The one-hour journey down from London to this most famous incarnation of Middle England is a jarring transition from drab suburb to rolling green. And it was this Arcadian escape that once helped birthed a national joke: a provincial dreamscape of undulating Georgian townhouses and posh schoolchildren had somehow curated an unfathomable discontent. “The Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” were letter writers and moralists, the sort of people who once made sure the bins were collected and sex was kept in the bedroom. So damaging was the archetype that in 2009 the council forced a rebrand: the disgusted were encouraged to give up the act and become the “delighted of Tunbridge Wells” instead.

Ten years on, you have to blend the two to understand the local mood. The busybodying and spleen, now more in step with the national mood, is taking on the behemoth of British decline. “I am using what I would call an application of chaos theory to apply pressure on all agencies through an increase in media relations,” as Hawker confidently puts it. Southern Water is the target: the indebted utility that has paid out more to shareholders than invested in keeping the town’s famous royal waters agush. It helps that the inconvenience also touches on the town’s usual bêtes noires: infrastructure that cannot keep up with the steady flight to Tunbridge Wells from London and a nation that’s lost its common decency.

Residents have organized accordingly. Once the nation imagined them making jam and penning acerbic notes to the Telegraph. Now they’re organizing emergency relief. “It’s the lies, the lack of information and the lack of honesty,” says Mel Alesi, the parish councilor that runs Staplehurst Emergency Help Team, a sort of disaster-focused residential association that now hosts a 24-hour helpline for the things that keep the new Middle England up at night: pandemic, water shortage, the collapse of civic authority. Alesi proudly explains her body was quicker off the line than officials in nearby Maidstone, quickly delivering a private water supply they had been quietly hoarding in anticipation of the worst.

For 114 years, the Tories ruled Tunbridge Wells without ever really thinking about the place. The Lib Dems triumphing in mid-Nineties local election was, as one local journalist recalled, “marginally less seismic than the defeat of Rome.” On a Friday afternoon in the Pantiles, a Georgian promenade that is uncharacteristically thriving for an English high street, no one is particularly sad to see the old empire go. Like many towns in the south east, it’s now an extended suburb of London, where young couples rub up next to proprietorial men in corduroys who look like John Simpson.

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Up in the hills you can find the Conservative Club, what looks like a run down colonial villa gazing over its erstwhile patch. A photo of the former Tory MP, who lost his seat to a Lib Dem rout of the Home Counties in 2024, still hangs in a dusty frame. Yet it is Reform that now hosts its meetings here, having now tripled its local party membership. By the party’s local headquarters, next to a cottage where Thackeray once lived, two elderly burghers quickly disappear inside when I announce myself. No one in the local Conservative Party wants to talk at all.

In a place that never had to think much about politics — not for nothing is its town’s motto “Do Well Doubt Not” — what’s now unfolding is a new dynamic in British politics, where Reform and the Lib Dems, two parties that could as well come from different planets, find themselves battling for the middling soul of the country.

The idea of Middle England, as Joe Moran argues in his essay on the term, is one of the foundational myths of recent British politics. In an age when parties won from the center, discerning the sensibilities of the market towns and suburbs became something of a national sport. Class: A View from Middle England, a 1979 book by Jilly Cooper, was the first to popularize the term; the book’s forensic obsession with the vagaries of taste and class soon leaked into the politics. From the early Nineties onwards, somehow “Middle England” came to represent everywhere from Tunbridge Wells to Woking to Peterborough, encompassing grammar schools, aspiration, “Pebbledash People” and “Mondeo Man”, foreign holidays, family values and the sort of budding jobsworths who called up John Major’s famous “cone hotlines”.

The stereotype was always confused and shapeshifting because it was designed to be fundamentally apolitical, a “small-c conservatism” forever moving with the expanding middle classes. The concept, by those who sought to court it (and those who despised it) was always ripe for abuse. Philip Gould, reflecting on New Labour’s triumphs, settled on a suitably broad definition: “A rich vein of empirical common sense that has always been central to the British people.” It is exactly this sort of sophistry, Moran argues, that led to the “tenacious idea that the key median voters decide elections.”

