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Clive Aslet, Country Life, 25 May 06
Thank heavens, therefore, for this book. England in Particular does everything that the idea grandmother would, with equal charm and perhaps an even greater depth of accuracy and information. It should become part of every well-organised family.
... But all that is here has a distinctively English cast, and taken as a whole, the book is as good an encyclopaedia of Englishness as it would be possible to find.
Not only is the book beautifully written, but it is exquisitely produced as well.
Sue Baker, Publishing News, 13 January 2006
The subtitle reads ‘A Celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Vernacular and the Distinctive’, an apt description of this major new reference work. I dawdled over this, savouring every word, taking immense pleasure in learning about all the elements that make up English landscape, life and culture. The authors founded the charity Common Ground specifically to campaign against the homogenisation of our surroundings, and succeeded magnificently in exploring the richness of England. In a time when the English seem somewhat confused over culture and identity, England in Particular has collected together a wealth of information that will surely spur readers into a deeper understanding of the land in which they live.
Simon Barnes, The Times: Books, 20 May 2006
“ABBEYS, ALLOTMENTS, Apples. This is the essential book of World Cup year. With gentleness, intelligence and love, it teaches us the difference between patriotism and nationalism, between things that have and things that lack meaning, between sentiment and sentimentality, between love and passion, between England and Inger-lund.
“Gallops, Gin houses, Gun dogs. This book is, if you like, a sermon on the art of cherishing, and also on the art of noticing. It is not a question of clinging to the past; rather of accepting that the past is what gives us definition and existence”.
Ronald Blythe
An entrancing green alphabet. An enquire within upon every native thing. The reading, walking and seeing are wide, and as fresh as a daisy. Each entry is perfectly written. “Go on from here”, they tell us. England in Particular is a beautiful achievement and a worthy statement by the founders of Common Ground. “The land is our most elaborate storyboard”, say Sue Clifford and Angela King as they demonstrate this truth in seemingly countless small essays, each one a brief masterpiece of combined social and natural history. The entire concept is original and successful. This is a book for all English seasons and every English mile. It cleanses our vision of familiar sights whilst adding a thousand more.
Nick Churchill, Dorset Echo Magazine, 9 June 06
England in Particular cries out against conformity by marking the rich variety that makes up our nation and its people. But what could easily have become a bone-dry work of lofty intellectualism is presented as an endlessly fascinating pot-pourri of the quintessentially esoteric nature of England. It’s easy to dip into and even the most cursory exploration brings instant rewards.
Jeff Cloves, Peace News, July-August 2006
This beautifully written, elegantly illustrated and lovingly designed book claims to be "a celebration of the commonplace, the local, the vernacular and the distinctive"; which is exactly what it is. In crude terms it is an encyclopaedia of the beloved ordinary. That it has assembled its content with good humour, enthusiasm, rare insight and without a trace of patriotism or nationalism, is characteristic of all Common Ground's publications and initiatives. If you want to buy a present for somebody you love - and that includes yourself - look no further than this.
Mark Cocker, The Guardian, Book of the Week, 24 June 06
There is an impressive synoptic quality to the essays, which are given further unity by the lyrical character of the prose, by the rich, warm, humorous, celebratory tone throughout and the lightness of the author's touch with the facts. Yet this is also a wonderfully scholarly book...
The book is an absolute delight for dippers, but there is a serious and unifying philosophy underpinning it. despite celebrating the near-continental diversity somehow squeezed into these small islands, the book also makes us deeply aware that in the half century from 1940s the British did their very best to destroy their own environment. ... once you homogenise a landscape in the way that we see across large parts of central England, you not only lose the wildlife, you rob its inhabitants of the elements that make up their identity. The antiseptic uniformity of many English high streets is part analogue, part consequence of the surrounding countryside's wider sterilisation.
