This is Paul Theroux’s travels around the coast of Britain in the 1980s.
It’s a true artist’s journey – he writes about whatever interests him, intrigues him, astonishes him, amuses him, and often what depresses him, from ugly holiday camps to grotesquely flirty hotel landladies, to train strikes. It’s not a pretty travelogue, more a close observation of decay and ruin, with the Falklands War glimpsed through news headlines, adding to the overall sense of an unstoppable cosmic engine of change and loss.
His prose is honest, graceful, and vivid, with a great ear for character and dialogue. All in all, an unexpectedly moving experience.
Award winning writer Paul Theroux embarks on a journey that, though closer to home than most of his expeditions, uncovers some surprising truths about Britain and the British people in the '80s in The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain.
Paul Theroux's round-Britain travelogue is funny, perceptive and 'best avoided by patriots with high blood pressure...'
After eleven years living as an American in London, Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise round the coast and find out what Britain and the British are really…
I read this straight after the Theroux. I wanted to stay near water. I live in London but know little about the areas beyond the part that flows through the central city. This book starts beyond the Thames we routinely see, where the river is becoming the sea and lives have to accommodate its rules.
I love industrial architecture, especially decaying and strange structures, and this book was a glorious tour of rusting sea forts, sunken vessels still full of wartime bombs, abandoned piers, hidden sandbanks in the river that wait to catch ships when the tide turns, which remind you that the river is a living, capricious thing, even with all our fancy scanning equipment and satellite whatnots. I intend to take my own tour of the places she describes, book in hand.
An immersive, intimate journey into the world of the Thames Estuary and the people who spend their lives there
The Thames Estuary is one of the world's great deltas, providing passage in and out of London for millennia. It is silted up with the memories and artefacts of past voyages. It is the habitat for an astonishing range of wildlife. And for the people who live and work on the estuary, it is a way of life unlike any other - one most would not trade for anything, despites its dangers.
I still had a yearning for the sea, so when I came across this book, which begins with a symphony of foghorns, I was sunk.
The author excels with her descriptions of phenomenal gut-shaking sounds, and her infectious love of the weird machines that make them, doing their duty on forlorn stretches of the coast. She travels to see notable foghorns around the world, meets a guy who puts train horns on the roof of his car, and then parks in a lonely canyon to play them, enjoying the ricochet of offensively vast sound.
Several times while reading, I paused to search on YouTube for the horn she was describing, so I could look at its structure and hear its melancholy magnificence. If this was a holiday tour, I’d take it.
'A truly unusual and strangely revealing lens through which to view music and history and the dark life of the sea' Brian Eno
'As memorable, pleasurable and irrational as all the highest quests' John Higgs
'A perfect example of the power and beauty of industrial music' Cosey Fanni Tutti
What does the foghorn sound like?
It sounds huge. It rattles. It rattles you. It is a booming, lonely sound echoing into the vastness of the sea. When Jennifer Lucy Allan hears the foghorn's colossal bellow for the first time, it marks the beginning of an obsession and a journey deep…
In life there’s the fast lane or there’s the scenic route. Take your time and you meet people whose stories are as gripping as those of any famous name.
In Not Quite Lost, Roz Morris celebrates the hidden dramas in the ordinary. Her childhood home, with a giant star-gazing telescope on the horizon and a garden path that disappears under next door's house. A unit on a suburban business park where people are preparing to deep-freeze each other when they die. She takes her marriage vows in a language she doesn't speak, has a Strictly-style adventure when she stumbles into a job as a dancer, and hears an unexpected message in an experiment in ESP.
Not Quite Lost is an ode to the quiet places you never realised might tell a tale.