In the country’s present upheaval, it’s an idea being tested to extinction by everything from recent immigration arriving into the shires to failing water firms. In their survey of Britain’s fragmenting political landscape, More in Common evokes seven political tribes — in response to the majority that now believe “the system is at fault” for the county’s decline. In practice, they range from “established liberals”, who believe in moderately reforming Britain’s existing institutions, to the “rooted patriots and dissenting disruptors” who seem on the verge of marching on London.

Taken together, the More in Common analysis is a spotters guide to voters in the towns and villages of the Kent High Weald — where neither of the two major parties have featured prominently. All the while, it seems clear that “Middle England” has now become little more than a centrist sop, bound together by docile slogans about family, stability and home. Now, though, all that’s unraveling, a portent not only for political volatility beyond 2029, but also for a corner of the country changing far faster than the old myths can cope with.

Ed Davey, the cricket-playing, bungee-jumping leader of the Liberal Democrats, has emerged as the last great defender of this apolitical calm. In the great tradition of Middle English politics, he has attempted to raise a big tent: exploiting the latent if superficial snobbery of places like Tunbridge Wells to form a sort of moralistic anti-populist front. “There’s just this massive space, call it ‘Middle Britain,” he told the New Statesman last September, “decent people who think Labour haven’t provided change but who are deeply worried about Reform.”

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I ask the local MP Mike Martin to dig a bit deeper. The former Army man, a Pashtun speaker who made his name calling out the follies of British strategy in Afghanistan, is both patrician and progressive, the sort of Tunbridge Wells hybrid who could inspire the town’s sixth formers to take their Duke of Edinburgh to the Donbas. “If you go out on a Saturday morning, the people look like me,” Martin tells me over the phone. “They’ve got two kids, they want a sensibly run economy, they’re socially liberal and internationalist and they reject the parochialism we are seeing from the Conservatives.”

His undeniable popularity comes with a caveat: everyone likes the idea of Martin, but no one I speak to seems able to explain what the Lib Dems actually stand for when it comes to keeping the water running and the “disgusted” at bay. “I don’t think that’s fair,” the MP responds when I put it to him. “It’s about being radical in a way that is also credible. And we’re not there yet, but I think we are moving in the right direction.”

A short drive from Tunbridge Wells is an ominous reminder of how vulnerable this vagueness now feels. For the last three months, the pretty market town of Crowborough has seen a coalition of public sector workers and retired investment bankers mobilize for weekly protests via an organization called Crowborough Shield. This is a community group that has trumped the old rigmarole parish politics and unearthed a mood — via legal challenges to the Home Office and self-funded community patrols — that feels borderline insurrectionist.

The sense of rebellion is jarring. This is a place where Arthur Conan Doyle once went to play golf and die. The morning I arrive, the Government has quietly been moving asylum seekers into the town’s army base, part of their operation to end the use of commercial hotels. Crowborough’s disquiet has curdled into outright paranoia. Walking up the hill from the station, the sight of a lone male sends pensioners scuttling inside. As they pass, vigilant Land Rovers give me the once over.

In the White Hart Pub at the bottom of Chapel Green, I meet Nick Jones, former scout leader, and founder of the Crowborough Watch. Another community-funded patrol group, its mix of school teachers, ex-bouncers and councilors has come together to put local minds at rest. “Last night on patrol, we found a woman quivering in a hedge,” Jones tells me. “It could have just been paranoia on her part, but the slightest thing now is unnerving because of the vacuum of information from the Home Office.”

To reach Crowborough’s new asylum camp, you have to travel through the very heart of this new Middle England. Management consultants in lycra jog past forbidden Tudor mansions that look out over manicured golf clubs. A road hazard sign reads: “Elderly People.” At the entrance to the new asylum base, you arrive at a newly built estate that aspires to the gentler Crowborough of yore. Walking back towards the unsold houses, one family approaches with a pair of huskies and a sullen toddler in a pram. They moved in November and have already had reporters knocking to ask if they’ll sell for £20.

