vape shops; a commuter belt to Leeds and York in the former industrial heartland once home to the most productive coal mine in Europe. A place where three-quarters of homes are owner-occupied, but the housing shortage and mortgage-rate crisis now make home ownership both untenable and undesirable. A place where you can find all of England’s problems and convince no one of their solutions.

For both parties, this is not just a by-election, but a chance to war game electoral machines for 2024. Labour see it as a zone of reckoning for a country fed up with Tory rule, and a chance to lay the ghost of Jeremy Corbyn to rest after their vote dropped here by 9.6% in 2019. The local Tory wisdom — and ready defence — is that if they lose the seat, it will be because their vote stays at home. But outside of the two major parties, Selby is also a place where we can observe, in the form of political rebels and strays, the two unresolved forces of British electoral politics: the disbelief in the power of politics to change things, and a hatred of Westminster.

Nothing sums up the latter like the circumstances which led to the by-election. The stroppy resignation of Nigel Adams — a Johnson lackey who departed after failing to get a peerage — “has pissed everyone off”, as one Tory put it. The constituents aren’t impressed either. “Good riddance, you shocking grifter,” read one of the kinder comments on a farewell post. The legacy of Adams, further tainted by his temporal association with the other more sleaze-orientated by-elections, has only contributed to a broad cynicism towards Westminster. Adams himself is now regarded as a political morality tale in the pubs of Selby: the local lad who went to London and got lost in its web in his pursuit of patronage.

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The Conservative candidate, lawyer and councillor Claire Holmes, seems eager to bridge that gap by talking up her “local connections”. But she already appears to have misread the mood of the constituency on housing.  There’s only so much she can say about the mortgage woes other than repeating the promise to cut inflation, but her pledge to protect “green spaces from inappropriate housing” was regarded as tone deaf in a constituency that can no longer rely on Nimbyism to form a winning coalition of voters. It was this comment that spurred a number of younger local Tories to abandon her campaign — “the sort of lazy politics that will stop anyone under 50 from voting for us”, as one senior councillor put it.

By contrast, Labour has seized upon housing in their campaign. Speaking in the Commons last week, Keir Starmer pointedly raised the case of a police officer from Selby forced to sell his home due to rising mortgage costs. And mortgage deals are coming to an end across the area as repayments rise by up to £400 a month. At the age of 25, the Labour candidate Keir Mather might seem perfectly positioned to court young voters stuck in the area and unable to get on the housing ladder. But — Oxford to public-affairs consultant via the office of Wes Streeting — he delivers his campaign video with the robotic flair of a sixth-former running for headboy. When I walk into his campaign office in the centre of the high street, full of students and the odd flat-capped local, Mather is whisked away into a backroom the moment I mention the word “interview”. It’s not hard to understand why. He is most effective when saying nothing and grinning weakly in front of a giant portable screen that reads: Conservative Mortgage Bombshell.

Both candidates are accurate personifications of their parties: the Tories’ an unimaginative clone; Labour’s an anodyne silhouette. Where they are concerned, the belief that “nothing will change” persists. But then there’s the array of political eccentrics who always come out of the woodwork for a by-election. Nick Palmer is one archetypal centrist dad who has gone rogue in the terraced suburbs of Selby. He is the closest thing Yorkshire may ever get to Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down. Striding from a delayed train into Selby, the independent candidate looks and speaks like he’s just had to sit through an entire series of Question Time. Armed with a clipboard with his LinkedIn handle scrawled in black Sharpie, Nick preaches a message of democratic breakdown and a system of “shit processes” from London, carried out by people “scared to have a conversation with people who’ll tell them to piss off”.

He nonetheless emerges as a canny soothsayer for the town’s misery. In a busy cafe near the station, he finds common ground with the clientele sipping cappuccinos as they gleefully watch a set of passing canvassers getting drenched in the rain. A clear “90% of the people who come in here won’t vote”, the cafe owner tells us. “Modern politicians have no power or control over the real decisions,” adds her husband. “So what’s the point?” 

