Take Tyneside in the early 20th century for example. You could write a history of the North East as a tale of integrated industrial elites, families tied together by business and in some cases marriage. Armstrong dredged the Tyne into a world-class river. Stephenson (father and son) built the world’s first railway nation. Joseph Swan invented the electric lightbulb. C A Parsons built the first steam turbine vessel. Charles Merz built the first interconnected electricity supply. John Wigham Richardson (his uncle) persuaded fellow shipbuilders to use it.

When Yevgeni Zamyatin went to oversee the building of Russian ice-breakers on Tyneside in 1916, he saw shipyards so advanced he based his dystopian novel We on them. In 1906, Wigham Richardson and Swan Hunter launched the four-funnelled RMS Mauretania, the largest, the fastest, and the most beautiful coal-powered steam-turbine ship in the world. And just in case you think strong trade unions and great companies don’t go together, Sidney and Beatrice Webb viewed the North East as one of the best union organised regions in the country, and Tyneside shipyard platers the best paid.

Indeed, as late as the Sixties, Parsons’s steam turbines employed 6,000 skilled draughtsmen and engineers, while A C Reyrolle’s electrical switchgear employed 12,000. Lads wanted to work there because the apprenticeships were famous and the sports facilities unrivalled.

Peter Chapman’s Tyneside Heritage (2021) is exactly the kind of work we need to understand how ‘levelling up’ happened on the ground. Not only is it the first history of South Shields for a very long time, it is also the narrative of the Chapman family and their rise from early 19th century shipwrights, to mid-century drapers, to late-century chartered accountants and significant civic leaders.

At the heart of the story stands Lt Col Sir Robert Chapman (1880-1963), who joined his father’s firm and who, with his wife Lady Helene, became Tory celebrities in a rock-solid Labour town. How could this be? The Chapmans could have lived anywhere they chose (nice Northumbrian rectory perhaps, or dappled Durham farm house) but they chose to live in Westoe village, a mile from the one of the highest death-rate boroughs in the land, a place caught in the teeth of the Great Depression. 

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That’s the dignified part of their tale. The efficient part concerns Chapman’s role in developing commercial enterprises, as you’d expect perhaps from a chartered accountant with fingers in a lot of pies, but also in social housing, clean water, Harton Hospital, the Shields Gazette, the Boys’ High School, and almost every aspect of public life, from member of parliament for nearby Houghton-le-Spring to lord mayor of South Shields, from magistrates’ bench to colonel in the Northumbrian 74th Regiment (with a full chest of family medals, including a VC).

When in 1938 Chapman fell out with the Labour council over re-armament (they were against, in spite of new shipbuilding orders), he resigned and he and Lady Helene marched off to don their masks as the town’s first Air Raid Wardens. Whether ladling soup in downtown Zion Hall, or hosting charity fetes up at Undercliff, their baronial sub-suburban pile, or leading the floor at fundraisers, when we talk about levelling-up, we need to bear in mind those who didn’t leave it to others.

If Sir Robert was a local hero, Sir Arthur Munro Sutherland (1867-1953) was a industrial titan when the North East was the most heavily industrialised region in the world. He owned shipping lines, coal mines and shipyards. He ran an extensive Baltic trade in coke and timber.

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Like many other great northern industrialists, Sutherland believed in an ancient Northumbrian homeland that had preceded England, that had brought Christianity and Industrialisation, that had special qualities of skill and character. Marx thought the time would come when advanced societies would have no need for homeland or religion. He was wrong. Not only did Sutherland have a penchant for old Northumbrian castles (he bought one), and New Northumbrian myths (he was one), he was also a committed Methodist.

 His wife’s family, the Hood Haggies of Willington were the biggest makers of steel hawsers in the world. They were also active Methodists. Newcastle department store pioneers the Bainbridges and the Fenwicks were Methodists too, along with the great ship-owning Shields Runcimans, close family friends of the Chapmans.

