If you’re driving through Lincolnshire from the South-East, chances are you’re just passing through. Perhaps you’re heading to the nature reserves further north for a spot of scenic tourism, or to the east coast for a day at the beach. As you bomb up the A1’s ancient carriageway (parts of it are 10,000 years old), leaving behind commuter-belt Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire for the thinner air of Lincolnshire, the landscape gets emptier, petrol gets cheaper and roadside cafes get more eccentric. Settlements get sparser, too. Lincolnshire is the second-largest English county, but one of the least populous: 42nd out of 48 in terms of people per square mile.
You keep going, finally outside London’s blast radius, free from its cultural and economic gravity but not yet into the post-industrial North. Names on the motorway signs reek of Middle England. Grantham, birthplace of Margaret Thatcher and the Dambusters. Melton Mowbray, birthplace of the pork pie. This part of the world is about as Brexity as it gets: in 2016, in some parts of Lincolnshire, 75% voted to leave the European Union.
If you’re more comfortable in the post-Blair Britain of social liberalism, buy-to-let portfolios, Eurostar minibreaks and ironic bunting, you probably don’t want to stop in Lincolnshire. You should stop in Lincolnshire.
Pull in at Stamford, a town preserved to an almost surreal degree from the depredations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries thanks to its near-feudal relationship to the nearby stately home, Burghley House. This colossal sixteenth-century ‘prodigy house’ was constructed by William Cecil, Lord High Treasurer to Elizabeth I. Today it’s still owned by the Cecils (confusingly, the Marquess and Marchioness of Exeter), though the family themselves now mostly live in British Columbia.
Down the road, Stamford itself is almost wholly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century in its architecture, and permanently besieged by people filming the type of BBC costume drama that can’t decide between nostalgia and trying to cancel the past on the grounds of being old-fashioned.
BBC Costume Drama History, roughly speaking, covers an era that began with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and lasted until the sexual one began (as Philip Larkin put it) in 1963. After 1963, Britain modernised, with a capital M, and since then anyone who demurs has been increasingly shoved to the margins. You’d be forgiven for thinking we had no history at all before the BBC Costume Era (BCE). But in fact the BCE is barely the tip of a huge, mostly submerged iceberg of Britain’s past, the vast majority of which lies under dark waters, in a time where people spoke strangely and really didn’t think like us at all.
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