I try to strike up a conversation about politics. Are the Conservatives still relevant in their spiritual home? “Everyone I’ve spoken to in Crowborough is voting Reform,” the mother says bluntly. Further up the road, a group of policemen are trying to encourage a YouTube streamer in a van to move on. Tomorrow, the town is preparing for a set piece protest, with rumors that everyone from Tommy Robinson to Rupert Lowe will turn up to steal the show. “You don’t really care unless it’s in your town,” the mum adds of the new arrivals. “I expect they’ll get bored of Crowborough and travel into Tunbridge Wells. They’ve got no idea what’s coming.”

Away from the camp, I seek out some of the town’s older residents, wandering down one of Crowborough’s winding private roads. The big mansions were built for people who wanted to drift off into the sleep of deep England. I find a smart, polite woman in a pink Gore-Tex jacket and black sunglasses out for a walk. Did she ever imagine the country’s present chaos finding its way here? “I think it was inevitable,” she says with rehearsed drollness. “Since Covid, those wilderness years, we all hoped our life would go back to normal but it hasn’t.” I ask her if she still believes in the Tory party, the shires, the old idea of Middle England. “I just like the middle ground,” she says. Does she think it still exists? “Probably not.”

Local elections are traditionally an opportunity for upset, rebellion and protest. And in May, when the voters of Conservative metroland (from Tunbridge Wells and Tandridge, to Nuneaton and Bedworth) go the polls, the Greens will be hoping to repeat the gains of last year, when they established pluralities and majorities in the councils of Mid-Suffolk, East Suffolk, Babergh and the Forest of Dean. Of course, this was amid a general wave of anti-Conservative feeling. But these results were distinct. The Green Party, once the preserve of the bohemian bourgeoisie, holed up in university enclaves such as Brighton and Bristol, has managed a startling prison break, vaulting fences and stiles to advance across the fields of Tory England.

Whether these victories stick is an open question. But safe seats are only safe until they aren’t, and the last time dozens of Tory strongholds swung, in 1997, they never returned to the Conservative fold. There have been numerous theories to explain this metamorphosis: Nimbyism, short-lived protest voting, disaffection at the cost-of-living crisis, strategic localism, and a genuine slippage from Conservative conservationism to Green ecologism. But, while the Greens have recently been associated with a younger urban electorate concerned about housing, social liberalism and technological acceleration towards net-zero, the party always contained a “small is beautiful”, Little England wing. An older block that prioritises “green space”, local control, local public transport and responsive administration.

To understand the true colours of this countryside revolt, I head out to Mid-Suffolk, the first local authority the Greens have ever governed by majority control. Arriving in the market town of Stowmarket, I am greeted at the station by three of the district’s Green councillors, Teresa Davis, Colin Lay and James Patchett. In their chinos, desert boots, tattersall shirts and gilets, none stands out as a typical Green. All are former Conservatives with backgrounds in the military, farming, and charities: the lieutenants of Suffolk’s Burkean platoons. They show me around Stowmarket, from the Union Jacks adorning the Victorian high street, to the large and prosperous new estates patched onto its exterior. This was a bedrock of Conservative support in 2019. And nothing about the town speaks to a Green Party positioning itself towards an exodus of disgruntled millennial Corbynites from Labour, as some have suggested. Patchett admits that: “We’re almost the opposite [of young and professional]. If you look at the people who are in the local Green Party, who come to the meetings, well… we, in our forties, are the young ones.”

Stowmarket, still the centre for Suffolk farming communities in the outlying areas, is now also something of a dormitory town, with trains running to London in just over an hour. On the outskirts of the town lies the Orwellian-sounding “Gateway 14”, a vast freeport made up of huge distribution and logistics warehouses, the product of the Conservative’s attempts at a national industrial policy and “levelling up” in the area. Many residents grumble about the development, occasionally caveating with the need for “jobs for the young”. And this isn’t the only controversial infrastructure project in the region: Green Party support has also surged in East Suffolk, where Government plans to extend nuclear power capacity with Sizewell C have been met with stiff resistance.

