This is a book so obvious that we shall all think we should have thought to write it, but I daresay that none of us could have written it quite so individually as Professor Hoggart has. It is, effectively, an audit, an exact report, of the condition of the little town of Farnham in Surrey at the present time. Every social aspect of the town – its buildings and streets, its people, its shops, its schools, its institutions, its leisure activities – is explicitly chronicled.

Professor Hoggart has lived in Farnham for the last twenty years. He says, and I do not doubt him, that he has written his book because it struck him some time ago how typical Farnham is as a town. Those of us who live in Essex, and who regard the sitcom-style suburbia of Surrey with its retired majors, residents’ associations and rotary clubs as being quite unlike anything we know, will be sceptical of this assertion. However, as Hoggart progresses through his book, he introduces us to a cast of characters who, in their tragic simplicity, are as representative of our life as could be found. That was the intention of his book, and he has succeeded.

In his tone, the Professor is a cross between Cobbett (another Farnham man), J B Priestley and an old codger. His attention to detail – the description of the girls in boots, or the old men who sit outside the Argos store, or the pretend gents in their imitation Barbours and brogues – is slightly Pooterish, but that is all part of the book’s charm. He describes a social system and arrangement broadly unchanged – apart from the interpolation of what he calls ‘the drug culture’ – throughout our century. It is rigidly hierarchical, a self-confident middle class (far more self-confident, it must be said, than middle classes in most other parts of England) presiding over an implicitly deferential lower middle class, and beneath them the feckless, increasingly violent, lower orders. This has probably been the story of Farnham, and of most other towns, for most of the last hundred years, though most of us might have thought such a life came to an end with the social upheavals of the 1960s. This apparently unchanging world will not, though, last for ever, and the Professor ends his work on a downbeat note, prophesying that ‘perhaps we will prove to be the last or nearly the last to enjoy that saving illusion of security; even in Britain’.

Perhaps because the Professor is now an old man – seventy-six this year – he has the patience to detail so many inconsequential, taken-for-granted aspects of everyday existence. One wishes him years of long life and good health yet, but the idea one gets from his book is that it is some sort of leave-taking, a final assessment of the ordinary little things of the world in which he lives. That is part of its sense of tragedy; but this is also a celebration of the details of the small things that compose the lives of men and women, unremarkable in themselves, yet all reflecting a deep urge to participate in society and to extract something of value from life. The quality of the observation is unselfconsciously literary, precise and vivid.

To future generations the work will prove an invaluable, if quirky, social document. If we read it carefully today we see that it shows us, microscopically, much that we have long since not bothered to notice about the way in which our little world works. It makes the point that many of our much-loved institutions are imperfect (especially the National Health Service, of which the Professor has had a bad experience or two), and that we still, whatever Mr Major’s beliefs, tolerate a rigid class system. Professor Hoggart is at his sharpest when noting the different ways in which the classes behave, though it is a pity he has to keep reminding us of the badge on his lapel that says ‘socialist’. But even he, it seems, is tiring of the modern Left, with its political correctness (he laments not being able to call the assistants in Boots ‘girls’) and dogmatic resistance to the selling-off of council houses.

His book is not an English Journey or a Rural Rides; many will find it too parochial for their tastes, and even boring. These would, however, be superficial judgements. If the book is unrelentingly prosaic in its descriptions, and perhaps a little trite in its conclusions, that may just be because the society it seeks to depict, and which we have made, has those qualities in abundance.