Parklife: the myths that made England with Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears is published by Bloomsbury, and you can preorder it here.

This article originally appeared in the UCL Policy Lab Magazine.

Nothing remains new. In the end, newness fades and bends to the folds of a place. At the North Greenwich Peninsula, on one of the Thames’s great meanders, you are reminded that history is shaped as much by the immovable elements as it is by grand human impositions.  

The river, its past and its vista manage to dwarf any building or venue. Its great flow, in fact, provides the skyscrapers and music venues a reason for being. It is the context in which life exists. And today, sitting staring at the Millennium Dome or the O2 Arena, depending on your age, you are struck by how this once very modern idea of design and politics has become a very ordinary corner of London. Conceived by Tony Bair and his allies as a beacon of abstract newness, it has become another line in a continuous story of the city and the communities that have come to call these riverbanks home. 

For a time, the Dome had become a great political albatross. It was a space without a purpose. And yet slowly, with the emergence of cracked pavements and the fading of its cream tarpaulin, life has emerged— one that isn’t as showy or abstract as the art performed to a seemingly unmoved Queen Elizabeth II back on that rainy night in 1999. But one that speaks to a bigger English tradition of the ordinary.  

Today, it is an ordinariness that provides light relief to families at a weekend or venue for the concert of a lifetime in the 20,000-seater music venue. Where once there was performative dance, now there are The Killers pumping out the soundtrack of a night out in provincial England or Michael MacIntyre and his special brand of suburban humour.  

Here, where once there were myths, now there is a place and even an emerging community. The story of how ordinariness overcome grandiosity and how the power of personal connection trumps unmoored abstraction is the very essence of Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears’ new book England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight, published by Bloomsbury this St George’s Day. 

The fifth chapter of the book focuses on the Millennium Dome and the community that now surrounds it. I start there when I sit down to talk to the two of them in the pub, The Pilot, the last remaining relic of the pre-90s era, and the scene of the video for Blur’s “Parklife” thirty years ago. 

‘What struck us here in the North Greenwich peninsula is how community, and people can help to turn what is bright and shiny and grandiose into something humbler and more ordinary and more liveable.’ Baldwin says.  

Before I manage to ask my next question, the food arrives.  

The Pilot is a stocky pub arranged over a couple of buildings, lined up next to a neat row of bricked terrace housing. The food menu now lists tofu burgers alongside its steak and ale pie and fish and chips —further proof of Baldwin and Stears’s argument that change in England, even culinary, happens all the time, mixing the new amongst the old.  

‘Take this old pub,’ Baldwin continues. It’s a quintessentially English experience. But scratch the surface, and it’s a messier story. Firstly, it’s a Fuller’s pub, Fullers which is owned by a huge Japanese multinational corporate firm, one of the biggest in the world. And yes, there are plenty of regulars, I can hear a few now.’ Baldwin says, pointing around to the folks lined up at the bar.  

‘But just out there, we spoke to a bloke playing football with his son. And it turns out he’s from Bilbao and works in a bank. There is a community association here, but it is chaired by someone from Sweden. And so, there’s a sense that in England, what is reassuring and what is new are all wrapped up together. And that’s what we ultimately want to explore with our book’.  

‘The book is a recognition that England is necessarily a muddle, a mixture of the old and the new, the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.’  

That argument in the book also provides us with a window through which to explore politics today. 

 As Baldwin points out, politics has too often shrunk away from complexity—instead seeking out simple stories of national heroism or imperial evil—when, in fact, these sinners and saints have come to be interwoven.  

Politics today, that is, has its loud, simplistic, one-sized myths. And according to Baldwin and Stears they have warped our sense of our own country.  

Their book does not seek to disprove or discard these myths but more see them in all their messiness. To recognise their ambiguity, in doing so they offer us the tools to overcome our challenges today.  

It’s a theme that resonated with Stears following a conversation with the celebrated playwright and UCL Policy Lab Honorary Professor, James Graham. ‘James put it so well when we interviewed him,’ Stears tells me. ‘He says that the problem with politics in the last 20 or so years has been that actions have no consequences. But he doesn’t mean that in the usual, sort of ethical sense, that politicians get away with doing bad things. He means that politics has become detached from the tangible reality of people’s lives. Politics too often operates on a different plain, with grandiose abstractions, with phrases that end up coming from a political glossary, but that doesn’t resonate with the experience of millions of people in the country.’ Stears summarises.  

And that is why from the modernism of the Dome to the ancient rights of Runnymede, Baldwin and Stears have toured England unpacking their seven myths.  

‘One thing we were trying to do with the book is deflate some of these myths, take the air out of them, and bring them back down to the ground. In the hope that political life can be back in touch—real touch with people’s tangible experience’.  

