James Meek

speaker

486 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 15 Jun

James Meek’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · James Meek & Lara Pawson: Your Life Without Me · 15 Jun 2026 podcast

And it's not people outside the north.

People even outside Grimsby, even many people inside Grimsby, don't really care about it.

But it's a beautiful thing and it should be preserved.

And I think a lot of these towns have something like that.

Yeah.

that it would be better if it was part of the fabric of the country in the same way that St Paul's is.

Yes, I mean, when you pound the streets of these towns and you're trying to kind of answer some question about them in a journalistic way, then you do find yourself thinking these heretical thoughts like, why is this town here?

And in fact, I think that was the actual headline of the story, you know, why are you here?

Grimsby was a very, very small town until relatively recently.

It's kind of an artificial creation.

Like so many of these northern towns, these industrial towns, any town is artificial.

You know, that's one of the marvelous things about your framing of looking at a city landscape.

You can, I mean, I don't know, maybe sometimes I think maybe I'm a bit weird about the way that I look at a landscape or a cityscape.

I feel that I do always tend to think, well, what was here before?

What was here before that?

So, you know, I've been to Provence on holiday.

I like Provence as a holiday destination.

But I'm always... I can't look at it without thinking of...

centuries of peasants, you know, clawing a living out of this terrible, terrible soil, which is really difficult to grow anything out of it.

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