J B Priestley was a successful novelist in 1933 when he undertook to root about industrial England, from Southampton to Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, chronicling what he found along the way and commenting on it.

Three years ago, Great Northern Books published an edition of Priestley’s English Journey to mark the 75th anniversary of its publication in 1934.

This year’s new edition is book-ended by full-page photographs of the Bradford writer. The first shows him, pipe in hand, round about 1930, when he was in his mid-30s, the year after the publication of The Good Companions. He looks the very picture of prosperity, plump with self-confidence: the cat that got the cream.

In the second photograph, Priestley, cigarette in mouth, a little greyer around the ears, a little more lined about the jowls, waits to get into a car. Unfortunately, there is no caption explaining when and where the photograph was taken. But in his rumpled topcoat, he looks like a Central European at a dodgy border crossing in Nazi Germany.

Almost like a member of his own theatrical troupe the Dinky Doos in The Good Companions, he packed up his portable typewriter, pipes, notebooks, pencils and other paraphernalia and set out in a luxury charabanc (motor coach) to Southampton.

But why did he agree to go? Tom Priestley, his son, to whom he dedicated the book, asked his father the same question.

“When I asked him in 1982 about the origins of English Journey, he told me that it had been his idea; but plainly he had forgotten. Alan Day, in his excellent bibliography, quotes from The Book Window where JBP said...Hitherto I have always written what I want to write...But when it was suggested to me that the time is ripe for a book which shall deal faithfully with English industrial life of today, and that I was the man to write such a book, it seemed my duty to undertake it...’ “After my father’s death in 1984, Michael Foot remembered him as ‘the conscience of the country’. Though never a member of the Labour Party, and not remotely a communist sympathiser (he disliked dogma of all kinds), his position was left of centre; as an old-fashioned socialist he believed strongly in society, indeed a society in which everyone had a decent chance to fulfil his or her potential, unfettered by snobbish class distinctions, and the restrictions of poverty...”

Looking at the social, political and literary legacy of English Journey, Ilkley -based writer Lee Hanson says Priestley’s book “captured and described an English landscape and people hitherto unseen in literature of its kind”.

If you discount William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, 1830, Frederick Engels’ account of Manchester, The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London poor, 1861, and H V Morton’s In Search of England, 1927, I suppose that’s true.

Mr Hanson is more interested in what Priestley’s book may have influenced rather than what influenced its author. “...Priestley produce a brilliant state of the nation piece whose social and political significance was emphasised by the Mass Observation and Documentary movements it spawned and by artists, writers and filmmakers who followed in its wake.”

George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, for example, followed in 1937, three years after the publication of English Journey.

Great Northern Books’ previous edition was prefaced by Roy Hattersley. In this one, broadcaster Stuart Maconie declares at the outset: “You have in your hand the finest book ever written about England and the English...

“He identifies three Englands: Old England is ‘the country of cathedrals and minsters and manor houses and inns, of Parson and Squire, guide book and quaint highways and byways England’… “Nineteenth century England is the still prevalent industrial landscape, or rather townscape, built on ‘coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways...slums...sooty dismal little towns, and still sootier grim fortress-like cities’.

“This new England looks across the Atlantic to a model of celebrity, ease, shopping, recreation and a vaguely classless consumerist utopia.”

In the final chapter, To the End, Priestley’s description of 1930s England could stand for the England of the 1950s and 1960s:- “This is the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools, and everything given away for cigarette coupons...”

Priestley’s account of a wet Sunday evening in the pubs and streets of central Bradford 80 years ago reminds me what spiritless affairs Sundays were even in my youth a quarter of a century later. It was as though a damp fog, emanating from some dilapidated Victorian churchyard, seeped up from the ground and settled across the nation like a bank of low, rain-filled cloud.

“What a miserable barbaric affair! I asked myself what I would have done, supposing I were a young man living in not very comfortable or amusing lodgings. This was Sunday night, and a dark wettish Sunday night: a melancholy tract of time, with Monday morning waiting to pounce on me at the end of it...

“Please give me, I would say, a wicked wide open city, busy dishonouring its Sabbath, blazing with lights on Sunday evening, with concerts, theatre, cinemas, dance halls, restaurants, in full naughty swing. There I could trust my innocent child. But not – oh, never – in this barbaric gloom and boredom.”

Stuart Maconie, due to appear at next month’s Saltaire Festival, thinks English Journey shows that Priestley remains one of English letters’ finest hacks.

“No writer worth their salt minds being called a hack. It is a badge of honour in fact. It means they write to order, to deadline, to word length, for money. It doesn’t mean that their writing will be poor quality, slapdash or worthless. But it does mean that it will be written for a purpose and written to be read: read with pleasure by the largest number of people possible...

“English Journey, in its delightful and sympathetic way, is not just an elegant and enormously entertaining account of his travels, its not just a skillful and erudite piece of reporting, it’s a call to arms, it’s a tract for the times, it’s a kind of manifesto without any of the dreariness that that implies.”

  • English Journey is published in a new edition by Great Northern Books at £25.