A picture emerges, then, of an integrated business elite knowing each other and working together in the markets and in the chapels, in the suburbs and civil society, and in the two great hubs of Newcastle business, the Commercial Exchange down on the Quayside, and the Union Club up by Central Station. Sutherland’s head office was in walking distance of both. Of course, networking can mean cronyism too, and Sutherland was up in court for it in 1943. But it can also take you out of yourself. Chapman enjoyed his middle-class coteries it is true, but he also served with distinction in a war where men like him saw not only how the other half lived, but how it died as well.

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Long before “levelling-up”, therefore, the northern regions were able to foment indigenous growth where self-belief and belonging were part of an economics of agglomeration.

In 1945 Tyneside to Teesside was still one of the world’s great techno-industrial regions. In ruined Germany, by contrast, Bavaria was nichts. Now the positions are nearly reversed. Bavaria is one of the world’s great techno-industrial regions and the North East, if not nowt, is certainly not what it was.

Why so? First, after the war, Bavarian small to medium-sized firms surged while North East England remained dominated by three heavy industries, one of which (the National Coal Board) actively campaigned against the introduction of new industries. By the Eighties, public sector employment in the region stood at 63%, and the age of the entrepreneurial elite was all but over.

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Today Bavaria has a cluster of technical universities, colleges and linked apprenticeships, and manages to retain its graduates. The North East hasn’t, and doesn’t. In small to medium high-tech businesses there is much talk of “brain capital” and “spin out”. That the top British spinners are Oxford and Cambridge comes as no surprise because the economics of cultural agglomeration doesn’t just happen in the business hubs. It happens, it especially happens, in ancient colleges as well.

The North East may lack some or all these Bavarian features, but one thing it has in abundance is positivity. In spite of years of decline, and declinism (a North East trope), the people remain upbeat, friendly, and drawn to their own regional myths. Love of the craic is one of the first things visitors notice and although everybody talks about it, nobody sees it as an economic quality. 

Positivity is a form of entrepreneurial activity. How people feel about who they are and where they live can be transformative. This is easy to see in the hospitality industry, say, or in teaching, or sales and marketing, but how it relates to more technical fields, or R&D, or business start-ups, is harder to explain even though all these activities demand positive relationships whether in matters of trust, or problem solving, or training, or site location. Not everything is down to money.

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All market activity is as much social as economic, and all contracts, as Durkheim reminded us in a brilliant insight, depend on non-contractual obligations. In what he called the “Protestant Ethic” Max Weber recognised what he called the “Spirit of Capitalism” and “Ethic”, in this sense, meant a power within. And ‘power within’ is what is missing from the government’s levelling-up strategy.

Their white paper is a remarkable document nevertheless, promising to “unleash” and “empower” “every part of England that wants it” with generous and sustained funding settlements, six kinds of “capital”, five kinds of policy (“pillars”), 12 kinds of target (“missions”), hundreds of promises, application forms and god knows how many acronyms holding untold pots of money. The basic idea is that although the South won’t get less, the North will get more. Orwell would have loved this, but the real question is does Michael Gove mean it?

For sure, his white paper is a huge statement of belief in the regions, but unfortunately not in the people. It invokes the Industrial Revolution, but there’s not much business history. It calls for new forms of capital, but there’s little on accumulation. It talks about culture, but only as galleries and museums up from London, not inside the north’s own traditions and certainly not as something you might find on the street. If motorway service stations are anything to go by, business has not exactly shown us the way. Go to Costa at Woolley Edge, for example, and look for Yorkshire. Indeed, look for anywhere. We have come a long way from the days when Parsons’s steam turbines stood for the north.

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My question is how does a regional business elite grow and to what end? I realise that another way of describing the Chapmans and the Sutherlands is in terms of a capitalist class. In the past, I have made my own modest contribution to this way of looking. This essay, however, is about something different. Given that not everything can, or should, come from the state, levelling-up has no other choice than to think in terms of regional pride and purpose.

The North East continues to make things — Nissan cars, for instance — and some very good companies are locally owned. Barbours of South Shields for instance is listed in the region’s top 50. Founded in 1894 to make hard-wearing clothes for seafarers then motorcyclists, Barbour showed its drive and adaptability by re-inventing itself for the third time as a world-leading fashion brand.