One of the more coherent protest votes against Westminster comes from a former Conservative councillor now standing to establish a Yorkshire Parliament: Mike Jordan of the Yorkshire Party. Does he have anything more profound to say? “He’s more likely to say something profoundly fucking stupid,” a Tory member retorts. Behind this sentiment, however, is a quiet frustration. Jordan will be lucky to come fourth, but he represents a disgruntled Tory demographic. In a narrow race, the regionalist-populist energy he can attract and possibly harness is a potent minority view — one that Labour and the Tories cannot ignore.

The rosy-faced Yorkshireman tells me about his adventures in the Tory heartlands to the north of the constituency to garner interest in his vision for Yorkshire. “I spoke to one lady,” he tells me with relish, “who says this is the first time in 50 years she won’t vote Tory. She’s going to vote for me and Yorkshire instead.” When he took to the stage of the hustings, it took him only 30 seconds to deliver his message: “Voting for me is a chance to send a message to Westminster that Yorkshire needs to be thought about — and what are you gonna do about that, cock?” 

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It’s a straightforward message delivered in straightforward Yorkshire, but tellingly it’s being redeployed by both parties as a means to cut through the apathy. “No one on the doorstep is interested in what’s happening in Westminster,” says former policeman now Tory councillor Tim Grogan, fresh from campaigning in the key battlegrounds to the south of Selby. And taking power and money away from Westminster is about the only thing the Conservative Party has left to talk about up here, a localist stance that puts them in a strange alliance with Jordan. A new devolution deal has just been signed that will bring an elected Metro Mayor to York and North Yorkshire, in charge of £540 million in grants. But the push for more local power feels symbolic. It can’t stymie the disgruntled energy that drove Brexit — and which is now starting to turn its gaze towards Westminster in another effort to “take back control”.

We’re far from the Red Wall, but 60% of people here voted Leave. They feel the democratic deficit all too keenly. And nationally, Labour has tried to address this discontent, too, with their Gordon Brown-drafted “New Britain” constitution that promises a “radical devolution of power”, to “unleash the potential that exists everywhere in this country”. It is seen as one of the key components of Starmer’s reforming project, should he seize power. And much of the document reads like a Yorkshire Party rant condensed into polished policy prose. The irony with this, of course, is that this is likely to create more, not less, of the politics and politicians that everyone in Selby and Ainsty seems to hate.

Regionalism has frequently, and frequently lazily, been proffered to restore the discontented provinces to political equanimity. But devolution was overwhelmingly rejected by the North East in 2004; it’s hard to see that a Yorkshire “parliament” of Mike Jordans would satisfy Selby. One woman looks appalled when I suggest it. “The idea of some of the local politicians getting their hands on more power around here,” she says, standing outside Selby Abbey, “is, quite frankly, terrifying.” Whatever happens on Thursday, this mood is here to stay — a disquiet that all these candidates want to exploit, and none can bear to resolve.

Now, the Financial Times, Private Eye, The Yorkshire Post and many in Westminster have joined Dave in expressing concern about the character, business dealings and ability of a man once deemed the “rising star” of levelling up. Last week, their scepticism appeared vindicated when Michael Gove ordered a review into corruption allegations around one of the set pieces of post-Brexit Britain: the Teesworks development containing the country’s largest freeport.

Levelling up, like so many of the political visions of the last decade, appears to be dead. Once upon a time, before the ravages of inflation, pandemic and his own fall, Boris Johnson dreamt of a post-Brexit healing period driven by an era of high spending and devolution — a social transformation on the scale of the reunification of Germany. The rhetoric was always ambitious. But estimated costs ranged from £30 billion to £2 trillion — figures that never quite matched the Government’s own levelling-up budget of £11 billion, of which Labour claim 90% has not been spent, and from which seven in ten Conservative councillors say they have not seen any “tangible benefits”. And with this week’s revelation of another controversial “secret deal”, concerning Houchen and the transfer of public assets in Hartlepool, the events on Teesside now resemble a tragicomic final act for a British political era defined by exhausted ideas.

