We’re just about to go on one of our road trips and whilst thinking about where to go I remembered that Laura had had to spend a few hours in Wigan unexpectedly a while ago. She had been surprisingly impressed with the place so I added Wigan to the list.

All I knew about Wigan, apart from it being in what a large amount of English people call ‘The North’ but for us in Scotland it’s definitely Down South – was that George Orwell had written a book called The Road to Wigan Pier. I knew we had a copy of it somewhere, it turned out to be one of the many books still in the garage, thankfully Jack managed to dig it out.

The first half of the book is Orwell’s account of the time which he spent around the north of England in 1934, living in cheap lodging houses amongst the unemployed and low paid men. He describes the disgusting squalor, in one the fact that a full chamber pot had been under the table at breakfast had been the last straw which made him move on elsewhere.

He goes into great detail about the working conditions of coal miners, this was nothing new for me as the conditions were exactly the same as they were for the miners in Fife up until the 1980s when all the pits were closed down. Having to crawl for a mile or more on their hands and knees to reach the coal face, and not being paid until they actually got there, and of course for the Fife miners the mine was also under the sea – terrifying thought.

What I found most depressing about this book though was the fact that the living conditions in 1934 are not a lot worse than those for a lot of people stuck in private rented accommodation nowadays. Landlords are happy enough to take the rent but rarely carry out any repairs, with the result that people are living in damp and squalid conditions and having to pay a fortune for it, with no alternative due to the chronic shortage of housing. The solution in the 1930s was to build council houses and it must have felt like a miracle when families were allocated one of those, but of course almost all of those houses have been sold off over the years since Thatcher decided that that was the easist way to ensure a return of her Tory government after the election – a massive bribe and of course it worked.

In the second half of the book Orwell writes mainly about class, an English obsession, and politics. He regarded himself as being upper lower middle class, having had a public school education, but as he got a scholarship to go there and his parents couldn’t have afforded to send him there if they had had to pay, he would have felt inferior to those whose parents had paid for their education.

Early on in his working life Orwell had spent five years in India working as a Military Policeman, his experiences there had quite an effect on him and he grew to hate the Empire and those who ran it.

The British don’t have a monopoly on snobbery, in fact from my own observations I can count quite a few nations who are staggeringly more snobbish, but possibly it is something which the English give more thought to than any other nation, which is probably a sign of a guilty conscience, and a step in the right direction!

As the book was written in 1934 there’s a lot of mentions of Hitler, Mosley, socialism and fascism and it’s interesting to read his thoughts on it all, it’s a snapshot of history, but I found the first part of the book which concentrates on working and living conditions of ordinary people to be the most interesting.