John Betjeman began writing for the Telegraph in 1951 and continued to do so for a quarter of a century.
Taken together they offer a eulogy for what was lost and an impassioned defence of the past in the face of progress’s relentless onward march..
Salinger, through prescient warnings about the threat posed to the English skyline by office blocks, motorways and concrete lamp-standards, to elegiac paeans to Norman churches and, of course, the gothic majesty of St Pancras station, Lovely Bits of Old England collects the very best of Betjeman’s contributions to the Telegraph for the first time.
From contemporary reviews - often refreshingly caustic - of novelists such as Ian Fleming, Nancy Mitford and J.
D.
By turns eccentric, wistful and polemical, Betjeman’s writing for the Telegraph gave voice to this unease.
Amongst much of the population, however, such rapid change met with disquiet: a nagging sense that the New had displaced much that was wonderful in the Old.
And in fashion, hemlines crept up.
In music, pomp and circumstance gave way to the electric guitar.
In literature, a new generation of angry young men (and women) challenged convention head on.
In architecture, grand Victorian edifices were pulled down to make way for gleaming brutalist monuments to the Future.
During that time Britain underwent profound social and cultural changes.
John Betjeman began writing for the Telegraph in 1951 and continued to do so for a quarter of a century