England in Particular is thus a call to arms for us to protect what we retain and to restore what we have lost. On almost every page its authors proclaim that cultural depth depends upon ecological diversity. The more intimate and complex our relations with nature, the more fruitful the outcome for both parties. Clifford and King's essay on "Hollow Ways" makes the case perfectly.... [they] are, in one sense, nothing more than country routes from A to B. Yet they are also our collective signature in a landscape and testament to the fact that our connections may have continued uninterrupted since the neolithic. The abiding satisfaction of this superb book is to make us aware, perhaps for the first time, of something as wonderful and simple as a hollow way, and to allow us to appreciate it as both rural commonplace and national treasure all at once.
Philip Conford, Resurgence, November-December 2006
England in Particular celebrates the variety which can be found in one small country. There is nothing nationalistic about it, no hankering after some bygone arcadian perfection. Clifford and King are clear that our lives, and the places where we live them, are the creation of an inter-relationship between nature and all forms of culture, and they include the products of industry and technology among the treasures to be appreciated ... This book differs from much written on English life in its celebration of popular culture and everyday urban features. Common Ground has undertaken various projects to encourage the arts and this is no coincidence: if one of art's functions is to help us see the familiar and apparently humdrum in a new light, then England in Particular can in its way be considered a work of art.
James Crowden, British Farmer and Grower, August 2006
As the dust jacket proclaims, 'England in Particular' offers a way of looking at things that makes the mundane magical. It is only when you start to list the things that make England what it is, that you begin to realise the extraordinary richness which surrounds us at every turn ... What this book does in particular and particularly well, is to get you looking back at the origins of things and, in doing so, you look at the landscape as though through an historian's social lens, which is an education in itself.
Philippa Davenport, Financial Times, 21 October 06
England in Particular is irresistable, a joyous kaleidoscopic catalogue that captures the essence of England through seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary all around us ... each miniature essay a gem, the whole adding up to a magnificent rebuttal of the standardised, fake and anonymous.
Monty Don
This book is a joy. It celebrates the rich and enduring oddness of England in all its glory, and with its loving and intimate detail it is a triumphant rebuff of all that is bland, anonymous and fake. Reading it reminds me of the true meaning of patriotism - a love for the flesh and bones of your homeland and not some abstract idea manipulated by politicians on the make.
UA Fanthorpe
On every page of this enormous book the reader will find information of the most teasing and esoteric kind. Where is the longest avenue in Europe? (Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire). What is a drong, and how do you pronounce it? When is the best time to see the Trent aegir, and what is it? Why is a Hildocrases bifrons on Whitby’s coat of arms? This book will tell you all.
It is elegantly written; quotations are brilliantly chosen and helpfully explained. The book itself is as informative as an encyclopaedia, but far more gripping and more coherent. The references are to the ‘old’ counties of England, not the more recent local government-inspired ones. There are delightful illustrations. This is a book to keep for ever, that will bring you up to date and take you very far back. Geology, artists’ colonies, botany, Gypsies, the Oval... They are all here, and hundreds more, presented with the amazing scope and tender accuracy that England, being so special, needs. As the authors say, ‘we are concerned not with regional diversity but with local distinctiveness. When things are looked at on a larger scale, sensitivity is lost.’ This is the true spirit of Hopkins’ inscape. How he would have relished this book!
PS the Index and Bibliography are comprehensive and imaginative. This is a book that has everything.
Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
This book is as vital as it is joyous, and as timely as it is inspired. In their magnificent trawl through our landscapes and our communities Clifford and King have landed a thousand endangered species of Englishness, and made an eloquent case for the recognition and preservation of every one of them.
The resulting tome, paradoxically comprehensive yet eclectic, reminds us what life should really be about – the little and the local, the marvellous and the modest, the daring, the delightful and the diverse. As we stand on the brink of bowing once and for all to global corporate culture and the might of multinational branding, this exquisite volume is the antidote that might just help to set us back on the path to sanity.
It should join Shakespeare and the Bible as a ‘must have’ on any English man or woman’s desert island.