If you want to see how Geordie pride and purpose matters in manufacturing go and see the woman who leads it and the 600 women who work there. Michael Gove is a clever man and his civil servants mean well, but if they are serious about levelling-up, they need to start with the people, stupid, before all else. 

For if these universities were or are racist, their self-knowledge must be low, lower than one might expect from institutions founded to promote it. But if they are not racist institutions, how can they explain their willingness to be so falsely charged?

The Vice-Chancellor of my student days at Sussex University was the historian Asa Briggs. At 21, he went to work at Bletchley Park where he spent three years deciphering Nazi codes. We can presume he knew what real racism sounded like. We can presume too that the thought that Sussex could be a racist institution (coloniser or colony?) would be, for him, a sign of utter madness. I don’t know whether Sussex has declared its intention to ‘decolonize’ or not. I hardly dare look.

In the 1960s and 70s Sussex University was special. I got off the bus at Falmer and the first thing I saw was a low grey slab declaring this be the University of Concrete Modernism. This is it, I thought. This is me. After a particularly poor interview (got stuck on the world price of copper) I patted the slab for luck on the way out.

Then one lovely October morning I got off the bus again to be handed a leaflet denouncing the university as a form of ‘oblique state repression’. I didn’t know what that meant. In those days, nobody talked about the British ‘state’. If we had a state at all it was a ‘welfare state’. The concrete slab spoke of modernism, welfare, and social democracy. If this was repression, bring it on.

Sussex University was an astonishing example of the hope and aspiration of post-war British social democracy. At the time, only about 5% of school leavers went to university. A mere twenty years since working-class children had started going to secondary schools, let alone universities, the vast majority of students came from middle-class homes. But all that was changing. At 15, I could have left school and followed my father into the shipyards. At 18, here I was walking into what promised to be the finest education money could buy (but I didn’t have to).

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First of the ‘new’ universities, Sussex saw itself as modern but scientific as well. Even the Soccer Club promised “a modern approach to the science of soccer”. We took IQ tests designed to measure our brain power against Oxford freshers doing the same test at the same time on the same day. I copied from the lad sitting next to me, a fresh-faced Scouser who let me look.

If Oxford was olden and golden, Sussex was planned down to the last red brick — planned, in fact, to be like Oxford but not Oxford. Sussex ‘schools’ of study were intended to operate like colleges. Most teaching was done in tutorials rather than in mass lectures. While I was happily chatting away with my tutors, supping their coffee, at Manchester my wife (not yet) was shuffling into vast lecture halls un-noticed and unheard.

Sussex arts students did some science and Sussex science students did some arts – a nice idea but friendships have a life of their own. We mixed in Brighton flats and guest houses and in that vast range of Union clubs and societies that made the university swing. Experiences differed according to subject. My two flatmates read English and hardly had the time to look up from the 19c novel. One chose Jane Austen as his special subject not because she was good but because she only wrote six. I chose Human Genetics for my science module because I thought it might have something to do with, er…

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Instead of beautiful old buildings, we had Basil Spence’s beautiful new ones, and instead of crumbling quads, we had a ‘Great Court’ that reached out east and west to the very edge of our lives. In winter, when the wind lashed and the rain blew, we leaned across it like figures from a Lowry.

Sussex was planned, but the idea was to be natural, as if the university was itself a feature of the park it sat in, free to grow, but part of everything around it. There was no bureaucracy. Essex House was up in the corner and far away. The only office I ever saw administered my grant: in about three minutes. I once had to attend a disciplinary committee where I was fined 10 shillings by Macan, the Union president.

There were guys in ties and suits, but by and large they were the lecturers. The Vice Chancellor took classes, walked the campus, debated the Union, and could be seen Sunday mornings on his knees in prayer in a ring of light in the University Meeting House. The Student Left wanted to pick a fight with the university administration, and did so, but our hearts weren’t in it. We knew Asa Briggs was not the enemy.

Told from the start that “the University in the main expects students to run their own lives”, this was what we wanted, that was why we came. But when it came to the task in hand, I think too often we mistook weak teachers for liberal teaching, modular choice for intellectual diversity. If there were any conservative aspects to being human, or thoughtful, they weren’t taught.

