Travels with my rant

In the first of three articles following journeys made by 19th-century champion William Cobbett, Jonathan Glancey finds that there is now even more to lament about the state of England's southern counties

'All Middlesex is ugly not withstanding the millions upon millions which it is continually sucking up from the rest of kingdom." This is William Cobbett getting on to his hobbyhorse and into his stride with the first of his Rural Rides "of a hundred and four miles from Kensington to Uphusband". If Middlesex was ugly even before Rural Rides was published in 1830, what would Cobbett make of it now? I tackle the opening section of my Rural Rides Revisited, across Putney Bridge with 370 horses, under the prognathous bonnet of a supercharged Jaguar, compared with Cobbett's one. These extra 369 horses may sound superfluous, but they get me quickly away from The Wen, as Cobbett called London, and through its relentless suburbs as if I were riding Pegasus.

The ugliness of Middlesex is in the eye of the beholder. The most elusive of English counties, Middlesex, or Middx, or even just Mx, is little more than a doughnut-shaped postal area wrapped around west and north central London. For Cobbett, an agricultural labourer's son, the horror of Middlesex was the soil, "a sort of spewy gravel", and buildings that "consist generally of tax-eaters' showy, tea-garden-like houses, and of shabby dwellings of labouring people, who in this part of the country, look to be about half Saint Giles's: dirty, and have every appearance of drinking gin". For me, it's the trashy architecture funded by the private finance initiative (PFI), the rows of houses sprouting satellite TV dishes, gardens concreted over for executive saloons, and, at Mortlake, the first of many privatised buses, this one painted in a bilious Day-Glo orange.

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.

Tax-eaters, by the way, were one of Cobbett's great hates. Rural Rides is full of them, many of them irrational and some offensive, then as now. The list includes stock-jobbers, Church of England vicars, game-preserving magnates in the country, reactionary politicians in Westminster, Quakers, place-seekers, middlemen, rotten boroughs, hypocrites, Martello towers, the Duke of Wellington, pensioners, dead-weights and what Cobbett calls The Thing, by which he means the establishment.

Cobbett was a born campaigner. What he championed was England, and in particular an England of oaken wealds and downs south of the Thames. This was disappearing as fast as he rode, hunted hares and wrote. His dream England was to fuel the imagination of William Morris (1834-96) and thus, a touch ironically, suburbia itself via the garden city movement. For Cobbett, embryonic Regency suburbia was the decadent home of tax-eaters.

Tax-eaters, creatures of The Thing were those who devoured taxes paid by honest yeomen, wasting them on wars, pensions and political skulduggery. During the Napoleonic wars, the national debt had more than tripled, and in the years of peace that followed, a third of England's total revenue was spent on interest to fundholders and pensioners.

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.

As he rode through the southern counties, Cobbett witnessed changes wrought on the English countryside every bit as devastating as those wrought on towns and cities in the Black Country by the industrial revolution. As a one-time sergeant-major and yeoman farmer, this indignant polemicist railed against what he saw as the errors of his age, among these enclosure, paper money and the hypocrisy of the church. He was for the common man, but, especially perhaps after his army experience, against all forms of regimentation. He was imprisoned in 1809 for sedition: he dared to complain about the flogging of English soldiers by Prussian mercenaries. He supported universal male suffrage and the secret ballot, and was elected a very effective MP for Oldham in the great reform parliament of 1832.

Cobbett rode out from The Wen along byways and commons wherever possible, to avoid the new turnpike roads, the motorways of his day, and to meet com mon people. By the river Wey, near Farnham, he encountered a gang of labourers, among them a childhood friend, breaking stones as a form of job creation scheme. They are breaking them, rails Cobbett, "into very small pieces to make nice smooth roads lest the jolting in going along them should create bile in the stomachs of the over-fed tax-eaters". He feels himself lucky, as he shows his son a favourite oak tree on Tilford Common, that he has been able to educate himself. Although no longer a labourer, nor is he a "milksop" like Pitt the Younger or Canning, nor "as great a fool, as inefficient a mortal that are turned out from Winchester and Westminster school, or from any of those dens of dunces called Colleges and Universities".

