Constable; abridged hardcover edition (Sep 1982) ISBN 0-09-464060-2. Introduction by E. R. Chamberlain. Rural Ride from Dover, through the Isle of Thanet, by Canterbury and Faversham, across to Maidstone, up to Tonbridge, through the Weald of Kent and over the Hills by Westerham and Hays, to the Wen Cobbett might well have torn the private fishing notice down. He felt the country, and certainly its landowners, could afford to be generous to the hungry and poor. At Tetbury, he admonished a crowd pursuing an old man who had run off with a cabbage. The crowd was angry and in no mood to listen to Cobbett preaching. The old man, they said, was a bad character. Cobbett replied: "Very poor and almost starved people are apt to be bad characters."

Rural Ride from the (London) Wen across Surrey, across the West of Sussex, and into the South-East of Hampshire Certainly, the countryside hereabouts is still being sold off to create banal executive cul-de-sac estates, and business-park and PFI architecture. And yet there are lyrical moments to be had as you delve deeper into rural Hampshire, never more than a few miles from today's turnpikes. To be fair, such moments are even to be had on motorways. There is the moment, for example, where the M40 sweeps down from the Chilterns through a deep chalk cutting and out into Oxfordshire-in-excelsis. Here, you can see what seems to be an eagle-eye's distance. If only the Jag had flaps and wings, it might rise among all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

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Not always factually accurate but I’ll happily sacrifice that in return for some of the best rants against some of the most deserving targets...including the often sainted Wilberforce. no road there, and it is impossible for you to get through those woods.”“Thank you,” said I; “but through those woods we mean to go.” Just at Rural Ride through the North-East part of Sussex, and all across Kent, from the Weald of Sussex, to Dover We both escape over Richmond Bridge, me along past the faux-Georgian Riverside development designed by Quinlan Terry, an architect who would surely have preferred to work in Cobbett's lifetime (1762-1835) than his own (1937-). Neo-Georgian might well have been considered tasteful in Richmond in the 1980s, but for a supposedly classical architect to have inserted suspended ceilings behind sash windows is an aesthetic offence as least as great as Cobbett's tax-eaters' tea-garden-like houses. Honest yeomen were vanishing in the 1820s. They were Cobbett's heroes, the strong, independent farmers of yore, or folklore, who had nurtured the landscape he loved over many hundreds of years. Now, the common lands were all but enclosed and farm labourers had been reduced to wage slaves. Cobbett met some earning as little as six shillings a week - starvation wages.

Rural Rides in the Counties of Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Hampshire.... Original publication by Cobbett, 1830 and 1853. If I follow this parade of executive cars, it will take me, as surely as a New Labour politician follows the creed of Margaret Thatcher and her placemen, to superstores, out-of-town shopping centres, multi-storey car parks, drive-thru burger joints, multiplex cinemas and, worst of all, Swindon's Great Western Designer Retail Outlet. He would have hated them all, and so do I. The culprit, at least in part, is PFI, the private finance initiative, which has spawned bad buildings across the land. Mark Steel's review of reporters' journeys round Britain, starting with William Cobbett, the great English journalist and radical campaigner who was born 250 years ago. Mark talks to veteran horseman Dylan Winter and analyses a classic radio and TV genre that owes more than it realises to Cobbett - the tradition of going out and taking a look at Britain.dear good woman,” said I, “but you have been at [Pg 324] Ludgarshall?”—“No.”—“Nor at Andover?” (six miles another

unction. If this be the effect of their light, give me the darkness“o’ th a Sooth.” This is according to what I have heard. If, when I go

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The views above the hedges beyond the western flank of The Grange are of high cornfields ripening into the far distance, the sort of land Cobbett adored. Golf courses, one of the curses of modern Surrey, are few and far between. I cross the M3 between East and West Stratton and the southern main line from Bas ingstoke to Winchester at Micheldever. The road from here to Whitchurch is closed because of flooding. It would have taken me up by Freefolk Wood, a name to Cobbett's taste. I race down a section of the A303 dual carriageway instead. The general going seems to be 100mph despite a funereal procession of holiday caravans.