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Sussex was a university that wanted us to find out, but lacked any collective sense of what we needed to know. And because we were not in a position to know what we needed to know…well, you can see the problem. Arts and social science lectures should have been compulsory. Briggs and J P Corbett (two of the main planners) understood how lectures provided a common ‘framework’ or ‘narrative’, but they underestimated how important that was in a system based on module choice. In any case, lecturing is a rare talent. I had to wait years before witnessing brilliance in the lecture hall. Still, at their best, Sussex’s teachers had a wonderful capacity for getting intellectually close.

Sussex was planned, but the outcomes could not be. Wordsworth talks in The Prelude about “Remembering how she felt, but what she felt remembering not” — and so it was on finding myself standing next to Jimi Hendrix in the gents, or being dropped off in Penge (ah! so this is London), or seeing my first art film (The Bofors Gun). We in Social Studies were so used to cause, pattern and effect, it was easy to miss what could be learnt on the wing.

Sussex in the Sixties sang that we came not so much for the S-u-s but more for the S-e-x (tune: British Grenadiers) but that apart, what the university really enjoyed, on the wing, was self-belief. It believed in itself to the extent that it believed in us and we, by and large, had no difficulty in believing in ourselves. You might think that sitting in a tutorial while the tutor bought an oil painting over the phone – long corduroy legs stretching out to a pair of desert boots – was a waste of our time, if not his. Not at all. It was great. Keith Middlemas was doing his thing (in the jargon), we were learning to buy an oil painting over the phone, and the tutorial wasn’t too bad either. I was learning to fly but had no wings. Coming down was the hardest thing.

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Universities have come a long way since 1970. With over 45% of the school population preparing to go, they have never looked so open. And yet, they have never looked so brashly corporate and market-greedy either, and not only have (some) sullied their reputation, they cost a great deal of money, incur a great deal of debt, and suffer from a great deal of grade inflation both on the way in and on the way out. The number of firsts has risen by 90% in eight years. Eighty per cent of degrees are firsts and upper seconds.

In my lifetime, going to university has gone from the unthinkable, to a rare privilege, to a middle-class right-of-passage, to something that well over half the post-school population can look forward to. In 1964, John Fulton, first Vice Chancellor of Sussex, asked two questions of the new universities. First, he wondered how much of the nation’s youth talent they should monopolise. Second, he wondered how much of the country’s resources they should share with other “post-school institutions”.

Fulton’s questions need to be addressed all over again. Adult education is self-evidently a multi-tasking power for good, and an effective levelling agent. Part-time degrees cost less and probably mean more. Life on the wing does not have to happen only to the itinerant young. Communities sustain a full cultural life by retaining people who are not only educated but resident, and not only resident but rooted. If adult education could be said to have a strategic plan, this is it.

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As for further and technical education, having already grievously misjudged our polytechnics, we should look to German models. If De Montfort University, which has recently woken to the fact that it is named after a medieval war lord, wants to cancel its eponymous hero, ‘Leicester College of Art and Technology’ sounds great to me.

If we don’t re-think our universities, others will. Circling above are private business ventures like Euan Blair’s ‘Multiverse’ — companies that sell themselves as alternatives to university. On the one hand, now that Sussex has declared its intention to appoint a new Vice Chancellor not by trusting to its own legacy but by hiring a firm of consultants that specialises in “appointing world-class leaders”, and on the other hand, now that De Montfort’s new Vice Chancellor has just delivered an inaugural address devoted to “how can we reset public perception of the usefulness of universities”, this seems like as good a time as any to turn and think again.

Isaiah Berlin’s two freedoms — freedom from and freedom to — only work when mixed together and thrown in the air. Sussex in 1970 looks better and better because it trusted itself to make the mix and trusted us to do most of the throwing. It planned itself to be schooled. It unplanned itself to be free. It believed in both. Nine years after I graduated, Pink Floyd taught some kids to sing we don’t want no education. Which was handy because they’d already had one.