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Davis, Lay and Patchett deny that the Green Party surge in Suffolk comes down to Nimbyism, though they do allow that the pace of development targets from Whitehall has caused resistance. And speaking of the freeport, Lay offers little to ameliorate stereotypes of campaigners with a proprietorial attitude towards their surroundings, and a scorn for anything concrete or new: “There were a lot of objections to the project from the local people who live on the farms because their view used to be of rolling hills towards Stowmarket — now you’ve got a view of Suffolk’s biggest shed.”

It also seems that the pressures of the renewable energy transition, through developments such as solar farms, are, counterintuitively, pushing farmers and rural voters towards the Green Party. “We just had three solar farm applications go through planning,” says Patchett. “We’re obviously not against solar power. But we are against solar in inappropriate places. If developers are taking rich, fertile farming land and wanting to build solar farms on it — then we’re opposed to that.” The Green councillors justify working in opposition to certain green energy developments, because “one, the residents don’t want it and, two, these fields are the wrong place to put it”.

It seems odd that the Greens would be the best party to vocalise these niggles. Why have Davis, Lay and Patchett clustered there rather than in the party most associated with their perspective? “I don’t think the Conservatives have an identity you can get behind. We’re all disillusioned Conservatives, aren’t we? The first time I voted Green was four years ago, I always used to be Blue,” says Davis. Lay puts the Tory conversion to Green politics down to multiple factors, with the issue of competence looming large: “I think [the Truss debacle] reinforced what a lot of people were already thinking and gave them permission to say no — enough is enough.”

Their attempts to convert the surrounding areas have been boosted by recent events. All the Stowmarket Greens have set about capturing the conservationist and bucolic streak within Tory voters that has been alienated by Rishi Sunak’s Net Zero U-turn. “You’d knock on the door of a big detached house. You’d 100% know they were a Conservative voter. They’d have lovely big gardens. They admit to voting Conservative,” says Patchett, “You’d then ask them their views. ‘We like the environment, we like nature. We believe in all these things as well.’ That’s how we are flipping Conservative voters.”

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Despite the Stowmarket councillors’ insistence that the Green surge wasn’t down to a protest vote, others see their local victories more pragmatically. One Ipswich resident says they switched from Blue to Green because, “Tories aren’t really Tory anymore. Labour is the above with red ties and barely any real point of distinction. Green is a good protest vote.” Although they do concede that: “I wouldn’t [vote] the same at a general election.”

However, the often dismissed question of building continues to rear its head. Geri Silverstone, a political consultant who has worked closely on Green political issues, tells me the party’s eastern surge is down to infrastructure pressures rather than a wholesale abandonment of the Conservatives. “It’s a reaction to development,” he says. “Those Suffolk districts have been under the cosh to meet government targets. There’s been a backlash from their residents. These areas are predominately 50+ years old and that’s why you’re seeing a movement from traditional Conservative voters to the Greens. It’s an alternative — they think this is a party that’s going to say no.”

Up the coast, in the small, Georgian town of Halesworth, I test this theory out on Green Party co-leader Adrian Ramsay and local councillor Toby Hammond, who were analysing river water connected to run-off sewage plants. Ramsay also puts the Green swing primarily down to local alienation. But he admits that the Greens have been pursuing a different politics in Suffolk from the one they might in urban enclaves: “You’re going to see a very different style of Green politics in rural Suffolk than you’re going to see in Brighton, certainly. The leader of Mid-Suffolk is a farmer who is very pro-farming. We’re less tied up with some of the more fringe issues discussed elsewhere.”