I think of breakfasting at the New Barn Coffee House at Newlands Corner, a red-brick suburban building offering a breakfast ham-and-cheese sandwich and tea for £3.50 at the top of a snaking stretch of road avoiding Guildford. Instead, I register the price and then slip this amount in coins into one pocket. I will give these away later in the day. Cobbett saved the price of the food he didn't eat during the day - although he usually took breakfast - and gave the money to the needy he met on his rides. The hungry view from the coffee house across Merrow Downs stirs me from my sparrow-infested non-breakfast table. Cobbett would have loved it. I retrace my tyre tracks to a nearby stable and hire a horse, Treacle, to ride across the downs.

The morning is perfect. Clear, high skies and a small choir of skylarks. Views across to the Devil's Punchbowl and the distant South Downs, almost blue in the heat haze on the Sussex horizon. Two women walk two trios of labradors, one black, one golden; otherwise, aside from a lone jogger in a red baseball cap advertising Coca-Cola and a solitary mountain-biker, the Downs are empty. The clump of Treacle's hooves and the snorting of her morning breath are the backbeat to my canter across the downs. The jets to and from Gatwick and Heathrow are curiously subdued. Butterflies, blue, orange, peacock and cabbage white, flutter by. The grass is laced with daisies and buttercups, and here and there with Stella Artois and Diet Coke cans and supermarket sandwich wrappers.

Cobbett rode long days even in pouring rain. One day in November 1822 he set out from Egham, "the horses' manes and ears covered with the hoar before we got across Windsor Park". After breakfast at the Stag and Hounds in Binfield, he takes "a road as smooth as a die, a real stock-jobber's road" to Reading, where after lunch he harangues the farmers. He spent much time haranguing farmers. Cobbett was a popular speaker and acted as a kind of itinerant representative of the people long before he became an MP. He then rode all the way back to The Wen. "I came back on horse-back 40 miles, slept on the road, and finished my harangue at the end of twenty-two hours from leaving Kensington; and I cannot help saying, that is pretty well for Old Cobbett." It certainly was, seeing as he was 60, although Cobbett never admitted his age. He wanted to stay young and vigorous, and until his very last days on Normandy Farm, Farnham, he was. The day before he died he was carried around the farm to take a last, loving look at his crops and vegetables, although he never ate "garden stuff" himself.

He is buried in Farnham churchyard. I go to visit his grave. The church reminds me of a christening I attended at a nearby C of E church not so long ago, when the young, grey-haired vicar was indistinguishable from the young, grey-haired lady vicar, both wearing TV-screen-style glasses. Not only did they encourage children to run riot in the north aisle, but they expected us to sing hymns that were as illiterate as they were an insult to adult intelligence. I skulked out to sit on a 17th-century skull-and-crossbones tomb in the snow. The sort of hymns that Private Eye parodies in its Rocky Horror Hymn Book droned on in the background.

Private Eye, by the way, used to run a column under the heading Rural Rides, with a suitably bucolic wood-engraving as a masthead. It was written by "Bamber Gasket". Each fortnight, Mr Gasket would recall a trip by road from, say, Kensington to Uphusband, Wilts, via the A3 and obscure B roads. After absurd adventures in petrol stations and having criticised the skills of other road users, he would sign off by asking why the roads can't be left to professional motorists, and then adding "Reading Infirmary, Tuesday."

