The kingdom by the sea
The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around Great Britain, originally published in 1983, is the account of a three-month-long journey taken by novelist Paul Theroux around the United Kingdom in the summer of 1982. Starting his journey in London, he takes a train to Margate on the English coast. He then travels roughly clockwise round the British coastline, mainly by train, getting as far north as Cape Wrath. He ends his journey in Southend. 1982 was the summer of the Falklands War and the year when Prince William was born.
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What Hacker News says
- He was extremely unkind to coastal Britain in "the Kingdom by the Sea" -A book which I love and I will re-read, and frankly a lot of what he says about the un-endurable "greyness" of british sea-side towns in the post-industrial depression era is true.
I think he was in a giant "grump" when he wrote it. No passing cloud gave him joy, no chipshop met his exacting standards. Everything was a bit less than he hoped for, crumbling concrete and wet jeans and all.
- By total coincidence, I’m on the last couple of chapters of Paul Theroux’s 1983 travelogue The Kingdom by the Sea. He described these exact scenes in great detail, visiting only three years after the photos.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_by_the_Sea
In 1979, Thatcher had just become PM, so when Theroux got there, the slump foreshadowed in these images was in full ruinous collapse.
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