As in Nostromo, Joseph Conrad’s great saga of failed political idealism centring around a South American silver mine, the goal was to “bring this corner of the world into the new”. And Houchen’s vision is on a similar scale: to create a hub for global trade and the green energy revolution within one of Britain’s most neglected regions. In similarly Conradian fashion, the first sign of trouble on Teesside came in the form of epic metaphor. Two years ago, overnight like a biblical reckoning, a “Lobstercaust” of dead crustaceans washed up on its beaches. Immediately, this midden of rotting shell and claw was connected with Houchen’s project, rumoured to be the result of the poisonous chemical pyridine dredged up from the old steelworks. Concerns were waved away by Defra who judged the link “exceptionally unlikely”. Despite the portent, work on the site would go on.

The freeport, having replaced the second-largest blast furnace in Europe, is expected to make amends for decades of deindustrialisation, as well as provide up to 18,000 jobs. But further development on the old steelworks — now Europe’s largest brownfield site — has been suspiciously slow, and contains a toxic wasteland the size of Gibraltar. Until the £500 million clean-up costs are paid for, the development is worthless. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, then, that the deal that placed most of the site in the hands of two local businessmen — Chris Musgrave and Martin Corney — has become mired in controversy.

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So far, they have made a profit of £45 million over the past three years, and there appears to be no evidence that they have invested back into the project. One green steel investor told the FT he had already walked away from the “amateur hour” project. And speak to enough people on Teesside and you can sense the frustration of a place seduced and betrayed by a decade of failed political visions. Brexit, on the terms of its chief visionaries, has failed. Levelling up has, too. Now the last outlet of hope gifted to the area in this strange era of failed politics is the freeport.

“People up here still love Boris,” insists Andy Hixon as he takes me on a tour around the construction site. The former Tory councillor was swept to power on Johnson mania until he lost his seat in the recent local elections. We drive past the surreal icons of Britain’s post-industrial landscape: a drive-thru Taco Bell, a Victorian clock tower that tells no one the time. Speaking to locals in the town, there are plenty of reasons to doubt his optimism. The Mayor Ben Houchen is a “provincial, parochial solicitor from Stockton” who is “completely out of his depth”. Or, as one man told me, he’s a “poundshop Trump” who has “delivered no jobs” and helped “swindle the people of Teesside”.

But Hixon, calm and measured, is the archetype of a new breed of Tory stoicism in the face of doom. The men he drinks with are back in much-needed work after the pandemic. The myth of Johnson — ice cream cone in hand, windswept tie — that once toured these parts persists because it was the antithesis to the old politics of anger that haunted Teesside and never seemed to get anything done. Beyond the legacy of Boris, Hixon agrees that it boils down to a matter of reimagining the area. “Everyone’s continuously reinventing themselves,” he says. He has retrained three times and now owns his own petrochemical business. Teesside must do the same, he thinks, and arguably it already is. Redcar College has opened a Clean Energy Education Hub. SeAH wind, a Korean wind farm manufacturer, will open a turbine factory in 2026. If you believe in the freeport, then in time the freeport might believe in you, too.

Beyond the old industrial skyline and back in the centre of Middlesbrough, there is the opportunity to test out this vision. Joe, a sound and lighting engineer sunning himself in a redbrick street, has been “more or less out of work since Covid”. When I mention Houchen’s vision he responds with a description of Sunak as “a clueless rich wanker”. He doesn’t have an opinion on Labour and he doesn’t know what a freeport is. He will not vote. It’s not hard to find others who share a similar sentiment. “Look at the high street,” sighs one jaded-looking woman when I ask her about levelling up. And what about the freeport? “I don’t know what that is.” Inside a pub blasting karaoke onto the empty high street, a former RAF engineer is similarly bemused. Rather than empty promises of regeneration, he speaks of a “train and get out” model for the “Teesside diaspora”.

In Steelies, a social club whose existence reaches back into Teesside’s industrial past, a decades-old resentment still lingers. Concerns about the freeport, corruption and the future of the town are dismissed as “bloody pointless”. Guinness in hand, one retired electrician says he’s still furious about a “useless and corrupt”’ Labour council who did nothing for the area. “At least Houchen is trying to get something done.”

