The curious case of English culture

A new food market opened near my home recently. It takes a familiar formula, refined by hundreds if not thousands of cities globally: redevelop a neglected part of town and encourage ‘street food’ vendors to set up permanent stalls. The quality is generally excellent and will be familiar to all those who have visited such places: various not-too-intimidating approximations of multiple global cuisines, from Mexico to Thailand to Bangladesh.

Unlike its equivalents in much of the rest of the developed world, however, this global diversity is not matched with a take on local, regional or even national cuisine. There is nothing from the region, or even England or Britain as a whole: not even beer or cheese, and there is nothing whatsoever to indicate place.

Indeed, everything I seek when I travel abroad is absent from the market closest to my home. A foreign tourist looking for something distinctive would be disappointed.

It is a fairly common observation that distinctiveness of place is being erased by a creeping uniformity whose paradoxical hallmark is a rather shallow diversity. The ‘blame’ for this tends to be distributed differently depending on which side of the culture wars you find yourself on: one side blames immigration or supranational bodies like the EU, the other blames austerity and globalisation. In the UK, the erosion of place is largely due to US corporate power, which we have embraced with more enthusiasm than most of our neighbours..

And this is because of a basic reality: that contemporary English culture lacks substance. Our neighbours are subject to those same forces but still put more value on the tangible cultural practices that make their countries distinctive.

This is largely absent in England, so that what is most distinctive about modern English culture is its basic lack of meaningful ‘content’. Elsewhere in Europe, including other parts of Britain, culture (admittedly a very difficult word to define) is still discernible, and revolves around a quiet reinstatement of traditions – this is often cuisine, but might also be distinctive and historic cultural practices, unique national holidays and the like.

Clearly, not all the time, and in conjunction (in fact, a kind of negotiation) with the forces of globalisation that transcend boundaries and are inevitable features of the modern world. But there nonetheless, and cherished, sometimes revived. In England, by contrast, these things seem curiously unimportant (although they obviously exist), generally celebrated only by a small minority.

Frequently this is class-based, a reflection of the defining role that social class continues to play in English life, and another contrast with the genuine vernacular culture of our neighbours, where it is generally normalised throughout society, indeed it often acts as a binding agent.

Examples of the class-based nature of indigenous English culture are numerous: archetypally middle-class television celebrities wassailing or Morris Dancing, real ale, the occasional take on traditional cuisine. It tends to be highly restricted, deemed important by just a few, and swamped by tidal waves of American corporate power and the consequent blandness of the typical English high street.

In another curious inversion, English identity is rarely defined by what it actually is, but instead it is more often defined by what it isn’t. The anti-immigrant riots of 2024 were a good example of this.

The language of identity is frequently mobilised given that politics has become less political (the class struggle abandoned) and now is based on culture wars. And this is where it becomes doubly strange – because ‘culture’ in the sense it is now used, isn’t really culture at all. If it was, perhaps it would be less toxic.

Occasionally, the ‘c’ word is mentioned, and this often proves the wider point. Nigel Farage, for example, speaking in June 2024, argued that ‘we are in decline culturally’. In his case, this is because ‘we’ve begun to forget who we are, what our history is, what we stand for’.

In his case, he is of course referring to recent British history, which is odd because as many people have observed, that history begins and ends with WWII, which has become the creation myth of British history, its defining era, discussed ad infinitum and taught in schools to the exclusion of most of what came before.

That obsession leads to a historical amnesia which ignores all that went before it, leading to a weird historical illiteracy, particularly about the four peoples that make up these islands, but also about the English people’s basic Europeanness. Welsh, lest we forget, is an old Germanic term for ‘foreigner’. It takes an unusual tribe of incomers to describe the people they found on this island as ‘foreigners’. The inherent irony has been lost ever since.

Instead, English culture is generally symbolic. So while it doesn’t revolve around cultural practice, it might insist on clinging on to imperial measurements, for example (in reality, we only use imperial because the US retained it). A reverence for the monarchy is about all that makes it distinctive – another illustration of its top down, not bottom up, nature.

And perhaps football. Indeed, English football fans delight in displaying their flag, which is the ultimate pan-European symbol of Christianity (also used by dozens of other cities and regions across the continent) as well as impromptu renditions of the world’s only national anthem that isn’t actually about the nation.

And, for most, it is barely even considered. Very rarely is English identity actually firmly defined. Numerous writers try to ‘capture the essence of Englishness’ – Paxman, Fogle, Kate Fox and so on, but usually just capture the essence of humanity in general, or at least liberal European culture in general (tolerance, respect for the rule of law, satire and so on).

It is also one of the many curiosities about Brexit. Among the smorgasbord of reasons that people gave for voting leave, identity did occasionally crop up. But this is rarely framed in substantive terms by the English, who seem curiously unbothered about even preserving those things which are distinctively English and worth preserving. So they are perfectly comfortable seeing US corporate power dominate the high street, while pubs close all around them. I am always astounded that even when people do venture to the pub, many prefer standardised beers like Guinness or made-up ‘Mediterranean’ lagers like Madri, when there are pefeectly kept real ales available. Here is a rare example of indigenous culinary tradition – the highly distinctive British brewing practices – but although Camra saved them from oblivion in the 1970s they are now threatened again by the taste for standardised ‘cold ones’, or US-style keg ‘craft’ beers.

Language – British English with all its variety, wit and inventiveness - rarely even registers as a thing, while the BBC and other genuinely distinctive British institutions are under constant threat.

For Raymond Williams the word 'culture' meant both 'a whole way of life', synonymous with everyday existence, combined with the media that form messaging systems within a society. He also famously said that 'culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language'.

But consider some global comparisons. One obvious similarity is the relationship between Brazil and Portugal. As with the US and the UK, this relationship is far from reciprocal: the former colony has long since taken on a cultural life of its own, is effectively its own world, and sees the former imperial power (if it thinks about it at all) as staid or archaic, and many view it very reductively. Evidence suggests that young Portuguese people are increasingly influenced by Brazilian cultural output via social media, to the point that speech patterns and even accent is changing. For Portugal, read the UK, but here the forces are even more global leaving the wit and distinctiveness of British English, as well as its cultural products, increasingly compromised. Certain phrases I use, for example, are not recognised by younger relatives or students.

I watched a short piece recently about young people in Perugia launching a café aimed at ‘preserving old traditions’ where they spoke about the ‘beautiful juxtaposition’ of old and young. Could this happen in the UK? What is British vernacular culture? Where are the preservation orders? This issue gained some degree national prominence with the recent destruction of the Midlands ‘Crooked House’ pub, although again it was rarely viewed in cultural terms as the loss of an irreplaceable institution, more as an example of greed and vandalism.