Outside the Circle
This spirit of unwilling acceptance recurs in Mr. Geoffrey Moorhouse's new Penguin, The Other England, which is a readable and interest- ing account of life and its problems outside what he calls the Golden Circle. This is a circle which he imagines as enclosing London and its com- muting hinterland. Having grown up in South Lancashire, Mr. Moorhouse is, heaven knows, not likely to regard any change in the pattern of urban living as necessarily undesirable. Still, he reports with evident sympathy the reluctance of 'provincials' of all sorts—from Cornwall to the North-East—to modernise and reinvigorate their faltering regions by turning them into replicas of the 'gin-and-tonic' belt of Greater London. They want to keep their home ground distinctively Tyneside or Cornish, even though all the pressures are towards the extinction of local identity and differences. So, at least, he has found on his travels around the country. If he is'in general right, as I suppose he is, then much frustration is ahead. A couple of generations from now, the cultural differences between one English region and another are almost certain to be negligible.
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