To scrape beneath the competing rhetoric, I went looking for Green converts at what used to be called “the Conservative Party at prayer” — a local Anglican Church hosting an environmental panel. The event was attended by the Bishop of St Edmundsbury, Thérèse Coffey (then-Secretary for the Environment), Green Party activists, Ramsay and Conservative Councillor Richard Rout. The congregation: a grey sea of fashionably dressed parishioners. I was probably the only person under 30, and one of five under 40. A pensioner, dressed in fashionable workwear, sidled up to me and joked that “Coffey doesn’t know what she’s in for”, and there was an audible grumble as she entered the church.

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Various stalls lining the church outlined local concerns, everything from newts and birds, to the greatly disliked plan to run a series of pylons from Norwich to Tilbury to connect an offshore windfarm to the national grid. There were few — Green, Conservative or other — willing to make any kind of case for the potential efficacy of the pylon plan. No one, politician nor voter, mentioned that the cost-of-living and climate crisis, alongside energy security and Net Zero goals, might warrant speed over caution.

Outside, a tall man in a tweed suit, with a voice like Laurence Olivier, identified himself to me as former Conservative Councillor Michael Gower. “I’m a Tory Green! Don’t you believe it,” he bellowed. After asking him what “Tory Greenism” consisted of, Gower told me it’s “about doing things on the ground. I’ve been planting trees and testing water quality. Tories are local activists! We don’t like Sizewell C, and we don’t like the onshoring of wind turbines!” But, after he’d finished, I was none the wiser. Was he a green Conservative or a conservative Green? Was there any difference? How did an objection to onshore wind farms square with his professed environmentalism?

If Suffolk is anything to judge by, the “Green revolt” seems to be powered by those with the wealth and time to force a change in local politics. Rather than a national movement, it will remain a narrow phenomenon, both generationally and geographically, unless it can reach beyond its established confines. Because elsewhere in Halesworth, life goes on.  Young farmers, builders, and tradespeople gather in the pub, easily ignoring rural England’s debate over the future of the nation. The young sink pints, murmuring the politics of dark complaint, while receiving no echo in the church just yards away.

It feels weirdly incongruent, then, that the monastery where Bede lived and prayed is now adjacent to the vast car park where Nissan’s output waits to be exported around the world. The vast Port of Tyne complex sits on the edge of Jarrow Slake, a tidal lagoon, known locally as ‘Jarra Slack’, a name that hints at the town’s ancient history: ‘Släcka’ is the Norwegian word for slake, or quench. In 794 a Viking raiding party met a sticky end here when they were repelled by the local Anglo-Saxons and their retreating longboats were dashed on the rocks at Tynemouth.

Over a thousand years later, Jarrow was once again the site of bloody violence. In the febrile decades of industrial unrest that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a local magistrate was murdered, ostensibly by a striking miner called William Jobling, though the case remains controversial. Jobling was hanged in 1832 and his body was tarred, hung in chains and bolted into a gibbet that was toured through the colliery districts to intimidateee the striking pitmen. At Jarrow Slake it was then attached to a 21-foot wooden post to swing in the wind as a warning to all others (and in full view of the house where Jobling’s widow lived).

Jobling’s trial took place amid what the general commanding the British Army in Northern England called an “almost military occupation”, and his hasty execution was undoubtedly meant as an example to the newly formed miners’ unions of Northumberland and Durham who were striking for better working conditions — including reduced working hours for children from 16 hours per day to 12; indeed the sentencing judge described their strike action as “illegal proceedings which have disgraced the county”, and urged them to take “warning by his fate”.

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The pitmen’s final defeat by starvation and intimidation had a profound influence on the generations that followed. In 1939, the local Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson published a famous j’accuse against the capitalists who had laid waste to her constituency of Jarrow: The Town That Was Murdered. She argued that ruthless tyranny abounded in the coalfields, citing the strike-breaking actions of aristocratic coal-owners like the pantomime villain Charles Vane Stewart, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry (who is known for his forceful opposition to the ban on child labour in collieries.)

