Adam Nicolson is, on paper, exactly the sort of writer who should be embalming England in amber. He’s the grandson of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. He grew up with Sissinghurst in his bloodstream. He inherited the Shiant Isles at twenty-one. He has every credential the heritage industry worships: lineage, landscape, access, the keys to places most people only meet through admission fees and gift shops. If he wanted to write polite books that keep the velvet rope intact, he could do it in his sleep.
Instead, he keeps reaching for the pin.
That’s not modesty. It’s an argument. Nicolson understands that “heritage” is a sales tactic before it’s a value system: a way of making land feel innocent, history feel curated, and ownership feel like stewardship by default. He knows the sheen. He lives inside it. And precisely because he’s inside it, he can show you where it warps.
In Sissinghurst: An Unfinished History, the point isn’t just a famous garden’s romance. It’s the price of turning a lived estate into a branded experience. When places become icons, they get stripped of their working logic—farm, labour, mess, necessity—and left as a display. Heritage loves ruins and roses because they don’t demand anything back. Nicolson keeps asking what got pushed aside so the visitors could drift through “rooms” of planting and feel soothed. He treats the estate as an organism, not a postcard, and he refuses the comforting fantasy that beauty is the same thing as truth.
Heritage is history with its teeth pulled: it gives you the look of the past while protecting you from what the past did—who it fed, who it crushed, and who it still excludes.
Sea Room does something similar, only with the romance of “wildness.” The Shiants are easily mythologised: cliff, seabird, Atlantic drama, the fantasy of owning remoteness. Nicolson won’t let you sit in that fantasy for long. Ownership is not a poem. It’s responsibility mixed with entitlement, logistics mixed with desire, and the uneasy fact that inheritance can hand you a kingdom and call it “luck.” His island writing is devotional, yes—but it’s also blunt about the sheer materiality of land: rats, weather, access, maintenance, human imprint. The wild isn’t there to purify you. It’s there to remind you how much you take for granted.
Then he does it again to “history” itself. In God’s Secretaries and When God Spoke English, he goes after one of the most polished cultural objects in the English imagination: the King James Bible. You can treat that book like a holy artefact—inevitable, immaculate, dropped from heaven in perfect prose. Nicolson drags it back into the room where it was actually made: committees, politics, ego, compromise, ambition, power. Not to sneer at it, but to stop you using it as a monument that excuses the machinery behind it. He’s allergic to the kind of reverence that turns human labour into divine inevitability.
And lately, his nature writing has sharpened the same blade. The Seabird’s Cry and Bird School don’t just marvel; they accuse. They make it hard to keep enjoying “English countryside” as a lifestyle brand when the living systems underneath it are collapsing. The birds aren’t symbols; they’re neighbours in decline, and the decline has names: intensive farming, habitat loss, a national habit of calling destruction “management.”
Nicolson punctures sheen because sheen is a moral technology: it teaches you to admire systems you should be interrogating.
The reason this keeps working is that he doesn’t pretend he’s outside the problem. He writes from within privilege and doesn’t waste your time with performative self-flagellation. He just refuses the easy bargain: the one where access becomes authority, and authority becomes a lullaby. He won’t let “heritage” mean harmless. He won’t let “history” mean tasteful. He won’t let beauty stand in for accountability.
If you want the comforting version—England as curated rooms, Scotland as picturesque wild, the past as inspiring artefact—read someone else. Nicolson is for readers who can tolerate the loss of polish. He keeps puncturing the sheen because the sheen is the trap. Don’t patch it back up.