It was hard to get back into the car after the ride across Merrow Downs. For a few hours, I had been transported to the wealden world of yeomen farmers that Cobbett hankered after and rode so long and hard in search of. I diverted to Moor Park, near Bourne, to pay homage, as Cobbett did, to the spirit of Jonathan Swift, who stayed here when it was the home of Sir William Temple. Cobbett had very little time for most landlords. In his eyes they were greedy and destructive, and, what's more, they appeared not to understand why the countryside was in decline. Paper money was one reason. It meant a new system of buying, selling and stock-jobbing run by financiers in the "Fund Wen" who were replacing the old affections for the land and those who worked on it, with purely monetary relations and values.

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.

Back to earth with a bump: the experience of English motorways is rarely like this. Cobbett would have hated them. He disliked turnpike roads, despised canals, and lived long enough to hate the first public railways. His first rural ride from Kensington to Uphusband (Hurstbourne Tarrant) could have been made, 66 miles, in eight hours. He chose instead to ride the bylanes and across fields, through bridleways and hunting-gates. Such a journey is tricky to copy today.

Pubs are not geared up to water and feed horses, and even a supercharged Jaguar might be turned away from tracks that lead through private property. These self-important signs remind me of a game that a wealthy young undergraduate used to play; it was called "sweeping". He would sweep up Oxfordshire lanes at night with some well-oiled chums, sweep up the gravel drives of pretentious stock-jobbers' villas, play a few hoops of croquet, and sweep out again before irate owners rushed out to challenge him. Silly, of course, but two fingers up to the obsessive enclosure and privatisation of southern England. It is an ever harder place for the independently minded to travel. As for travellers, such as hippies and Gypsies, they are condemned to set up their temporary homes on the worst bits of wasteland, reinforcing the low view that many people have of them.

I turn the car down the narrow lanes that cut a diagonal path through Hampshire, down through lots of villages called something-or-other Candover to the Alresfords, Old and New, and so to Winchester, where Cobbett harangued the farmers. The lanes are very fast. There are no buses, public or private; or, at least, I don't see any. Twice, a BMW - one red, one blue - seems intent on attaching itself to my tail, as if they were Messerschmitts and my Jag a wounded Lancaster. I corkscrew off the road and up to The Grange. This is a magical and unexpected Grecian temple, Arcady in Hampshire, and once home of the Baring banking family. It was designed by William Wilkins, the architect of the National Gallery in The Wen. Now it is empty, except for the summer when it is home, delightfully, to the Grange Opera Company.

I drop down from here to New Alresford, drawn by the smell of oily smoke and superheated steam to the station, where a four-coach train with a coal-black Ivatt Class 2 tank engine (built Crewe, 1952) at its head is preparing to leave for the steep 1 in 80 climb towards Alton. Here it will meet sadly privatised electrics from Waterloo. The station is beautifully preserved. Its gas lamps and the wrought-iron finials on top of the semaphore signals are a joy. And yet, it's all too much like a film set for comfort. Passengers dressed in baseball caps and trainers appear to be members of some leisurewear convention. They look like Americans, yet speak with unplaceable TV-style southern English accents. Small children point at anything that moves and call it "Thomas". I feel out of place here. I can't even turn to huffing, puffing Cobbett for solace; he hated railways.

Alresford itself offers no relief. A handsome enough town, it has been given the heritage treatment up to its roofline. Lots of hanging baskets and direction signs, all squeaky clean. I cut back behind The Grange, weaving through lanes wriggling with stoats, weasels, pheasants and a sudden hare. Cobbett spotted an acre of hares in north Hampshire; I saw just the two on my three rural rides. Foot and mouth disease, meanwhile, has ravaged the farm animal population. As for the birds, the removal of hedgerows and the move away from winter stubbles has robbed songbirds of shelter. There are half the number of song thrushes and half the number of skylarks there were 30 years ago. I saw no linnets and no corn buntings on my first rural ride.

Plenty of people though. Between 1801 and 1821, censuses recorded a 40% increase. Cobbett wouldn't believe it. "A man that can suck that in," he wrote, "will believe, literally believe, that the moon is made of green cheese." He was wrong. He convinced himself, however, that the rural population was falling. The issue of paper money had created a cash nexus in farming. The new and landless wage slaves, denied the right to glean, to gather and certainly to poach (for Cobbett, hares, rabbits and game birds were all fair game for rural labourers), headed for better paid jobs in The Wen.