John Florence, Leicester Mercury, 29 May 06
I’m reading one of the most absorbing books I’ve come across for a long time. It’s called England in Particular and it’s an encyclopaedic celebration of the commonplace, the local and the distinctive. Hundreds of marvellous entries tell you everything you have ever wanted to know about all those things that makes England English.
Robert Louis Stevenson in his recipe for a happy life, advised: “ Learn to find pleasure in simple things.” England in Particular shows that the country is full of simple things as well massive bits of heritage. It will help us take delight in the everyday and commonplace, and so will bring much happiness.
Zac Goldsmith
A magical celebration of English diversity and a much needed wake up call as we sleepwalk further into the dreary global monoculture.
Ronald Hutton, Times Literary Supplement, 15 September 06
The book has a detailed and admirable grasp of the natural world of England, in all its rocks, trees, waters and wildlife: it has, in addition, the imagination to appreciate the importance of things rarely found in traditional Observer and Collins guides, such as clouds. Into this, it lovingly integrates the human landscape, layer after inherited layer, with special attention to the works of ordinary people. Its promise to deliver a dynamic and multicultural landscape is admirably fulfilled: factories feature as prominently as farmsteads and field names; mosques and Chinatowns get their place; and water towers are valued as much as water meadows and waterfalls. The coasts are given as much attention as inland regions, and most significantly, the rural landscapes of the North and the Midlands are valued as much as the South Country.
Paul Kingsnorth, The Independent: Arts & Books Review, 16 June 06
This is one of the most handsome books I’ve come across in a long while ... It’s apt that the design of England in Particular should be as careful as the text, for this is a book about detail.
“We are living in times which encourage us to take our eyes off the ground and focus on the horizon. Detail, we are told, simply gets in the way of the important things: income, competition, choice. This has always been a tempting but perfidious lie; god, like the devil, remains in the detail. “Local distinctiveness is not necessarily about beauty.” Say Clifford and King, “but it must be about truth”. There is much truth in this book, and I would be surprised if anyone came away from it without having discovered at least some – and determined to do something with it.
Richard Mabey
For more than 25 years Sue Clifford and Angela King have been at the forefront of the battle against the dumbing down of local cultures and landscapes. This wise and witty and broad-shouldered celebration (it ranges from accents and airfields to wrestling and zigzags) is the triumphant fruition of their work with Common Ground.
Andrew Martin, The Sunday Telegraph: Seven, 28 May 06
This book is a celebration of ‘the commonplace, the local, the vernacular’. It is a beautifully presented 500-page encyclopaedia of Englishness containing original illustrations by, amongst others, Peter Blake, Anthony Gormley and Lucinda Rogers.
… while Ecology is ‘imperative’ in Common Ground’s campaign …England in Particular is by no means all thatched cottages and Squirrel Nutkin. Urban and industrial themes are given plenty of space in the book.
This book comes at the right time to join the critique of the Blair years that is emerging from Left and Right. His England carries the sheen of commercial success, but it is insufficiently happy; its only goal is retail expenditure; it is a restless, over-stressed place, mired in bureaucracy and an off-the-peg internationalism – a sort of giant, droning airport in which everyone, whether talking on mobile phones or plugged into broadband, is perpetually aspiring to be somewhere else ... Here is a book to open our eyes and shame us into action.
Adam Nicolson, Evening Standard, 5 June 06
This book is not a description but a manifesto, not a catalogue of charms but an urge to action and to a new way of seeing England. “Everywhere is somewhere,” the authors declare in their introduction, and that profound sense of anti-hierarchy shapes every one of their 528 pages.
It is a ragbag of riches dragged up from all over England into which you can plunge your hand elbow-and shoulder-deep. Here, the authors say over and over again, are the valuable things which you had scarcely noticed were valuable before. As a result, it is a deeply optimistic book. Gravestones matter as much as graffiti, grassy triangles and granite: all take their place as part of the language that the English use to know who they are.
