Icons of England

I saw from Le Monde, of all places, that ICONS has revealed a new set of English icons. I think the new list is worth citing in full, just to give the flavour of this exercise:

Fish and Chips Rugby Robin Hood
The Tower of London The Magna Carta Hedges
The Bobby Foxhunting & The Ban The Pint
White Cliffs of Dover The Archers Monty Python
Sherlock Holmes Lake District Parish Church
The OED Bowler Hat Mini motor car
The Oak Tree ‘Oxbridge’

So much for multicultural Britain. And good to see the people and things that have changed the life of women featuring so highly. To me this list is a grotesquely nostalgic little-Englander version of Nora’s ‘Lieux de memoire‘, which at least acknolwedged the existence of ‘les France’, even if in a somewhat cursory way.

ICONs is a curious project. Whilst the website attempts to present it as the brainchild of some advertising agency and really just a bit of light-hearted fun, closer investigation reveals that it is funded by the DCMS (although you have to read the very very small print to get here. Incidentally, I wish I could remember who told me or where I read that you have to read the department’s title backwards to get a correct sense of its priorities). But why? What’s this all for? I don’t buy the following explanation for one moment:

It will whet the appetites of tourists and provide valuable reference material for students.

Like ‘The Archers’ and ‘the bowler hat’ are going to send them flocking to London rather than to Paris or Barcelona or Berlin. Not so long ago London was trying to attract the world’s attention by playing up its diverse credentials, notably in the context of the Olympics. Did the bombings of July 2005 change all that? Are we now so desperate to ‘define’ ourselves that we’re scrabbling around in the files of the British tourist board c. 1960? Next we’ll be trying to sell the changing of the guard.

An alternative even more worrying possibility is that the choices actually reflect the views of the mainstream British public, or at least that section of the public engaged by the nomination process. Whoever is responsible for the choices, it seems to me emminently clear that someone, somewhere – and I suspect our jumpy, regressive, repressive government – is extremely nervous about English national identity. Hence the ambiguous statement on the website’s homepage:

Some people argue there is no such thing as a shared English culture. They say all those invasions by the Normans and Romans simply left us with a ‘hotch potch’ of other people’s cultures. Paradoxically, this melting pot is what makes England unique. And today’s multicultural communities make this mix even more vibrant and interesting.

So why then do we need to fix it through backward-looking symbols if ‘Englishness’ is precisely about change and diversity? (Worringly, the phrasing of this statement suggests that all change was suspended between 1066 and the last 50 years, implying that recent immigrants are incapabale of impacting on a ‘core’ identity). The words are hollow. For rather than in fact celebrating the absence of a homogeneous common culture – always a myth anyway, wherever you are – ICONs is an elaborate strategy to mourn this loss. Indeed, if we take Paul Gilroy’s model, mourning is the appropriate term: in After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (Routledge, 2004) he argues convincingly

The melancholic pattern [that is, nostalgia for a lost era of omnipotence, symbolised, one might suggest, by the 'icons'] has become the mechanism that sustains the unstable edifice of increasingly brittle and empty national identity. (p.116)

Or in other words, if you want to rethink national identity don’t start from here…

As for me, I’m writing this in Paris sipping (green) tea from my Moroccan landlord’s Union Jack mug. I presume he bought it in London for a laugh, or someone bought it for him. Either way, he clearly guaged something ICONs in its neo-Imperial pomposity fails to note – the inherent absurdity of the whole thing.

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