There is a dead man standing in the centre of Bradford. He stands perfectly still, his flowing overcoat blown back by the wind, clasping a pipe in his hand as his stone-cold eyes appraise the city that stretches out before him. Men and women hurry past him, occasionally turning to glance in his direction, but he does not move. His name is John Boynton Priestley and he was born in 1894 and died in 1984, 12 years before this statue was unveiled. JB Priestley was many things - a prolific novelist, essayist and playwright - and his most influential work was a book published exactly 75 years ago. It was called English Journey and it was subtitled "a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933". Priestley travelled across England, from Southampton to Birmingham, Leicester to Lancashire and from Bradford to Norfolk recording the England he saw.
In capturing and describing England and its people, usually ignored in literature of its kind, English Journey influenced the thinking and attitudes of an entire generation. It spawned the Mass-Observation and Documentary movements, provided the inspiration for George Orwell's The Road To Wigan Pier and helped formulate a public consensus that led to the formation of the welfare state. The book is a vividly drawn portrait of an England still reeling from the first world war and anticipating the second; it is also a country that has yet to absorb the effects of Commonwealth immigration or the full impact of globalisation on its culture. The England of 1933 may seem a world away but Priestley wrestles with a question that could hardly be more contemporary: what does it mean to be English? And that is why I am here in Bradford on an overcast Friday afternoon staring up at the statue of Priestley. I am here to see how this city has changed since Priestley's day and to explore what Englishness looks like today. I am on another English journey in another England.
A blue plaque on a three-storey house built from pale yellow Yorkshire sandstone. Martial hip-hop beats blare from the top-floor sash window as a woman in a pink shalwar kameez follows a man with a snowy beard down the sloping road. This is the house where JB Priestley was born, Saltburn Place, a mile from the city centre and in his day home to the lower middle class but not far from working-class housing, mills and factories. His father was a teacher and the young Jack attended Bradford grammar school but left at 16 to work as a clerk in a wool merchant's office, before joining the army in 1914. He never settled back in the city again. In English Journey Priestley is both warm and cool towards Bradford. "It is a city entirely without charm, though not altogether ugly," he notes but he also recalls that it was "at once one of the most provincial and yet one of the most cosmopolitan of English provincial cities".
Bradford had long been a cosmopolitan city with Flemish weavers, German wool merchants, Irish navvies and eastern European refugees. But the influx of immigrants from the subcontinent has been of a different magnitude and has had a greater consequence. According to the last census, 17% of the city's population is Asian, the vast proportion from Pakistan. Walking around the city, past the sari stores and Indian restaurants and jewellery shops I could see how Bradford has earned its nicknames of "Little Pakistan", "Bradistan" and so on. It is a huge change in a comparatively short time and it is why Bradford has been a city where the question of English identity has been most fiercely contested, and one which has regularly attracted writers searching for the heart of Englishness.
"The England admired throughout the world is the England that keeps open house," Priestley wrote. "History shows us that the countries that have opened their doors have gained." By the time Beryl Bainbridge retraced Priestley's journey for a BBC series and book 50 years later the city was home to Pakistani immigrants who had begun arriving since the early 60s. Bainbridge found that Priestley's optimistic vision of cosmopolitan Bradford had given way to discontent, as unemployment among the Asian population exceeded 50%, and an increasingly confident community agitating on issues such as single-sex schools. In 1986 Hanif Kureishi visited Bradford for an issue of Granta magazine devoted to travel writing. He had come "because Bradford seemed a microcosm of a larger British society that was struggling to find a sense of itself, even as it was undergoing radical change".
Elsie and Percy are sitting at a wooden table. She is 85 and he is 89 and they have spent the last three years at the Elderthorpe residential home. Percy has throat cancer so mostly communicates in gestures. The couple have spent their whole lives in Bradford, leaving school at 14 to work as weavers in the textile mills. During the war Percy joined the Black Watch and his wife helped build the bombs that defeated the Germans. "I remember dressing up in our Sunday best with rouge and a two-piece," she says, "and going promenading after dinner. We were dressed to kill, we were." She laughs.
"For my dad, being English was about being a patriot," says Charles, their son who is visiting from Australia, where he has lived for the past 40 years. "It meant empire and the monarchy and it was about being part of a big family and a strength in families that you don't find today." I ask Elsie how Bradford had changed. "You don't feel like it's our town like you used to," she says diffidently. "It has a different feel to it." Different how, I ask. "It's not Bradford like I knew it," she explains. "It has been taken over by Asians."
