[Photo taken from here]

I’ve never been a flag-waving patriot, and I don’t intend to start now. I’m quietly content that I’m English; but I’m just as glad that my heritage is fortified by relatives from earlier generations of Scots, Irish, Belgians and others. As I was telling a Welsh friend yesterday (as we shared a drink on St George’s Day and bemoaned some passing drunks who were sporting St George Cross hats and comedy underpants) my ideal of Englishness is probably embodied by Tommy Huggins (a.k.a. Monsieur Hougins) in A.G. MacDonell’s England, Their England. Huggins is a colourful, drunken eccentric whose insistence that he is Belgian conceals the fact that he bravely and sincerely fought for his nation - Britain - in the Great War. He’s enough of his own man to grow into his own form of Englishness without resorting to jingo or tribal bullshit.

It’s this wider understanding of Englishness - and the fact that he centres his argument on events in Hackney - that has drawn me to this article by Patrick Wright. He says:

It’s possible to be vigorously English without resorting to mournful elegies, or without having to prove your descent from the ancient Iberian or Celtic stock that Hilaire Belloc, writing a century ago, described as ‘the permanent root of all England’.

I like this thought: he’s talking about an Englishness that’s about “being” rather than “belonging”; something that’s defined by a person’s attitudes rather than their being part of an exclusive club. But what interests me most about his argument is the fact that he says the expression of Englishness comes to the fore when the local - and not just the national - is under threat.

..the England invoked in earlier times has often been thrown into relief by a burning sense of imminent danger. This is easily understood at times of war, when the threat is palpable. Yet it is by no means only at such moments of righteous emergency that Englishness has been a defensive stance. Even in peace time, being English can feel like a perpetual Dunkirk, in which everything that is valued is polarised against ‘encroaching’ developments that promise only nullification and destruction.

And what better place to see this in action than in Hackney? Citing the time he lived in the borough in the early 1990s, Wright says:

…there was one street above all that seemed beyond hope of improvement or recovery. It was spurned even by its own graffiti, which declared ‘Broadway Market is not a sinking ship. It’s a submarine.’

As anyone who knows the area will tell you, Broadway Market is now a thriving, busy, valued part of Hackney life. But it was achieved at a price, and in the teeth of fierce and soulless opposition:

What takes place here on Saturdays is as much a weekly resistance movement as it is a street market with an alternative, organic air about it. The revival has been achieved by local people against powerful opposition. The first enemy, as so often in these parts, is easily identified as Hackney Council, which, as the organisers claim, first tried to stop the street market happening and then, when it emerged as successful, turned round and attempted to take it over. The second is the developers favoured by the council’s officers as they prepared to sell off the street’s shops and buildings.

Hackney’s officials appear to have recoiled in dismay when local traders defied expectation by scraping together the resources and offering to buy their long-rented buildings. Their preferred buyers are developers of an absentee and sometimes also offshore variety: people whose manoeuvres as they assemble sites for demolition are even less encumbered by respect for local life. The campaign for Broadway Market has been accompanied by a vigorous defence of local traders faced with eviction. This time the graffiti has declared ‘We want our café not yuppie flats’.

Though only a local affair, the battle has gone into wide circulation as an encouraging story proving that the spirit of England is not entirely dead.

It’s an attractive thought. Could our other local battles be the furnaces in which Hackney’s communities forge a common expression of Englishness? There are plenty to choose from: the battle for Dalston’s future; the skirmish over Ridley Road Market; the war over proposed developments in Shoreditch.

I’d like to think so, but - given the tenacity and cold determination of local officialdom - I suspect I’m taking too poetic a stance. It’s a very English failing, after all.

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