4 ideas
The first England is Old England of cathedrals, manor houses, inns and guidebook villages. The second is nineteenth-century industrial England of coal, iron, mills, back-to-back housing and blackened towns. The third is the new post-war England of arterial roads, bypasses, filling stations, light-industry factories, cinemas, dance halls, Woolworths and wireless: cheap, clean, Americanised and democratic, but standardised and thin in character.
On Tyneside in 1933, Priestley found Jarrow wrecked after the closure of Palmer's shipyard, the town's single major employer. Hundreds of idle men stood about the streets, and the whole community sank with it. He framed the town not as a victim of natural decline but as a place whose livelihood had been deliberately shut down by distant financial decisions.
Priestley attended a reunion dinner of his old Great War infantry battalion in Bradford. He learned that some surviving comrades had stayed away because they were too poor, and too ashamed of their shabby clothes, to appear among the others. Men who had been honoured as soldiers fifteen years earlier were now cut off from their own comrades by unemployment and pride.
The derelict industrial towns were produced by leaving whole communities dependent on private owners who took the profit and then walked away. When the money went elsewhere, no one was held responsible for the people left behind. Priestley argues that because the damage is collective, responsibility for livelihoods and towns must be collective too, not left to the market and the dole.