Announcing the release of a major work: a critical Walking History along the Capital Ring trail on the outskirts of London. In Search of the English – A Walking History is now available to everyone, free of charge, at http://www.aichaobang.com.
This book is based on a journey I undertook in 2018, wandering in dark personal strife while stranded in a country which, for all the years I’ve spent here, has ever left me an alienated stranger.
It so happened that this was also a time of pivotal strife for the English people. Split rancorously at the height of their Brexit contestations, the seams in their three-hundred-year-old United Kingdom had started to crack, and soon COVID-19 would appear on the horizon. But perhaps a different event represented, most powerfully and painfully, the distress to which English modernity had fallen. The burnt-out husk of Grenfell Tower, consumed in a disastrous fire the previous year, stood in towering symbolism of the shameful failures and abusive power relations in which the English national reality had come to ruin – and in staggering contrast with the ideals of freedom, democracy, prosperity and rule of law which, in spite of it all, stand on so insistent in their national storytelling.
Somehow, then, my bitter and despondent wander grew into a thorough immersion in English stories and problems as encountered on this circuit round their centre of power. The outcome is a reflective blend of travelogue, History and mythography: a fifteen-chapter exploration of these strands of Englishness on a quest for who they think they are, who they actually are, how it all went so wrong for them, and just perhaps, what they might do for a better future.
In Search of the English: A Walking History now available here:
http://www.aichaobang.com