Robert Colls is author of This Sporting Life. Sport and liberty in England (OUP)

In fact, of the rare household flags you do see across the country, few are likely to be British. There’s been a Greek national flag flying in Walberswick for as long as I can remember. All last year our local Conservative Association had an Irish tricolour unfurled from the flat above. Ditchling in Sussex proudly flies the Cornish white cross at the moment, for some reason, and Eastbourne Town Hall the Gay Pride stripes, but that’s about it outside of major football tournaments. On the whole, like all other official symbols of our national identity — portraits, parades, anthems, uniforms and the like — we go quietly.

What does this tell us about who we are? First it speaks the truth: that states are all very well and we’d be literally lost without them, but that their official symbols are not what counts. What counts is generally found around the corner and that isn’t a flag up a pole. Our most telling identities are inherent in the people, although there are institutions — the armed forces, for instance — when popular and official expressions powerfully combine, and the battle flag is one of them.

Second, it shows a remarkable, non-political, political maturity. Communities come from the inside out. That is why they are communities. Raising a flag (especially the national one) in the middle of a community does nothing for that community, and is also just a bit naff.

The same goes for lapel pins. It was George W Bush, I think, who started wearing a tiny stars and stripes in his lapel soon after 9/11 and to my utter astonishment he kept it there and then Obama followed. British ministers do it now with Union flags or, in Hancock’s case, with the blue badge of the NHS. Warning to ministers: do you believe in our country or do you not? If you do, you don’t need to wear a pin. If you don’t, we don’t trust you anyway and a pin isn’t going to help.

Third, flags get tacky. They only look good for five minutes in a germ-free environment. After that they fly tattered and torn not by shot and shell, but by general indifference and neglect. Like weeds in the garden, flags that look like dishcloths are a bad sign. Leicester railway station used to have half a bush growing out of its clock-face and I can assure East Midland Trains that this did not inspire confidence.

Now flags are flying high in the Euro football championships, and like summer blossom, they burst out everywhere you are expecting them and in some places you are not. But like Christmas lights, or party balloons, or bare chests, they’re only there for the moment and the minute we’re out, so to speak, so are they. But if we win (did I really say that?) the whole country will come out like the Kirby Estate in Bermondsey and even Emily Thornberry will be forced to get her flag out to celebrate.

The point is, except on high days and holidays, we do not like to be told where we live or who we are, just as we did not need to be told by Gordon Brown back in 2007 what our national values were. Either they are our national values, or they’re not, and if they’re not they’re not, and if they are they are, and we don’t need teaching about them.

Only, they aren’t our “values” at all – more like pieties, and most Western democracies claim to share them. We look at ourselves more by managing, pro tem (it’s always pro tem), to come to terms with our history not by erasing what is shameful but by facing it, with all due humility. The rest can look after itself. For our history is us, not a set of values, or a lecture, or a flag, and of course it is never quite resolved. The trick is to keep it in play as an essential and positive part of who we are.

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The Union “Jack” was originally the creation of a Scottish king (James VI, also James I of England) who wanted a Union of Great Britain when he found himself ruler of both kingdoms. Designed for the main masts of the Royal Navy, St Andrew’s silver saltire was laid over St George’s red cross for Scottish ships, and St George’s red cross was laid over St Andrew’s silver saltire for English ships. After the 1707 Act of Union, the Jack joined John Bull and Britannia as the third great icon of the Union state, gradually taking on a darker blue to better weather the wind and rain.

In the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland, St Patrick had no cross to offer and was not around to conjure his own martyrdom, so the flag designers found what they wanted in the red saltire of the Fitzgerald family. Stranger things had happened. In 1776, the Union Jack with stripes was the first flag of American independence, while the Welsh, who were in the Union from the start, were never in the flag, and the Irish, who were last in and first out (mostly), are in it still.

As the Union of Great Britain and Ireland was buckled together at home, and Empire accumulated abroad, the Union Flag became pre-eminent. The four home nations came to stand for the inner, more affective resources of the peoples they came to represent (and vice versa), while the Union Flag came to stand for the outer power and authority of a British state which, one way or another, claimed to represent them all.

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Inner and outer nationhood was an asymmetrical mixture of politics and culture that has confounded pollsters ever since, with England, the dominant partner, subsuming its identity the most. When England won the World Cup in 1966 just about every flag at Wembley was a British Jack, even the corner flags.