"You can't get English food any more," says Pat, who works at the home. "No meat and potato pie, no pie and peas and black pudding. Even the good old English pub has gone." Reduced to words on a page, such sentiments may make Elsie and Pat seem reactionary, possibly racist, but I am sure they are not. When I ask if it is possible to be Asian and English, both are certain that it is. "If you're born here you're English," says Pat. "What I don't understand is why the Asians who have been born here want to fly the Pakistan flag? They're English."
But what does it mean to be English and who gets to call themselves English? "Priestley argued in favour of a civic rather than ethnic idea of Englishness," Ken Smith tells me. He is former chairman of the JB Priestley Society and I meet him in a large room at the University of Bradford that stores the Priestley archive. "Priestley assumed that anyone who came here would buy into certain things - Shakespeare, Magna Carta, free speech and so on," Smith says. To be English was to live in England: it was about sharing a set of assumptions, batting for the same side. "He had not envisaged that there would be people who would look beyond these shores for their identity," says Smith, "and he would have had great difficulty grappling with the notion that some people's identity would be bound up in religion."
"This is the spot," says Husman Khan. "This is where I was with the rest of them." Khan is 41 with a neat beard and wearing a sensible beige jacket. I am standing with him outside Bradford magistrates court in the shadow of the town hall where, 20 years ago, Khan was among the young Bradford Muslims who gathered to burn copies of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses. "I was well caught up in it," he says. "We were being told about the book in the mosques so I was in the mob chanting with the others - we used coathangers and broomsticks to make sure we didn't burn ourselves when we were doing it."
The controversy that engulfed the publication of The Satanic Verses was the start of a new chapter in the conversation about what it means to be English. That conversation is going on still, and Bradford has continued to be at its centre: it was here that young Muslims rioted in the summer of 2001 and when the BBC aired its White Season last year - which examined the impact on the English white working class of immigration - they located two of their programmes in the city. The prevailing mood of that series was one of loss, a sense that as the children of immigrants have become more confident so the indigenous peoples have lost their confidence in all the things that made them proud to be English.
I say goodbye to Khan and head north of the city centre to nearby Saltaire, an industrial model village built by the Victorian philanthropist Titus Salt to house his employees. Walking past the neat terraced streets, I reach the grounds of Saltaire Cricket Club. Formed in 1869 it is unique in encouraging racially mixed teams. Cricket in Bradford is a metaphor for the divided city: communities living apart, playing in separate leagues with all-white and all-Pakistani teams. Saltaire is different. "We actively hold out our hand to different communities," explains chairman Ed Duguid. "We recruit from an area that has the highest proportion of Asians in the whole of Britain but we also have white players on the team."
On the pitch the junior team is warming up for the match. Joe Hicks is 18 and keeps wicket. He went to sixth form at Bradford grammar, the same school as JB Priestley, and has been playing here for eight years. "There is a different atmosphere here than at other clubs," he tells me. "It's mixed so we don't have the drinking atmosphere that there is in white clubs, and also the banter is different." I ask him if playing in a racially mixed team has made him more tolerant. "I have white friends who will say things that are a bit stereotypical and ignorant because they don't know any Asians," he says. "Like if a student is at private school people will say his parents only got the money through drugs or something but because I know how hard Asian parents work for their children I can correct my mates." What does Englishness mean to you, I ask. There is a long pause. "I don't really know," he says. "I can't think of anything ... I'm not sure." Everyone, it seems, from the Muslims to the Scots to the Welsh to the Jews know who they are, except the English.
I leave Joe and his fellow team members and head back into the city centre. The metropolitan district of Bradford takes in surrounding farmland, dales and the moors. This countryside and the small towns that fringe Bradford are where the whites who have fled the city now live. It is a world of teashops and brass bands and morris dancing societies. There was some surprise this year when Bradford was declared by a St George's Day study as one of the three most English places in the country, but it was this "greater" Bradford, that the study was describing, not the actual city.
I return to the city itself and meet John Baxendale, who has written a book about JB Priestley's England. I want to know if it is true that things were more settled in Priestley's time and that our common sense of Englishness is unravelling. "We tend to romanticise the past and pretend everyone was united back then," he told me. "In fact when you look at the 30s, England was hugely divided - this was the time of the General Strike, England losing its Victorian self-confidence, the shadow of the Great War and the Depression and the threat from Hitler in Germany and Oswald Mosley in this country." Englishness always seems to be more simple in retrospect and deeply vulnerable in the present. That vulnerability, exploited in the past by Mosley's Blackshirts, helped the BNP win a seat in the European parliament for the constituency that includes Bradford. JB Priestley was living in Bradford before mass immigration from the subcontinent but his words on the threat from the far right are eerily prescient. He wrote: "Behind all the new movements of this age - nationalistic, fascistic, communistic - has been more than a suspicion of the mental attitude of a gang of small-town louts ready to throw a brick at the nearest stranger."