Cobbett visited many old churches and estimated the strength of their congregations when built. He found churches with attendances as low as a couple of dozen in the 1820s that might have housed several hundred. From this he deduced that the population had declined. Such a practical man as Cobbett was unable to believe that ancient church builders would have provided such generous space for so few. He had no time for fancy theories and blasted the "filosofees" of "Scotch intellectuals" who had prompted the laissez-faire system of economics to undermine his beloved yeoman England. Although stubborn, Cobbett was prepared to change his mind when he saw that he was wrong. His direct experience of politicians, for example, turned him from a conservative to a radical.

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.

At St Mary Bourne, I want to tell Cobbett that the blacksmith is still here and that a yeoman house is being handsomely rethatched. I'm not sure if I should tell him that a young man in a baseball cap is attaching a satellite TV dish to the front of his cottage, nor that two youths in baseball caps are skateboarding along the high street. The baseball cap is now the national headgear as surely as Coca-Cola is our national drink and Mr Ronald McDonald's soggy beefburger our national dish. Cobbett preferred bread, cold bacon and milk. And so to Uphusband, or Hurstbourne Tarrant as it legally known. And back to The Wen.

First stop is the pretty Fox and Hounds pub at Highclere, where I swap the Jag for a 24-speed bicycle, and then on to Burghclere to see the Sandham Memorial Chapel, with its anti-war paintings by Stanley Spencer. I come upon Greenham Common, the scene of more recent anti-military protests. It is being turned into a business park. Perhaps the local church might be renamed St Andrew Undershaft in honour of George Bernard Shaw's cynical "guns are good for us" armaments tycoon in Major Barbara.

Cobbett found this a "miserably poor" country and its villages set below the Kennet and Avon canal "villainously ugly". Even the vegetation is wrong. Instead of the oaks that would grow best here, "plenty of fir-trees and other rubbish have been planted recently". Cobbett despised the area more than he might have because this route took him through "the Heir Loom Estate of the greatest Captain of the Age". Wellington, a tax-eater of the highest order, was one of Cobbett's bogeymen. On the way to the great captain's estate, I pass Aldermaston, its sinister Atomic Research Establishment buildings reminding me oddly of Birkenau, and the ghosts of CND protesters.

This is a claustrophobic stretch of countryside, hemmed in and dark. I cross the Devil's Highway (the Roman road to Silchester), divert to Blackbushe airport to plot a Rural Flight, and battle down to Camberley through military traffic. This is army land. Then it's back into the Jag and a canter along increasingly congested roads, punctuated by less than magic roundabouts, and back to The Wen via Sunninghill, Virginia Water, Egham and Hounslow Heath (Heathrow airport). This whole tract of country, says Cobbett, is "execrable", starting with Sunninghill on the western side of Windsor Park, a spot all made into grounds and gardens by tax-eaters. "The inhabitants of it have beggared twenty agricultural villages and hamlets."

I feel pretty beggared myself as I roll hungry as a horse into The Wen. The indefatigable Cobbett has quite tired me out. But I have come to like him, which I don't think I did before. Yes, he has his irrational prejudices - which of us doesn't? Yes, he is egotistical - but in a way that is, as William Hazlitt said of him, entirely without affectation. I like to think that this conservative-hearted rebel would have fought the errors of our age - PFI, out-of-town superstores, privatised national railways, leisurewear, executive housing, boring architecture, the loss of songbirds, suspended ceilings, deregulated buses, the suburbanisation of rural villages - with me. But he might have been too busy hunting hares. And there, until next week, we split company.

 Rural Rides Revisited continues next week. A new version of Cobbett's book is published by Penguin on September 27. To order a copy in advance call 0870 066 7979