Edge of England is a love letter to Lincolnshire written by an Irish-born author who moved to the county to escape London about twenty years ago. In a rather florid style, he takes us on a journey around the county, discussing its oft overlooked beauty and telling us engaging anecdotes from its past. This is how he describes the prehistoric period when the limestone that forms much of the geology was formed: ‘Darkness. Silence. Time beyond reckoning. Mass extinctions. Bone turns to stone. The sea cools and sinks, the bed upheaves. Waters trickle away, continents shift, ice advances and retreats…’ It often reads like a poem turned into prose or a novel with no plot. He paints a picture of Lincolnshire sneered at by the London elite: ‘disparaging, showing the county as decaying, boorishly rustic, and even a target of diabolic ire.’ He was surprised to find the county had kept its charm, a place that has produced greats that have shaped the world (such as Tennyson, George Boole and Isaac Newton). He makes much of the obscure Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Lindsey that once covered the northern third of the county.
It is a rambling book; Turner himself, when he gives talks, admits he is unhappy with the structure. In the chapter titled ‘Shadows in the Water’ he describes the fenland of South Holland; in another chapter, ‘The Bracing Coast’, it is the coastline around Skegness; the ‘City on the Cliff’ is about Lincoln, and so on around the historic county – but what kind of book is it?
Turner is certainly very well-read, and the book references many novels and poems written in or concerning the county, but there are some odd omissions and inclusions. A S Byatt’s Possession is not mentioned, despite being partly set in Lincolnshire, while John Gordon’s The Giant under the Snow is, despite clearly being set in the Brecklands of Norfolk not the Fens of Lincolnshire. It is not a literary review.
It is hard to know who the actual intended audience is. It is not a history book. There is no new research in it, no lost sources evaluated or old thesis re-examined. If it is aimed at people familiar with the county, it can be an arduous read. Turner admits that he is no historian. The Duke of Rutland is erroneously referred to as an earl: we are told that the last execution in Lincoln occurred at the Castle in 1961, when it fact it took place at the new prison on Greetwell Road (the prison in the Castle had been shut for eighty odd years and was a tourist attraction); it is a Comet tank, not a Churchill, whose remains are embedded in the sands a few miles from Turner’s house, and so forth. It seems odd that neither Turner nor his publisher thought to get the book proofread by an expert on Lincolnshire’s history. The book’s argument is that the elite in London looks down on Lincolnshire, but the author has ‘discovered’ the county and is going to share this secret. The county, however, is not ‘on the edge’, it is a well-integrated part of the economy of the wider region; the workers of the East Midlands, for instance, have been visiting the Lincolnshire coast for over a century.
If Edge of England is not a history of Lincolnshire it is not really a travelogue either. E H Carr advised us to ‘study the historian before you begin to study the facts’ and it is illuminating to consider Turner in relation to this prescription. Turner declares how much he loves Lincolnshire, but it is a vision of the county he saw when he first visited twenty-five years ago: ‘Lincolnshire is already less distinctive than when we first knew it … ruined by planning decisions or the “improvements” of newcomers who probably should have never moved to the countryside.’ The perils of immigration seem to have been one of Turner’s consistent concerns in his literary career, but the right-wing journals he has edited in the past are not mentioned in this book. When he gives public talks promoting the book under review, however, Turner claims that England is besieged by the forces of globalisation and that his next book will be about English identity.
One paragraph on p 63 is rather telling: Turner gives us some census figures that suggest that Lincolnshire is demographically the least diverse, most English county in England. He draws a line between the rise in crime in Boston and immigration from Eastern Europe. Rather than a rambling love letter to Lincolnshire, the book could be a paean to a lack of diversity. In one of the few recorded conversations with the locals, Turner reports that one holidaymaker likes Skegness because: ‘It’s English England! Do you know what I mean?’ English England? The Quarterly Review, which Turner was once the editor of, is one of the few to link together these facts (Millson Reference Millson2022):
Edge of England, then, is both history and autobiography. There is a sub-text. ‘Lincolnshire’, we learn, ‘is one of the least diverse counties in England’ – the non-white population is only about 2.4 % … For the author, it represents a ‘demi-paradise’, a ‘place of escape’ …
The book seems to propose, contradictorily, that somehow Lincolnshire has led the world while existing in splendid isolation free from a mass influx of outsiders, guarded by the River Trent and the North Sea. This is entirely nonsense; the county has taken its character from the influx of Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans and more recently Poles and Lithuanians. This reviewer also moved from London to Lincolnshire two decades ago, but welcomes the county’s growing diversity, its wish constantly to reinvent itself and to celebrate being in the middle of something, not on some ‘Edge’ only attracting those beguiled by a vision of a monocultural Englishness that never existed.