As a former political speechwriter Stears has thought more than most about the power of words and actions in political life. And he has always been driven to explore how our relationship with memory and place creates the foundations for a political story and strategy which can create lasting change. ‘That’s one of the reasons why the Dome is such a, a sort of great place to come, because it captures a moment in British politics when politicians, for good reasons and bad, were trying to imagine a perfect future unmoored from the shackles of the past. One not let down by the failures of Britain in the 20th century, both free of prejudice and discrimination, but also free of texture and tangibility and place of belonging. And now we’re hopefully entering a period where, you don’t have to pose all those things as dichotomies, that you’re either new or old, you’re either ambitious or cautious,’ Stears says.  

This belief in ordinariness and nuance is not a rejection of the new or a disagreement with diversity and difference. In their telling of England’s myths, you have a story that leans into the personal work of myth-making. England is a country where new communities add and adapt the old, sometimes odd traditions. ‘This is not anti-modernity, you know, because if you’re anti-modernity, you’re basically just reactionary,’ Baldwin argues. ‘A lot of the original reaction against the Millennium Dome and New Labour was a sort of ersatz tradition. You saw it with the Countryside Alliance and a belief in an England that had never really existed. And that’s as much mythological, than the myth of modernity. What we’re asking for is almost just to relax these engorged mythologies so that everybody can find the space to live more easily, not perfectly because they won’t, but more easily with each other.’  

These messy ambiguities are what have so come to define the UCL Policy Lab’s work and how Stears has gone about creating a space for a genuine exploration of perspective, experience, and ideas. 

Sitting with Baldwin and Stears now and hearing their stories, both personal and political, one realises theirs is a politics forged in a belief in people’s ability for genuine joy and compassion. That somehow, whatever the political challenge, the untrampled brilliance of ordinary spirit is where politics can find ordinary hope.  

Theirs is a story of relationships, relationships which are politically powerful because they are real and tangible. The people described in the book – which James Graham calls a ‘cast of characters to die for’ – they are foundational building blocks to a better politics not because they espouse grand visions but because they tell stories which are bound to the people and places around them.  

If this is a theme of all of Baldwin and Stears’ recent work – it’s a theme they think is shared across politics and can be a process for renewing politics and public service.  

‘I think the reason that so many of the different people that we spoke to for the book about England, or who have read the book ended up agreeing with us – it was because both on the Labour side and on the conservative side or the left, or the right, there are people who recognise the sort of problems with grandiosity, abstraction, distance that we tried to identify in the book and who strive for a more humane story about the country and a political approach to changing it’.  

As we come to finish our meal of pie, fish finger sandwiches, and, yes, the tofu burger, Stears goes back to where the book began, in a conversation he has with Baldwin when thinking up ideas for a speech back in 2011. He tells me that they both tried to think back to their own memories of growing up in Britain, Stears in the suburbs on the edge of Cardiff and Baldwin in the John Bull countryside of the Cotswolds.  

They landed on the memories of attempting picnics on rainy days – sat in some National Trust car park, attempting to see the view through the fogged-up windscreen and listening to the football scores on the radio. This is not some celebration of misery or blitz spirit but that in its difference and strangeness England and Britain can find joy.  

‘We’re just saying that there are some good things here, slightly weird good things which can provide the foundations for some sense of belonging, security, identity through which they can then rebuild a better life and a brighter future.’  

In doing so, they offer us a glimpse of what is beautiful through the similarly foggy windscreen of British politics.  

‘Finding that middle ground, which is neither a grandiose myth which rejects everything, nor a sort of grandiose myth which celebrates everything, but which says, actual life is complicated and muddled and sometimes joyful and sometimes melancholic, and sometimes your next door neighbour is from the other side of the world, and sometimes they’re an old person who’s lived in the same town for 70 years, and all of that mish-mash together is what England is. And if you accept that and recognise it and build on it, you’ve got an opportunity to create betterness.’ Stears says.  

As we wander back through the newly sewn lawns and sprouting developments, we see all that life and joy so perfectly expressed by Baldwin and Stears. And I remember coming to the Dome on a school trip aged 9 – one of the thousands of other schoolchildren given a coach trip to witness our future.  

Most of it had fallen from my mind, but I remember the excitement, the possibility that came from a day trip out and time with schoolmates. From a sense that we were part of something new, that perhaps this future might include us. In truth, the exhibits all seemed bonkers to that nine-year-old and his mates.  

Standing here today, by the now not-so-new Dome with its growing sense of place and community, is something not so bonkers. It is a place where ordinary people get to experience each other, to see and witness joy and happiness. To be here today, is to glimpse the realities of the ordinary, a new myth perhaps, but one which deserves its place amongst the best of them.   

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country by Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears is published by Bloomsbury, and you can preorder it here.