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When I repeat this to a local Labour activist, the man is dismissed as living in a “fantasy land”. But what will Labour do with this grumpy, unresolved energy once courted by the Tories? The answer seems to be: try to move beyond it. Canvassing in the wake of local election success, he claims freeport allegations have brought a national narrative about Tory sleaze and incompetence home to Teesside. Now, as the activist puts it, there is a coalition of voters that exists beyond the ghosts of Brexit and Johnson: people under-40, female voters, those who have realised they’ve been “conned by the last decade of Tory rule”. But a vision for Labour here isn’t clear either. They want to echo Blair with talk of a new teacher training college, and sound like Starmer with their “laser focus on building local businesses”. But beneath that, they too lament the loss of the Steelworks in 2015, and are disquieted by the knowledge that they will once more come to inherit the blank canvas of toxic land around the freeport.

Conrad never knew how to finish Nostromo. Having spun a tale wagered on the cruelty of political idealism, he drove his characters to madness or suicide. Despite all this, the silver mine endured as a paradoxical symbol of hope. On Teesside, I suspect the freeport will, too. If it can weather the storm of allegations, and the new age of Global Britain in an uncertain world, it may yet save the region from the malaise and resentment that come after betrayal. Or — more likely now, as the clouds of corruption and incompetence draw in — the freeport dream will fail, too. This is the outcome this part of the country has become accustomed to. As with Teesside over the last decade, so much has changed politically, yet also so little.

Today, England’s rendering of this fantasy, otherwise known as the Home Counties, seems warped and unstable. Travelling through Surrey, from the quiet villages nestled in the North Downs to its London border in the north, it resembles not a cliché of suburban aspiration, but a capsule of all England’s problems: the demise of its ruling party, a lost generation of millennials, polluted waterways and a cost-of-living crisis. In these leafy streets, decline and affluence have become entwined.

The Conservative Party has always relied on the Home Counties — both to symbolise its vision for England and for its dependable voters. Now, as even this region is threatened, other parties are sweeping in and vying for a new future coalition of voters. “The Tory party needs to die,” says Westminster’s new Liberal Democrat candidate in Mole Valley, Chris Coughlan. He is the product of the Surrey incarnation of the suburban dream; the son of a stockbroker, he grew up in the village of Peaslake, joined the army and then the Conservative Party, and had a stint in the City. He is now one of the many Lib Dems trying to do the unthinkable: turf the Tory party out of its spiritual home.

With the local elections less than two weeks’ away, the Battle for the Blue Wall, the affluent suburbs that cling onto London, is now very much on. The first skirmish came in 2019, when Dominic Raab nearly lost his seat to an unprecedented Lib Dem surge around the Surrey town of Esher. But the past three years appear to have set up a far bigger fight that goes well beyond the revenge of the Remainers. Alongside the material decline of the Home Counties, a further dimension to the campaign has opened up. As London ages and gentrifies, and a “parasitical housing market” bites, an exodus of young families, millennials and renters unable to afford life in the capital have found themselves pushed beyond the sprawl of London and out into the Tory shires.

This is not the ordinary flight to the suburbs that comes with each generation’s economic maturity. Not all of these newcomers are young families seeking homes. Professional-millennial émigrés have made areas of Surrey such as Guildford and Tandridge some of the fastest-rising areas for youth voters in the country. And they have found themselves in a very different home county from the stereotype of Surrey comfort. The south-east has seen the biggest fall across the country in disposable income since 2019, with a gap opening up between median income and house prices that far outpaces the rest of England. More recently, some of the country’s most expensive mortgages were among those hit hardest after the Truss Budget. Nor is the county immune from the cost-of-living crisis. Throw in rising unsolved crime levels and a cripplingly expensive commute into the capital, and it’s not unreasonable to talk about a wave of de-gentrification taking place not just in Surrey, but across the Home Counties.

