This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Theodore Dalrymple sometimes feels like the elegist for a country in terminal decline. If Evelyn Waugh wove tragic satires of the dying days of Edwardian England, Dalrymple repeats them as bittersweet farce, as a fat, tattooed, absurdly self-forgetting country rolls blindly into the civilisational sunset.
Car Park: Slovenliness as
a Way of Life, Theodore Dalrymple (Gibson Square Books, £14.99)
Dalrymple is never less than entertaining (not least on the pages of The Critic), but it should be noted that he has been ill-served by his publishers in the case of his latest work, An Englishman’s Home Is His Car Park: Slovenliness as a Way of Life.
In the first instance, the title is misleading: the book is really a reflection on modern Worcester as a microcosm of modern English life, not a sweeping state-of-the-nation book. Likewise, the book’s formatting is poor — although a short volume, it cries out for chapters, rather than the stream of consciousness that greets readers, along with small but irritating flaws such as typographical errors and footnotes needlessly strewn across multiple pages.
That aside, once we are suitably inoculated against these annoyances, it is a thoroughly entertaining read, as darkly funny and humanely nasty as fans of Dalrymple could hope for. The book spans, effectively, a long weekend that Dalrymple and his wife spend at Worcester after she was called up for jury service.
From this suitably banal beginning, he weaves a theme of the town’s layered past, from the repeated desecrations of town planners, to the jarring generational shifts and contrasts — recent immigration included — that wrack the once-elegant cathedral town.
The business of the court adds drama to the more static story of the city, and Dalrymple is at his best in Rumpole of the Bailey mode, casting a worldly but compassionate eye over the strutting barristers, bleary judges and surly defendants shuffling around the shire court.
One of the things that makes Dalrymple so entertaining, like all gifted comics, is his ability to see things perpetually afresh. The many absurdities, cruelties and stupidities we now take for granted in modern life are made searingly visible. He opts out of the collective shrug at pointlessly hideous buildings, poorly dressed and overweight fellow citizens, and mind-numbing, vulgar entertainment.
At his best, he’s the little boy pointing out that the emperor not only has no clothes, but a pendulous belly and a very unflattering sleeve tattoo. In a society that puts up with, and even celebrates, mediocrity, ugliness and individualism, this is a refreshing corrective.
But as with another sharp critic of British decline, Peter Hitchens, there is a sort of comfort-taking in despair. It would be very easy to forget, as you immerse yourself in the tragicomedy of the text, that whatever the blights upon its fabric, Worcester remains an essentially pretty and pleasant cathedral town full of charming old buildings and winding medieval streets. Indeed, it feels significant that although the cathedral looms in the distance at various points, the reader never darkens its door or gets to peer inside.
We get a very amusing takedown of the Swan Theatre, with such enlightening performances as Scummy Mummies — Hot Mess, “advertised as ‘Mum’s night out!’” Yet if a glance at the Swan’s programming confirms this portrait, how fair is Dalrymple’s claim that “if the theatre is indeed a cherished part of the cultural life of the city, one can only wonder about the quality of that cultural life”?
Had he walked quarter of an hour down the road, he could have gone to evensong at Worcester Cathedral, which has one of the best choirs in the country. The existence of a sublime and distinctively English art form was available on a daily basis throughout this long assault against the ugliness of much of modern life, and this should give us pause.
Whilst Dalrymple’s pugilistic portrait of contemporary crudeness is entertaining, and I would also argue important and necessary, it is very far from complete. Without getting on the train and knocking on doors, I will make an educated guess. I would imagine that Worcester, like many historic towns in the Midlands — and I grew up in such an historic cathedral town myself — is a tale of two cities.
The regional arts scene is underfunded and low quality outside the larger cities, and high streets are often very run down outside of pockets of wealth. A poorer, less educated and older population will indeed be consuming what is on offer, and it’s pretty poor stuff. But there will also be (and class is an ever present ghost at this literary feast) a large middle-class audience that will be going to the regular classical music concerts at the cathedral, attending the town’s famous festivals of Elgar and the Three Choirs, and regularly going up to Birmingham for more serious cultural fare.
They will by and large not be overweight, badly dressed or tattooed. This is a question of who does, and who does not, have access to wealth, education and social capital.
If class is one underexplored subtext, Christianity is another. Dalrymple scrupulously avoids the cathedral, but he does glance in at a former church that has been turned into a Slug and Lettuce chain pub. Dalrymple writes of his sorrow at the passing of religion, but admits he personally finds it absurd. This contradiction tends towards a council of despair:
I recognise, however, that cultural entropy is irreversible, that the Barbara Pym-ladies will never return to St Nicholas, and that therefore that the church building itself can never return to its original function.
The reader is left wondering: Why not? It sometimes feels that if they thoroughly reject the Whiggish doctrine of perpetual progress, many conservative critics seem to instead hold with the dogma of inevitable decline. I’m put in mind of the furore around the so-called “Quiet Revival”. Youthful church attendance was hoped to be suddenly on the rise, but following a humiliating confession of incompetence by YouGov, the corrected statistics seem to show the usual pattern of stagnation and slow decline.
Yet what is religious faith? Is it sitting in a pew every week, or is it “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”? According to a Pew survey, fewer than half of people over 50 believe in life after death. But amongst those of my generation, aged 18 to 34, nearly two thirds believe that there is something beyond the death of the body.
Here Dalrymple has given us a valuable and entertaining Worcesterian window into the country we live in, but it is one with a limited field of vision. One can see only a civilisation on the wane, but miss the elite failures causing it. One can, not inaccurately, look on ordinary people as vectors and victims of decline, but thereby miss the visions of hope and revival still flickering in the shadows of the national twilight.
