Book Review: Is Britain Great?

A mundane celebration

The Caravan Gallery's first book Welcome to Britain: A Celebration of Real Life presented a rich vein of quirky Britishness revealing the ordinary and mundane in glorious color but unfortunately, I thought, it was all spoilt by the photos being crammed into a very drab looking book. This latest one at last gives the photographs the treatment they deserve: one to a page (eleven pages have four) generous margins, good paper and well printed with 175dpi.

The 125 photos continue the theme of the first book with wry observations of the lifestyle of ordinary folk relaxing and the environment in which they do it. This is certainly not the Britain of the tourist brochure. Fortunately there is not a whiff of royalty, stately homes, the sentimental landscape or anything to do with the Establishment and Authority. The strange thing is that these photos depicting the ordinary actually become rather extraordinary as you turn over the pages and it is a tribute to Williams and Teasdale that they have managed to capture so much without resorting to gimmickry, trendy angles, filters and other dubious photo techniques in order to hype up the content.

There are plenty of photo books depicting 'real' Britain but few that actually show reality. 'Is Britain Great?' fortunately answers that question with humor and honesty.

Is Britain Great? is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

Typical spread.

Is this guy actually mowing the sidewalk?

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