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The material circumstances that once made these places Conservative are starting to crumble. But the battle for the Blue Wall will not just be fought along a straightforward economic realignment. Surrey still has some of the country’s wealthiest postcodes and an established Tory party machine. And for their most proximate challengers, the Liberal Democrats, a vision for Surrey that somehow ties together Tory defectors with younger economic exiles isn’t clear.

Their targets fall into two categories: the “Surrey Shifter”, (young, newly-arrived from London) and “Waitrose woman” (middle-to-late aged and socially conservative). But while both are some of the most “Bregretful” in Britain, beyond that they have little in common. And nothing divides them more than the issue of housing. Millennials are the Yimby generation, overwhelmingly in favour of increased house-building. But here the greenbelt is sacred, and though judicial review has been forced to intervene, Surrey Nimbyism is a well-funded and experienced political force, courted by both parties on the council. Down the road in Wisley, plans to build a new town of 2,000 houses have triggered outright rebellion among disgruntled locals. As ever in this part of England, the home-owning dreams of the new generation is becoming the older generation’s nightmare. 

One way to cut through the schism is to talk about other things, mobilising instead the apathy and disaffection that is more or less universal. Knocking on the door in Surrey, “the worst it’s ever been in our lifetime” will do well as a campaign slogan. Coghlan certainly says it a lot and so do other Tory defectors. Young families are using food banks in Dorking; the River Mole that runs through the Surrey Hills is one of the most polluted in the country. When Ed Davey came to visit Mole Valley, he was taken to a swimming pond in Fetcham, which is now, as one local told me, “full of shit”. The arrival of England’s decline in these once-protected suburban idylls is now as visible as it is pungent.

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For Geoff Eaton, a 64-year-old businessman and lifelong Tory voter, a reckoning is coming for his old party, which has “lost its moral compass”. He complains about lies, Brexit and even the lost legacy of the London Olympics. “The Conservative Party has moved away from me,” he says, “I haven’t moved away from the Conservative Party.” When I bring news of this reckoning on the Surrey doorstep to Sir Paul Beresford, the Mole Valley MP, he seems unfazed. Along with 27 colleagues, the Tory grandee has announced he is standing down at the next general election — a decision that possibly reflects the fact that his seat, which saw a record Lib Dem swing in 2019, is no longer the quiet Tory shire it once was. But when I ask if the character of Surrey has changed under him, he seems oblivious to the tensions. “In the past”, he says, “when I get talking to Surrey people, they usually come round to my way of thinking.”

But who is a “Surrey person” now? Electoral regions cannot be so easily presumed anymore. It’s much like asking who a Red Wall voter is. But while other realignments in the North and Scotland have been driven by a sense of political betrayal, in Surrey, the failure to reward conservative aspirations has elicited a different response. In the high streets of Dorking and Guildford, the Lib Dems can look for Waitrose Mum and Surrey Shifter, but their sense of decline translates not into political activism but terminal apathy. “I have absolutely no interest anymore in this country,” says Kieran, who moved to Surrey just before the pandemic with his girlfriend, and now does an evening Uber stint so he can save enough to escape to Canada. “Everything went wrong after Brexit,” says his opposite number, Jayne Bleby outside an artisan butchers. “But I can’t vote for the Lib Dems. There’s just something about them that’s not quite right.” Another gentleman in Bookham is blunter when I try to tease out his views on the county’s future: “Surrey is like the rest of England; it’s becoming a shithole.”

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“If the Conservative Party can’t win here, where can they win?” one Tory strategist said to me despairingly. Next week, his disbelief will be put to the first of many tests, not just in Surrey, but across the Home Counties, the towns and villages that once offered a tangible encapsulation of English conservatism’s ambitions. With the structural and generational changes of the last few years, it’s unclear whether the Tories’ vision for England still commands any loyalty here. Of the sleeping 20th-century suburbs, Ballard also said they “dreamt of violence”, to escape the stifling boredom of their eternality. The search for a new suburbia forebodes a different disquiet that will last well beyond the May elections.

