Review: Mark Steel’s In Town

I knew when I picked up Mark Steel’s In Town I was going to enjoy myself. However, what I hadn’t realised was that this was going to be the best book I’d read all year. Really.

I do have a nagging feeling that the book was written specifically for me. It’s love of people in all their flawed and hostile beauty. It’s hatred of the bland tendency towards identikit towns that have a Clinton Cards just there and a Gregg’s the bakers over there. This tendency is at war with our individuality and our sense of place and Mark Steel takes it on.

Often it’s the grotty that can be a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dismal town. When Mark visits Milton Keynes that very antiseptic cleanliness repels him. Where is the shonky CD stall? Where’s the bus shelter tagged within an inch of its life just to prove that someone is alive in this town?

When it comes to London the book deals with the division between North and South of the river with aplomb as well as those places written out of London’s story until all you’d think there was were Bloomsbury coffee shops and  West End shows.

I did find his idea that no one is proud of London intriguing, but wrong. It’s right to say that many people identify more with Camden, Lewisham, Hackney or Croydon than they do with London as a whole – but a whole load of Londoners work in one place, drink in another, live in another and have friends in yet more. They might have a special, narrow view of what London is but often their local community is more distant to them than those they’ve made for themselves.

But it’s an affinity to place that makes Mark’s book so lovely to read and had me in fits on the train. It also made me think a trip to Southall on Christmas day might be simply glorious – which would have been an impossible thought before this book.

I’ve enjoyed previous books like Vive La Revolution, his extraordinary history of the French Revolution, or What’s Going On? his diary of political despair, but there is something beautiful about this latest book that feel deeper and richer than simply having a laugh.

When I work out what it is I’ll let you know.