Jonathan Meades

There are​, of course, the huddled masses, nameless, deprived of family, possessions, hope, dignity, wrapped in ragged blankets of despair, worn and punished for their very existence. And then there are the onymous wealthy or celebrated or connected, who have the means to act on their prognosis. Billy Wilder’s apothegm that ‘the optimists died in the gas chambers, the pessimists...

In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where...

Castlefield with Beetham Tower, Manchester.

‘Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.’ The London that Muriel Spark describes in The Girls of Slender Means – ‘buildings in bad repair or in no repair at all, bombsites piled with stony rubble, houses like giant teeth in which decay had been drilled out, leaving only the...

Listen to Jonathan Meades introduce and read this piece on the LRB Podcast

Asneaked photograph​ from the earliest years of this century shows the teenage prodigy Wayne Rooney leading his parents out of the sea on a Mexican beach. They are about to move into an unknown world, where they will, all three, lurch from idolisation to easy prey, from objects of pity to mean-spirited envy – the...