‘Deep England’: Britain, the countryside and the English in the Second World War

In 1941 the social survey organisation Mass Observation asked its many respondents to reflect on what Britain meant to them. The majority of those who responded chose to conflate Britain with England, and wrote particularly about the subjective and emotional meanings that the landscape of Southern England had for them. This book chapter, derived from a keynote address given at the 'Fighting for Britain' Conference at the University of Edinburgh in 2012, sets these responses within their wider cultural context to consider the meanings of nationhood and national identity in Britain during the Second World War.