View source for Engel's England: Thirty-nine counties, one capital and one man by Matthew Engel

{{infobox1
|title=Engel's England: Thirty-nine counties, one capital and one man
|author=Matthew Engel
|reviewer=Sue Magee
|genre=Travel
|summary=A very readable journey through the historic counties of England (plus London): it looks like the sort of book which you'll dip into, but I read it from beginning to end and loved every page.  Highly recommended.
|rating=5
|buy=Yes
|borrow=Yes
|pages=538
|publisher=Profile Books
|date=October 2014
|isbn=978-1846685712
|website=http://matthewengel.co.uk/
|cover=1846685710
|aznuk=1846685710
|aznus=1846685710
}}


Matthew Engel has spent some considerable time travelling around the thirty nine historic counties of England.  On the face of it this is a rather strange task given that some of the counties (anyone remember Middlesex? Cumberland?) no longer exist and that they are - or were - situated in a country which you can't reliably find on a drop-down internet menu.  Engel's attempts to explain to his eight-year-old son which country we live in produced mixed results.  His son grasped the outlines but as he explained the concepts Engels found himself getting more and more confused, particularly when you add in the counties: reorganisation in 1974 changed borders, created new counties and abolished some old ones.  Some were renamed, to subsequently revert to the old name whilst others faded away unremarked.

The three-year journey around the historic counties began in 2011 and they appear in ''Engel's England'' in the order in which they were visited, with a useful map at the front of the book which doesn't show the names of the counties - just the chapter number.  Try naming them and see how far you get...  There was no obvious order to the visits and I did wonder if I would like this randomness, but in the event it proved to be one of the joys of the book.  I'll confess too that I thought that I would probably cherry pick my counties, reading the chapters on the ones I knew best, or where friends and family lived, but then I started reading, and I was hooked.

There are a dozen or so pages in each chapter, and Engel manages in that limited space to bring out the essence of the place.  There are snippets of history, anecdotes, traditions and a sense of what makes that part of the world special.  Or, just occasionally, leaves it being unspecial: he is not fond of Surrey.  But by and large the thoughts are positive and I left each chapter feeling that I would like to see more of that particular county.

The joy of the book - and the reason I kept reading - is not the subject, but the writing.  There's a vein of humour running through the book and a sense that Engel takes what he's doing seriously, but doesn't take himself too seriously.  I was fascinated from the first page and when I turned the last, quietly surprised by how much information I'd gathered, even about my own county.  (I was going to email him to tell him that he'd got something wrong.  I checked my facts.  He was right.) There's a real talent to the writing: you feel that you ''know'' each county, but there's never any sense that every last piece of research has been shoehorned in, come what may and you're left with the thought that if you were to chat to Engel there would be lots more that he could tell you - and this is a gift which only the best writers have.

(By the way - don't be fooled by Amazon's insistence that the book has 352 pages - mine certainly has 538.)

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

If this book appeals then you might also enjoy [[In the Country by David Gentleman]].  We can also recommend [[You Are Awful (But I Like You): Travels Through Unloved Britain by Tim Moore]].

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