I ask if they care about what happens to Kukës, but the question is redundant. It is basic economics — people will move if they are paid more. A decade of unprecedented migration into this country is proof of that. Loyalty to land and community has lost. Still, I try to resurrect that dead idea: is there not more dignity in being a professional in Albania than a labourer in the UK? “I did dignity for 20 years,” says a police officer, smoking behind us, “and now I have nothing.” To prove his point, he takes me out on patrol. “Look,” he says pointing to the streets, “all old people, no future.” Corruption, neglect: this is the story of Kukës he gives me. A place where after the fall of communism, the end of history never arrived. The last major construction work that was completed on time? A nuclear bunker on the orders of the country’s mad dictator Enver Hoxha, finished just as the Cold War was winding down.

Out of town, we head into what has become known as “the exodus zone”: the villages nestled in the foothills of an Albanian mountain range nicknamed the Accursed Mountains, from where most of its men have left to work undocumented in England. Here, the journey across the Channel starts to make sense. In one abandoned hamlet, 72-year-old Zehrito emerges from her newly refurbished house. Three years ago, her son landed in a dinghy on the shores of Kent. He walked into town, jumped on the train and spent the next three years building luxury apartments in London. The money he sent home paid for his mother’s heart surgery. “If it weren’t for him,” she says, “I’d be dead.”

Soon all this may end. Everyone I speak to in Albania, from the Crown Prince to the hotel receptionist, is trying to imagine a future in which half the population does not flee. They know the British Government is trying to close the door. News of Conservative ministers who want to bar Albanians from seeking asylum and fast-track deportation schemes make the evening news. More who leave illegally are being sent home. And for a country where 31% of GDP relies upon money sent back home by emigrants, this is not good news. The economics of the great diaspora are starting to be tested. The population is ageing. In some towns, patients must cross the border to Kosovo or Greece for healthcare. Schools are emptying out. Beyond the capital, large swathes of civil society are virtually non-existent because there is no one to do the jobs required. The World Bank predicts that soon a third of the country may be below the poverty line. This is despite the country’s consistent rise in GDP in the last decade — one largely driven by foreign investment. For those left behind, the age of exodus is starting to unravel.

On Albania’s Day of Independence in late November, the grandson of its last King, Crown Prince Leka, walks me through the capital. The Crown Prince recently broke his ceremonial silence to appear alongside Piers Morgan and Reform UK leader, Richard Tice, and defend his countrymen from Suella Braverman’s talk of an Albanian “invasion” in Kent. When I meet him, the prince is full of hope for the country. Guiding me through the open boulevards of Tirana, he talks not only about the country’s past but the promise of its future. We walk past the national bank being rebuilt, a place that will soon coordinate the growing investment in the country’s tourism sector. Despite the pandemic, visitors to the country generated more income than ever. Cranes tower over half-built apartment buildings.

“Albania has always been on the edge of Great Empires and this is what makes it unique,” he tells me as we near his grandfather King Zog’s old palace. It was the last European colony of the Ottoman Empire, the last under the most severe form of communism. In Albania, history has often happened too late. But now it is at the vanguard of trying to solve the global problem of international exodus. It has become the testing ground for different policies aimed at deterring people from leaving the country. British investments to prop up the country’s local economies and stop the flight have seen £6m poured into the region of Kukës. The money will be used to build infrastructure and  kickstart the region’s hopes of making the Albanian Alps a tourist destination. For a country weary of politicians swindling public money, there is scepticism. But the model of investment makes sense, and the £6 million is a trifle compared to the estimated £150m it would cost to find and deport those who have crossed the channel illegally this year alone.

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For Lavdrim Krashi, MP for the Dibra region just south of Kukës, this is only half the problem. There is also a need to lure back the people who left the country. “The diaspora is our biggest asset,” he tells me on the night of Albania’s Independence Day. The former senior local government manager from London, a poppy pin in his lapel, is an example of his own vision in action: to see those who have lived and worked abroad bring back their experiences and regenerate Albania. Others have done the same. One of his constituents arrived illegally in the UK and ended up serving the Queen lunch. Now he has returned to Tirana and runs a successful chain of restaurants. Lavdrim also makes it clear that he wants the values of these countries brought home too — particularly those of Britain.

