Buying English

The Guardian reports on what they say is a trend for the English to actually start being proud of their heritage - and buying into it:

Since the early 90s, the appetite for English things has changed. This change is visible in mail-order catalogues and lifestyle magazines, in house prices in certain places, in where people go for holidays or the weekend; in trends in interior decoration and gardening, and children’s names, in fashionable foods and periods for furniture, in new sorts of shopping markets and new shops such as Old Town and Labour And Wait ("traditional products for the home") in east London. Consumer trends are slippery to define or explain but some of the symptoms of people buying into Englishness, consciously or otherwise, have become hard to miss: the feverish popularity of beach huts, and of knobbly local potatoes at farmers’ markets, the rebranding of fish and chips and sausages and mash as restaurant dishes, the transformation of peeling old resorts such as Whitstable and Hastings into locations for second homes and fashion shoots, even the status of the name Jack, with its bracing whiff of Enid Blyton and the Secret Seven, as the favourite for baby boys in England and Wales for the past 10 years running.

Blimey.

Guardian Article
<via Agenda Inc>