Island Story

Shortlisted for The Orwell Prize 2017 Over four months I went cycling across Britain, gathering stories, seeking out something I couldn’t yet name. Serendipity and a smartphone chartered my course, and a compass when either failed. I camped in parks and playing fields, forests and castles, and I slept in the houses of an improbable number of strangers… Along the way I met farmers and fishermen, miners, nurses and teachers, civil servants and millionaires, professors and probation officers, artists and students, a film actor, homeless people for whom a sleeping bag was no stunt, and many people working in the service sector or unemployed, poverty blurring the boundaries. What is life like on this island? With a tent and a rusty bike, J.D. Taylor set off to find out. No other subject has spilt so much ink as Britain today. But whilst assuming a monopoly on national identity, a London-based elite has proven a poor forecaster of the political weather around the island. Sceptical and inquisitive, Taylor instead cycled all round Britain, interviewing and staying with strangers from all walks of life. Without a map and travelling with the most basic of gear, the journey revels in serendipity and schadenfreude. Island Story weaves histories, experiences and ideas to tell another kind of story: one of rebellion and retail parks, migration and inertia, pessimism and disappearing ways of life, and a fiery, unrealised desire for collective belonging and power. Think you know the island? Island Story will have you think again. ‘Island Story is informed by the spirit of Cobbett's 1830 ‘Rural Rides’, that great work of social criticism… but he knows too that he is travelling around a country that might soon cease to exist.'  - The Financial Times