When I hear this, I tell Lavdrim the story of Xhevahir, the schoolteacher I met in Kukës. Before the pandemic his visa application for the UK was rejected. Now between his job as a teacher and running an English-language school, he spends his time trying to convince his students not to leave. I had asked him in Liverpool House what he said to them, and he laughed at me: “It’s hard to know what to say when you are planning to leave too.”

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I ask Lavdrim if the hope of the returning diaspora, “British values”, and targeted investment in Albania’s local economies can really be enough to stop the lure of higher wages. He found it difficult to answer. Much of this wishful thinking is dependent on factors beyond the country’s control. To end the exodus, whether progressive thought likes it or not, requires countries such as Germany, England and France to stop encouraging the country’s “brain drain” with visa schemes. In addition, it requires a commitment by both the Albanian government and private enterprise to invest in something whose returns may not be immediate: the local economies of the nation-state. To rebuild a community, and indeed a country, hollowed out by a decade of hyper-globalisation.

Curiously, to explain their frustration, the men in Kukës turned to those values that Lavdrim seemed to want to bring home. A sense of respect and integrity they saw in Britain, but also its monarchy and history. They could not understand why other nationalities — Afghans and Iraqis — had apparently escaped the Home Secretary’s ire. A visa should be about love for the Queen and respect for the country, said one.

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After I spoke with Lavdrim, I went to see the statue of Skanderbeg, one of the heroes of Liverpool House (along with Steven Gerrard) who, in Albanian historical legend, saved Europe from the scourge of the advancing Ottomans in the 15th century. On the night of the Independence celebrations, a stage was being prepared for a concert by London-born English-Albanian popstar Dua Lipa. The day before, she had been given citizenship. There were plenty of young people on their way to the concert. They reminded me of the teenagers I had seen at Liverpool House, watching on TikTok the lives of their luckier contemporaries in England.

Beneath the husks of Tirana’s new construction, they walked past the statue of Skanderberg and towards the lights of the concert. I remembered something Bedri had told me in Liverpool House. “Deep down, no one wants to leave their home country.”

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Since his ascension, King Charles and his model community have become an unlikely source of inspiration for those jaded by modern politics. A honeymoon of praise has flourished around the King’s idiosyncratic, anti-modernist philosophy concerning life, work and nature. All of this has largely focused on his experimental community on the outskirts of Dorchester. And this buzz has even worked its way to the lips of Michael Gove, the minister responsible for revolutionising Britain’s housing stock, who this week rhapsodised about Poundbury’s beauty and vision.

Poundbury was conceived in the late Eighties when a section of the Duchy of Cornwall estate was confronted by Dorset County Council with new house-building targets for lower-income families. Today, it has a community of 4,600 people, up to half of whom find employment in the town, living in new-build properties so eye-pleasing they couldn’t possibly have been built this century.

“People often come here sceptical and end up changing their minds,” says Blake Holt of the resident’s association, which, unlike most such groups, is more accustomed to promoting the town’s ethos than solving neighbourly disputes. Blake talks me through the sustainability, social integration, and “harmony” between man and his environment that Charles and his architect Leon Krier have built into every shop front, front door, flowerbed and fountain. With empty words like sustainability too often thrown at us, it’s intriguing to actually see them in action. Blake talks of the local factory, the anaerobic digester plant that covers most of the town’s energy needs, and the Duchy’s commitment to having 35% of housing as “affordable”. He speaks of the many who have come here, from ministers to amateur mystics, in search of some sort of alternative to the reality of living in England in the 21st century.

Not all are convinced. The New Yorker’s profile of the town from September got tied up in a Truman Show analogy after it questioned what “the best of the United Kingdom’s past” could really “tell us about its future”. “Architectural visionary, or regressive Nimby?” asked The Times in a recent reappraisal of the King’s take on architecture that saw the town described as a “nostalgic vision”. This was how Poundbury was widely interpreted after Charles’s ascension: a sad, backward refusal that fails to reckon with Britain’s present, let alone its future.

