At the tail-end of 2000, Ian Sansom decided to move from London to a small town in County Down. He had half expected friends to dismiss his plan as a backwoods adventure, and was surprised when they said they felt the lure of the place. Sansom tells the story of moving house, and makes sense of his friends' enthusiasm, in a typically buoyant essay, 'Where Do We Live?'[*] In the English imagination, he argues, Ireland 'remains a place of refuge and fantasy'. It is one of those destinations - 'like the South of France before Peter Mayle, and Tuscany before champagne socialists' - which, it is assumed, is 'unspoilt by the American coffee shops and the malls and the ring roads that have ruined Arnoldian England'. But as Sansom discovers, the Ireland of middle-class English fantasy doesn't exist. His nondescript new town, just outside Belfast, boasts a Tesco, a heritage centre and a ring road.

LRB 20 May 2004 | PDF Download