If you're British, you'll be well acquainted with the type of tv programme that follows a 'celebrity' on a journey. Whether it be Julia Bradbury or Tony Robinson or Alex Polizzi, they all follow a fairly similar model. Along the way, the presenters meet up with various locals with a story to tell or an activity that requires the presenter's amused participation. These characters may be totally unrepresentative of the local environment and may add nothing to the story of the journey. They are there for entertainment value.

Welcome to Watling Street! The first and last couple of chapters were reasonably interesting but the whole journey, if it was made at all, is simply an excuse for spending time with other people or telling stories that are all too familiar to most of us, e.g. Rugby school, Bletchley Park. Mixed in with this random assortment of history bites is a dabble into pub politics and musings on the meaning of nationalism.

I wanted to read this book as I enjoy a good journey with a good travel writer. This doesn't fall into this category. I'm not sure how it should be categorised really. It will also be out dated very quickly as while Brexit is the topic of the moment, two or three years down the line I don't think we'll care.

With thanks to NetGalley and Orion Publishing for an ARC.

This book takes us on a journey on the prehistoric route of Watling Street travelling from Dover to Holyhead in Wales on whats loosely the modern A2 and A5 roads but feel its more a journey of history and cultures which make a cross section of this nation through the places on this famous road from the first Briton to the spiritual home of Canterbury as it heads towards the capital city of London and through the heartlands of Mercian Midlands where we encounter the myths of highwaymen, outlaws,rugby ,medieval football and modern day cartoons as the road heads towards the Welsh marches with Viriconium (modern day Wroxeter) on the banks of the River Severn towards Wales and Telford's remodelling of the old road to improve travel to and from the port of Holyhead.
Overall enjoyed the book as it was informative and you felt as though you were travelling along this road too taking in the culture, history and the noosphere of everything being the collective even if this is different for everyone though

Higgs is best known for his astounding KLF biography; its follow up, on the 20th century, was obviously hampered by having a less interesting and significant topic, but still an extremely good read. This time out he’s prodding at the fraught topic of British (or perhaps English – this will be a recurring theme) national identity in the wake of the Brexit referendum. Which he addresses by following one of our oldest roads, in a manner he compares to a surgical incision:
<i>"The surgeon wields her scalpel in a well-chosen line at times of illness or disease, because sometimes you have to go inside the body to fix the problem. Our sense of national identity is fearful and troubled in these days of uncertainty, austerity and blame, and we are going to have to go in deep if we want to cure this division. At least a neat line will leave less of a scar.
We are seeking a better sense of national identity. Not one that is imposed on us by the state, monarchy or military, but one which bubbles naturally out of the land – an identity that is welcoming, not insular; magical rather than boorish; creative rather than triumphant. It is out there, waiting for us, and if we head out of the front door and follow the road, we will find it. It is an identity fit for those would live nowhere else in the world, but who wince at jingoism and flag-waving. It should not make anyone proud to be British ; it should make them delighted to be British.”</i>

So far, so Higgs: light shed on the universal by an apparently whimsical choice of the particular. And I can’t deny he’s chosen a route with plenty of interesting material; it ticks plenty of my boxes by taking us through Powell & Pressburger’s Canterbury, up Shooter’s Hill with the debatable death of Steve Moore, and past the London Stone to Bletchley Park (where the obligatory genuflection to Alan Turing is complemented and complicated by a look at the still little-known pioneer Tommy Flowers). A stop in Northampton, site of the land’s lost omphalos, is obviously the occasion for a tour with Alan Moore, of whom Higgs makes the very sound point that perhaps his pronouncements on the state of modern culture are so gloomy precisely because he’s the one person who, when he looks at 21st century culture, doesn’t see Alan Moore there. Then too there is the note that all those snobs and cranks who can’t believe a Midlands lad with little formal education could have written the works of Shakespeare should probably consider what another Midlands lad with little formal education has managed more recently, and with full proof of authorship.

From Northampton Higgs continues across the Welsh border – occasion to discuss borders in general – to the road’s end, where disappointingly it rather peters out. But the logic of the quest and the geography convinces him, plausibly, that Anglesey is the end-point proper – once the spiritual heart of Albion, whose razing by the Romans turned the tide in their war against Boudicca which ended, of course, with the Battle of Watling Street.

And of course, because Higgs is Higgs, his self-imposed limit of never going more than five miles from the road has cracks all over the place. Tom Brown journeyed to Rugby on Watling Street, which is reason enough to compare his journey to Harry Potter, but the wider subject of school stories and the leap to Kanye West…well, they’re interesting, so why not? Similarly the way Bletchley’s pivotal wartime role enables a discussion of the differences between the book and TV series of <i>The Man in the High Castle</i>, which themselves mirror a philosophical divide within the book. Or the comparisons of Blake to Jack Kirby, a man who to the best of my knowledge has no direct Watling Street connection whatsoever. This is how associative thought works; it’s only cheating if you don’t buy it.

But despite all this good stuff, there’s an occasional worry that Higgs might be trying for a crossover hit here. And obviously I wouldn’t begrudge him the success, and heavens know we could do with more of the populace reading John Higgs, especially at this fractious time. But when he starts bringing his family along on days out, when we start getting a bit more about his own background…some of it enlightens, but other bits make me wonder if a voice (external or internal) was saying ‘The mass market needs something a bit more personal, John’. And for all Higgs’ undoubted breadth of knowledge, there are odd glitches. He makes a valid point about the pragmatic British fudge in which the nation indulged upon discovering a republic wasn’t working, but in so doing seems to imply that he’s unaware of the brief restoration of the French monarchy. When he says, apropos of cock threshing (look it up, or rather don’t) that “It took some time, but all games or sports based around killing or maiming animals for pleasure are now illegal in the UK”…well, really? What about shooting and fishing? And while he makes a perfectly sound observation regarding the way in which the point of Robin Hood is undermined by making him a knight or lord, and has something interesting in suggesting that the same happened when the enigmatic Doctor was made a Time Lord, he then suggests <i>Skyfall</i> showed the same process being applied to Bond. And, for all that <i>Skyfall</i> is a godawful travesty of everything I want from James Bond, that isn’t among its flaws; the posh background was definitely there right back to the Fleming originals. At other times, the issue is more an overemphasis on the particular without wider comparison: yes, ‘Welsh' and ‘Cymraeg’ may be synonyms which in another sense are antonyms - ’them’ and ‘us' – but isn’t this always the way with names for your own tribe and others? I think it was Pratchett who observed that if only some people occasionally met other people and started calling them ’some other people’ instead of ’not the people’, the world might be a nicer place.

Still, this occasional hint of Bill Bryson – or worse, Mark Mason – certainly isn't enough to derail things entirely. Higgs remains one of our most original and inspiring thinkers, and there’s much food for thought here. His key points may seem trite in summary – that the noosphere, the realm of ideas, is just as vital as the ecosphere and can indeed impact on it in all sorts of ways; that divisions which seemed at least as insoluble as Leave versus Remain have been dealt with before, generally by a new synthesis which moves beyond them (such as York and Lancaster resolved in the Tudor rose, which was particularly bold given the whole rose symbolism was only applied retroactively). At least once, there’s even cause for hope in a detail where the book has been overtaken by events: Higgs discusses land value tax as a progressive idea suspiciously absent from British debate, but now it’s in the Labour manifesto. It could have done with another editorial pass – and indeed, I read a Netgalley ARC so it may yet get one – but this remains at the very least a bold starting point for a necessary debate which elsewhere seems not to be progressing much past name-calling.

Excellent! Entertaining and fascinating.