A cultural history, a memoir, a love letter and a reckoning

The English Midlands is the least eulogised part of these islands; the bit left over when all of the sharper, sexier regions have staked their claim; the blank space at the centre of the map. And yet. This is also a bellwether region, the canary in the national mine. The perfect symbol of an in-between nation at a very in-between moment in time. Shouldn’t we get to know it better?

Weaving between Birmingham's canals and the Black Country's battered high streets, Coventry cathedral and the ghostly underbelly of Spaghetti Junction, Mike Parker excavates the deep strata of a place that shaped him more profoundly than he ever acknowledged knew. Here is the Lunar Society and the Civic Gospel; 2-Tone and heavy metal; Enoch Powell and Benjamin Zephaniah; George Eliot and the Staffordshire Hoard; Mary Whitehouse and the Peaky Blinders.

But Mid-land is also something more intimate and more urgent. Running beneath the cultural history is a family story: two ageing, estranged parents on opposite sides of the conurbation; a godfather with secrets; a childhood split between Kidderminster and Paris, between aspiration and shame, between belonging and exile. As Parker walks the canals from Hartlebury to Leamington Spa in the aftermath of bereavement, the geographical and the personal converge into something unexpectedly moving.

This is a book about what it means to come from nowhere in particular, and why that might, right now, be exactly the vantage point we need. In the Midlands' compromise and muddle, their pluralism and lumpy centrism, are all the hallmarks of our national reality. If we could only accept that, it might just be the making of us.