It is the longest hymn in the language to the governing English virtue of particularity ...
The book doesn’t generalise but instead nurtures and celebrates the wrinkles of which the English consciousness of England is made ...
Angela King and Sue Clifford have been pursuing this quarry for more than 30 years and it would be difficult to imagine anyone encompassing more of England between two covers.
They love stories that places create and the ‘ecotone’, the zone in which life-systems overlap. They relish unconformity, where oddity protrudes through the imposed blandness of modernity. But this is not an exercise in nostalgia. More, it is the England of the immediate, the fresh and, perhaps more than anything else, of ‘absorption and re-invention”, the idea that you can take the past, love it, look after and use it not as your haven but as your dancing partner, your source of new life, your surge of delight ...
Rachel Oakden, Country Living, June 2006
Now an extraordinary new book holds a magnifying glass to this rich tapestry of details. England in Particular: A Celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Vernacular and the Distinctive is an A to Z of architecture, cookery, geography, geology, folklore, natural and social history, containing around 600 entries in all, of which the following extracts offer the briefest taste. As well as hailing the singular the Hallaton Hare Pie and Bottle-Kicking contest in Leicestershire; the Sound Mirrors of the south-east coast – it champions the everyday: the barns, bricks, boats, bollards and bridges around us and how they differ from place to place.
Robert Gwyn Palmer, Grove Magazine, May 2006
… Prepare to be totally absorbed in descriptions of heronries, ice houses and zawns spread over a formidable 528 pages. It is illustrated with distinctive woodcut-style drawings by contemporary artists including Anthony Gormley and Peter Blake, who support this paean to our culture. Twenty years in the making, this description of the idiosyncrasies at the heart of British life is a national treasure in its own right.
Fiona Reynolds, Chief Executive, National Trust
England in Particular is one of those completely delightful books that draws you deeper and deeper into both one's personal and our collective memory.
In it is everything you could possibly want to know about what makes England special - customs, foods, placenames, landscape features, flowers and plants ... Indeed part of what makes it so special is that somewhere deep inside you, you feel you know, or half know it already. Childhood memories of walks with long gone relatives, distantly remembered visits and conversations, books read and subconsciously absorbed, information not sought but imbued - all of these come flooding back as the place that is England, with all its endless variety and idiosyncrasy is revealed. Hurrah for Common Ground in refusing to let these memories die, but, more deeply, hurrah for England with its treasureland of delight and revelation which, thanks to this wonderful book, is brought to vivid life to inspire another generation.
Simone Sekers, Blackmore Vale Magazine, 9 June 06
It should be added to Dorothy Hartley’s similarly inspiring book published in 1954 called Food in England, to Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica and the equally wonderful Birds Britannica, to make a quartet of books guaranteed to receive enthusiasm for our island home.
This book is the antidote to surfing the net. Spend an afternoon in its company and the view from your window will never be the same again.
Alan Titchmarsh
This book should be at every curious Englishman’s bedside.
Carol Trewin, Western Morning News, 27 May 06
This book is an extraordinary exploration of all these aspects of our lives, both urban and rural, that make England the distinctive place it is, yet which many of us either take for granted or simply misunderstand.
In our iPod-obsessed, time-poor society this book is a good starting point for rediscovering the things that are always around us that will enrich our lives.
Fay Weldon
England in Particular is a living portrait of England here and now, with all the narrative and mystery of the past attached.
An important book and a book of real substance: a rarity.
Enquire within on everything that has to do with the delight and pleasure we take in the ever-changing world of the non-city - places, things, rumours, traditions, from tales of the sinister black cats of Devon (seldom Dorset; why?) to Yan Tan Tethera, the ancient Yorkshire language of sheep counting.
The book is gracefully written, phenomenally knowledgeable, and simply exhilarating, speaking as it does of the extraordinary things that are all around us, if we are only prepared to open our eyes to them.