Gerry Sutcliffe is the local Labour MP and his constituency has two BNP councillors. "I think what you're seeing is that the white working class feel challenged by their environment and are looking to lash out," he tells me, "plus the BNP has changed their image and send young women out knocking doors rather than men." Sutcliffe tells me that in the past those who had voted BNP would not look him in the eye on the doorstep but now they will confidently say that they have done it.
My time in Bradford is drawing to an end. What I have found is a more complicated picture than I had expected. The city did feel divided and I can see why some whites could feel that much of Bradford more closely resembles Pakistan than England and are turning to extremist parties. And yet digging deeper I also found signs of hope in places like Saltaire Cricket Club. Things were rarely quite what they appeared. Ed, the chairman of the cricket club, was white but adamant he was not English since he had spent the first seven years of his life in Scotland. Meanwhile his friend Anil had been born in India but said that he felt utterly English. And then there was Husman Khan. He was the one who had been in the throng burning copies of The Satanic Verses, but not long after the book-burning Khan met a girl -a white girl from Halifax, whom he married and with whom he has four children. I met his 16-year-old daughter, Najda, her head covered in a headscarf that she had bought, she told me, "in a hippie clothing shop". She belongs to a generation whose identity is as much about the music on their digital devices as the heritage of their parents. What does Englishness mean to you, I ask. "It's about being prim and proper," suggests Najda. "You either laugh or cry and the English laugh at it all."
Khan himself views his fiery youth with regrets. "When I look back at how I was 20 years ago I was wrong," he told me. "I didn't know anything. I now realise I have a history in this country: I am English." And is it just because you were born here that you think you're English? "Well, I'm a member of the National Trust and we like going on holiday to Scarborough, if that means anything," he laughs. Khan now believes he has a stake in the inheritance Priestley wrote about. It seems quite a journey, from burning books to visiting Scarborough - how had Husman become English? The answer, I think, is that he has become middle class. "The true definition of a middle class is that it bridges extremes," Jim Greenhalf, author of a book on the history of Bradford, had told me. "I see the burgeoning of an Asian middle class and it is there that the aspirations, energy and enthusiasm for change and tolerance lies." There is, of course, a rich working-class English history, of brass bands and working men's clubs, but that history is more excluding and appears on the decline - not because of immigration, but due to the glittering temptations of the modern day. The middle class may not be the saviours of Englishness but, at the very least, they help strengthen it.
Englishness, I concluded as I prepared to leave Bradford, is not really about a thing - the countryside, the city, the pub or the cricket ground - and it is not about Shakespeare or the Brontë sisters. Being English is about behaving and feeling and responding in ways that are quintessentially English. During my curry with members of Saltaire Cricket Club one evening, we discussed what it meant to be English. But it was only when Anil began complaining that most Asians were too lazy to have proper gardens and that his Slovakian tenants were ruining his garden - "They start fires on my lawn!" - that we hit upon what being English means.
I began my journey standing by the statue of JB Priestley wondering what he would have made of his city and country. Coming to Bradford it is easy to be blinded by the changes and to believe that England today is an utterly different country than in Priestley's day. But Englishness is more resilient than we suspect, changing out of all recognition and yet remaining the same. As I walked to the train station I saw a young black girl with her arms around a white boy. Minutes later I saw an Asian girl, in a short summer skirt and body-hugging T-shirt, holding hands with her white boyfriend. There is a dead man standing in the centre of Bradford guarding the past as all around him the young are busy writing the future.
The way we were
JB Priestley - biography
1894 Born 13 September in Bradford.
1914-1919 Serves in the first world war; matriculates at Cambridge after.
1922 Settles in London and establishes himself as a critic and commentator.
1925-28 Publishes early critical writings, including The English Comic Characters and The English Novel
1929 Novel The Good Companions brings national success.
1932 Play Dangerous Corner is produced in London.
1934 An English Journey published.
1940 Presents Postscripts on radio.
1946-47 Play An Inspector Calls opens.
1958 Founder member CND.
1977 Awarded Order of Merit.
1984 Dies 14 August.
Ollie Brock