Londonderry’s was an example followed by the heartless Victorian plutocrat and Liberal MP, Sir Charles Mark Palmer. It was his vast shipyards that turned Jarrow into the archetypal one-industry town, with all the attendant socioeconomic problems. The yards attracted thousands of migrants, especially the Irish, whose presence saw the town become known as Little Ireland, and rekindled in that part of Tyneside a Catholicity that Bede might’ve recognised (“Our Father who art in Hebburn, Jarrow be thy name.”) In matters of industrial relations and employee welfare, Palmer shared the same outlook as The Simpson’s Mr. Burns. Although overblown tributes to civic worthies are not uncommon, it’s rare to see a lie as brazen, and frankly laughable, as the encomium on his statue opposite the town hall: “a life devoted to the social advancement of the working classes”.

The experience of crushing defeats at the hands of coal-owners in the 1830s and 40s, and then in the General Strike of 1926, had bred a cautious and conservative approach among the trade unions of the North East. It partly explains why the Durham Miners Association became the last of the miners’ unions to affiliate to the Labour Party. This pathological resistance to confrontation meant that even as the “hungry thirties” bit hard following the closure of Palmers in 1931, with unemployment levels reaching up to 80% in places like Jarrow, there was surprisingly little unrest, or much in the way of Communist stirrings. This was met with disbelief from those who knew how miserable conditions were for the unemployed — and caused Wilkinson to muse, “if not Jarrow, then where?”

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By 1936, as crippling unemployment dragged on, and promised government support failed to materialise, Jarrow Council made a decision. In the conciliatory traditions of North East England, 200 out-of-work local men would march to Parliament and petition Stanley Baldwin’s government to provide work for the town. 85 years ago this week, they set off.

The strategy of the march organisers was astute: they knew that, unless handled carefully, political demonstrations can repel as much as they can galvanise. Therefore, the march organisers were careful to demonstrate discipline and dignity in their demand for work, not handouts. Churchmen were courted and Communists were wheedled out. And, as over 60% of these unemployed riveters and platers were Great War veterans, they presented a disciplined picture of men marching smartly in step, blankets tightly rolled, demonstrating their endurance and good order in a deliberate appeal to Middle England.

And yet, despite all this, what they got at the Palace of Westminster was not government action, nor even a formal reception, but cups of tea. The reaction was captured brilliantly by Thomas Cantrell Dugdale’s painting “Arrival of the Jarrow Marchers in London”, where a socialite in a cocktail dress peers out of her drawing room window at the throng outside, while her bored companion blows smoke rings with studied indifference. After causing a little inconclusive chatter in the Commons, the marchers got the train home.

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But it wasn’t just that Londoners didn’t care; it’s that they couldn’t understand. Though the depression may have bit hard in the industrial heartlands of the North, Southern England was booming in the 30s: new light industries producing consumer goods were sprouting along the Thames Valley and London was experiencing an incredible housing boom. Back in Jarrow, the old joke was that Hitler saved the town — albeit temporarily — by providing war-work for the old shipyards.

Still, by 1945, middle-class people had felt “the call of conscience,” as AJP Taylor put it. The immiseration of Jarrow and places like it were uppermost in many voters’ minds when they cast their votes in Labour’s first landslide. But the fundamentals of the British economy did not shift, and have not since — success stories such as Nissan notwithstanding.

Just in recent weeks it’s been reported that the North East has not only the highest levels of child poverty, and the greatest number of deaths from opioid abuse, but it has also seen the sharpest fall in life expectancy of any English region. So, I find it hard to shake the pessimistic view that the North, having experienced a relatively brief few centuries of industrial prosperity, will never again throw off its subordination to the South, or indeed the legacy of its century-long economic decline.

Although there are some signs of optimism, especially in low carbon and renewable energy, with giga factories being built and wind turbine blades emerging from old dockyards — a pleasing narrative arc perhaps given our disproportionate role in carbonising the planet – the ability of the British state to level up the North East will always face the brute facts of geography and history.