It might be that the English have moved on from those sunny days and the rise of the plain red cross of St George signifies as much. When a British Government built the opportunity for formal secession into the constitution, at any rate for the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish if not for the English (who were persuaded that they had nothing to devolve from), politics in these islands changed forever. From then on, not liking the government meant, or could mean, not liking the Union, and not liking the Union meant, or could mean, politicising all the affective power of the inner nation. How well that inner power would do after independence is anyone’s guess because it has far more pull inside the United Kingdom than out it. As in the football, Scotland plays best in England. Dealing with a far bigger, more complex, and alien Union in Brussels would test Scottish flag-waving to the limit.

For the English, the rise of the red cross of St George might be a response to devo-nationalism; it saw a renaissance around the time of Scottish devolution being passed in 1997, although it probably had more to do with Euro 96 the year before. It is certainly a class signifier against a liberal meritocratic caste who, although they have found their love of football (and never stop writing about it), appear to have lost their nation. To misquote Orwell, they would rather be caught stealing from Oxfam than flying the English flag in their garden. Which is a pity. The flag of St George saw action on the people’s side in the Peasants’ Revolt and in the English Civil War, and is streaming now in pubs and bedroom windows and yes, from hard-working dirty white vans, across the land.

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Back in SW1, it’s a risky game for politicians to stand in front of the flag not because it makes them look zealous but because it makes them look dull. At the Downing Street press conferences, flanked by freshly ironed Union flags, Boris & Co looked like a firm of undertakers who had got a bit above themselves.

For sheer iconic beauty and power, politicians done up in Union Flags are never going to beat gold medal athletes wrapped in red, white and blue. Flags have their moment and then they’re gone — and on their own they are never going to do it for you. If you are going to fly the flag, find the people to fly it for you, and only then spontaneously, and in earnest and together. As it was ‘Ooray for Bobby Moore, and Kelly Holmes, and Jessica Ennis, so it’s ‘Ooray for ‘Arry Kane.

It’s quiet today because it’s raining, but all through our serial lockdowns, my local park has remained lively. While Leicester’s professional sporting venues — Grace Road (cricket), King Power (football) and Welford Road (rugby) — stand empty, park life has sustained the sporting life of the city after the old, archaic meaning. From toddlers pushing baby walkers to old guys on the trot, from kids walking the plank (arms-out), to teenagers sullen on the swings (arms-in), from some pretty serious Indian fast bowling at one end to some pretty unserious English tag rugby — both sexes, not very distant — at the other. I could go on, but you’ve all got a park and you know what I mean. There are more ways to sport than playing football for £290,000 per week.

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It has been calculated that “green infrastructure” provides Britain with £34.2bn benefits every year. I don’t know how they know that, and even if they do, it all sounds a bit sterile to me. The good that municipal parks do is there for all to see, and never more self-evident than in recent months.

Victoria Park used to be Leicester’s race course. Fashionable punters would disport their way up New Walk to get there. Racing ended in 1882 and the park opened in 1883. Old Aylestonians Rugby Football Club was founded in 1919 and has played Saturday afternoons here ever since. Club headquarters is The Old Horse. Quite sporting for a one-year-old, my grandson thought it fun to drop his arm straight down a player’s pint.

Rugby, football and cricket dominate according to the seasons, as the park changes too, from bright verdant mornings in the Spring, to inky pinky sunsets in the Winter. Keep fit apparatus runs around the perimeter, which is clever of it, as do families on the Saturday morning fun run. Over by the playground, the park thickens with bushes and a wildlife pond, perfect for a bit of (never to be under-estimated) nature-watching and finding what parks have always offered, relief from the town.

Every May the Caribbean Carnival swivels its way through the wrought iron gates, and it was here that local band Kasabian played to fans in 2016 — the year in which Leicester supporters (and a very big Italian contingent) covered the park in blue. When the team arrived with the Premier League trophy, 50,000 people sang Volare to Ranieri the manager while he conducted as if they were a great opera chorus, which of course, in a way, they were.

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There used to be a croquet and bowls club but I can’t find it. It seems to have been swallowed by a builder’s yard now morphing into a meadow. And dominating the entire skyline is the University of Leicester. Founded in 1919 as a war memorial, its motto is Ut Vitam Habeant. Which they do.

