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The English Fix

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Patrick Wright examines the long history of anxiety over threats to English identity.

The English Fix: Series 1

The English Fix: Series 1: The Common Market in the Garden of England

Documentaries

20/02/2017

The Common Market in the Garden of England

Series 1

BBC Radio 4 - The English Fix, Series 1, The Common Market in the Garden of England

Patrick Wright traces the impact on Kent orchards and villages of Britain joining the EEC.

Patrick Wright explores how Englishness changes when it feels threatened by outside forces. How did 70s Kent orchards and villages respond to the coming of juggernauts and the EEC?

Writer on Englishness Patrick Wright explores how our sense of England responds when people feel threatened by outside forces. 

In this episode, he visits Kent, the 'Garden of England'.

Patrick lived in Kent in the 1970s, when two new' threats' encroached on people's lives. In this programme he explores how people interpreted these new developments, how they responded - and what all that tells us about how we think of 'England'. 

The first 1970s intruder was the juggernaut - huge lorries hammering through tiny villages on their way to the ports and the Continent. Patrick meets campaigners whose lives in the quiet village of Bridge were blighted by the juggernauts, and finds out how they blocked the A2 in a bid to have a bypass built. And he talks to a playwright and actor about the play they staged about all this.

The campaign for a bypass was successful. But how much did all this really have to do with Europe?

Patrick also explores how the UK's admission to the Common Market affected the Kent orchards, visiting a farmer who remembers the impact on his father's apple-growing business, and the National Fruit Collection in Brogdale.

And he talks to local people, including the editor and senior reporter of a local newspaper in Sheerness, about how the sense of Englishness that emerged in the 1970s in response to our EEC membership may ultimately have shaped the vote for Brexit.

Finally, he talks to the National Trust, who responded with striking speed to Brexit by heralding an opportunity to recapture long-marginalised aspects of England's distinctive landscape. 

So, Patrick asks, does Brexit offer a liberation for Englishness, or the loss of a way to define itself - at least until another apparent threat encroaches?

Producer: Phil Tinline.

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Series 1

The Common Market in the Garden of England

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