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Walking through town, you can see this is all wrong. We walk past a carpet shop housed inside a building that looks like a Roman Temple, then a fountain that wouldn’t look out of place in Moorish Spain. It would be a mistake to confuse Charles’s cultural and aesthetic cherry-picking with a bygone age, let alone the values he has actively tried to install into the town. It doesn’t take long to realise that nothing like Poundbury has ever really existed in England’s past. This radical blend of conservatism, localism, environmentalism and aesthetic appreciation is more idealistic than nostalgic, more pioneering than retrograde.

We arrive at the edge of town, the clear boundary between Poundbury and Dorchester. You look back at the forgotten England, the one you normally see from a high speed train window. The disused water tower, the matchbox council housing. You start to wonder if — or even when — Poundbury could start to exist there too.

The world out there is in crisis — and not just Dorchester. Far from a beacon of innovation, Britain is fast becoming renowned as a lesson in economic stagnation and failure. Throw in the death of the Queen, a flurry of Prime Ministers and a Budget that crashed the economy, and you have a very English apocalypse. Both in the sense of such grim incompetence you can only laugh, but also in the old religious sense of the word: in the divine revelation of a truth. Surely we can’t go on like this. Something in Britain must change.

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Charles, or his cheerleaders, could well argue that what he was trying to implement on the edge of Dorchester was at least an attempt to grapple with this. Poundbury isn’t about the past, it’s about a different, more cautious understanding of what is likely to be a poorer, uncertain future. Critics of Charles may sneer at his alternative to the globalised modernity he sees at the root of our problems: the idiosyncratic mix of mysticism, localism and environmentalism he laid out in his 2010 book Harmony. But as acute observers of the King’s philosophy have observed, his desire to find harmony between man and his environment is not just a sounding board for nice ideas about fewer cars, sustainable farming and pretty houses. Charles, and by extension his planning committees, is trying to grapple with a more existential question that now dominates our country’s future. When the tide of globalisation turns and the age of abundance ends, what do we really have left?

In Poundbury, there is an answer of sorts woven into the architecture and community. It’s not hard to see why so many make the pilgrimage. The King is asking questions about living, purpose and our future, and has found feasible answers compatible with a wider cross-section of British society. Meaning in community, localism and environment. Security in energy, employment and home. A culture, aesthetic and way of life in complete contrast to the globalised modernity that has dominated the country for so long. This is a language few of our politicians talk, let alone understand. Could what has worked so well for Poundbury, be scaled into the ethos of our nation? Could it tame the forces of our present and future apocalypse?

Of course, this version of our future is not without its sacrifices, something Poundbury itself has struggled with. On the other side of town, one that looks away from Dorchester and out to the rolling fields of Dorset, there is a more desired but increasingly exclusive version of modern Britain. Here, in the final stages of the town’s development, a trio of property companies are set to take advantage of the 29% premium new arrivals are willing to pay to become residents. In the Queen Mother Square, in the middle of the town, I can see a busy Waitrose, and just next to that a luxury spa. Poundbury’s vision has become a victim of its own success. Now without its founding Prince to shepherd its ethos, it’s easy to see its rising house prices take the reins. Instead of being a viable alternative for a different kind of Britain in the 21st century, much of Poundbury is fast becoming a luxury refuge for those lucky enough to afford where to see out the storm.

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Here the pilgrimage must come to an end. Regardless of whether or not Poundbury will stay true to the King’s philosophy, the reality is that increasingly we will have to take seriously the vision of the future it was built to anticipate. A less gentrified form of Poundbury may provide us with an ideal of what might work in a poorer country as the tide of globalisation turns. For a country long weaned on the opposite, the path to optimal decline may well be a tough sell. It will require us and our politicians to confront a set of questions we may soon have no choice but to answer.

Can we continue to bury a forgotten England from a high-speed train window in poorly-built, isolated communities? Or can we rediscover a common purpose and identity that will allow us to forego the cultural and economic individualism of high modernity many of us may no longer be able to afford? Until we face up to these questions, we will keep returning to Poundbury.