All this popular amusement used to be a big part of what sport meant. Blur’s 1994 hit Parklife captures it perfectly. “All the people”. “So many people”. “And they all go hand in hand through their parklife”. “Know what I mean?” Certainly do, Phil.

Apart from the grass cutting, none of this costs much. It’s a state of mind: cheap, amusing and near to hand — which is, as my book explains, exactly how the English used to sport in their old parish wakes, or at their Shrove Tuesday football, or in all those mad games and festivals which at least once a year denoted liberty and belonging to all who took part. Stamford used to run bulls and it took the NSPCA, Lincoln Assizes, the Home Office, the 14th Dragoon Guards, the patronage of Queen Victoria and a big dollop of the Metropolitan Police to stop them.

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Sport in the time of the virus, though, is not just outdoors. While elite sport founders in its billions looking as deracinated as it really is, our lockdown world has taken up those fine old British indoor sports of kitchen curling (aka cleaning the floor), skittles (tins of baked beans), balloon tennis over the sofa (an old favourite), and keepie-uppy with a toilet roll.

C. B. Fry (1872-1956) was a world class athlete who did it all. He scored a century against the Australians. He won a Cup Final medal with Southampton. He played right back for England. He held the World Long Jump record, wrote thrilling sports stories and declined the throne of Albania. But his favourite sport cost nothing and was performed entirely indoors — an amusing party piece where he’d jump up onto the mantelpiece from a standing position. Backwards.

I started writing This Sporting Life thinking the history of sport was important, but not that important. I finished it seeing the sporting life as one of our great civil cultures expressing our deepest national instincts.

I’ve stressed the custom and belonging aspects because they are most apposite to life in the time of the virus. But the book deals with other elements as well, including an equestrian world that says everything you need to know about the gentry, a prize-fighting underworld that stood for what we might call the plebeian side of national honour, local festivals that reflected how people saw their freedoms, and all those sports and games that flowered in schools and colleges as distinctive ways of being young. Then, of course, there was Association Football: England’s gift to the world. Football slipped its village moorings and became not only modern but modernist.

William James once said that the first demonstration of free will is to believe in free will. Football works against all determinisms. Every match involves absolute freedom of movement within set limits, which, come to think about it, is about as near to an everyday expression of liberal freedom as we can get. You could privatise the land to deny the people their sport, but you could never privatise the social solidarities that sport embedded. Where parish wakes ended, football took off. Sometimes a football crowd on the move can look like the parish on a war footing.

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By Dan Jackson

Historically, people had little choice in where they lived or who with. They had to get on with it and like it, and being for the most part excluded from educated opinion, they found their own forms of expression. They didn’t call sport patriotism and they never called it nationalism. They were simply tapping-in to what was available.

Eric Hobsbawm famously remarked that the nation, comprising millions, “seems more real as a team of eleven named players”. This is fair enough as far as it goes but it misses the larger and far more untidy point that it works the other way as well. Patriotism in Britain has never really been about the great and the good as about faith in each other. Nobody ever cheered a national team for being better than them. They cheer it for being part of them, a piece of the main.

This is something intellectuals such as Fintan O’Toole and Pankaj Mishra, who portray the English as the upper-class gullible led by the lower-class stupid, do not understand. They like to claim Orwell, but not the Orwell who suddenly realised that if the working class was patriotic, it was patriotic in its own way, after its own heroes. ‘The great and the good’, lest we forget, is strictly ironic. Royals and politicians always look like fish out of water at Cup Finals because, deep down, they know it’s not about them. It’s about us.

I started in Victoria Park Leicester. In a piece for Literary Review, Sean O’ Brien cites Pearson Park in Hull as “the centre of imaginative operations” for England’s greatest poet Philip Larkin. On that park, no different from thousands of others like it, Larkin looked from his high windows on the kids and the football, on the fog and the litter bins, and turned what was ordinary into moments which, taken together, have entered the nation’s soul.

Here’s to This Sporting Life.

Robert Colls’ This Sporting Life. Sport and Liberty in England 1760-1960 (Oxford University Press) is published on Thursday.