I have always admired the songs of Ray Davies who, in my opinion, is not given the credit he deserves for his particular observations on the decline of English traditions.
The following I swiped from Wikipedia which has quite a good article on him.
The Kinks have been called "the most adamantly British of the Brit Invasion bands" on account of Ray Davies's abiding fascination with England's imperial past and his tender, bittersweet evocations of "a vanishing, romanticized world of village greens, pubs and public schools".
During the band's mid-period, he wrote many cheerfully eccentric—and often ironic—celebrations of traditional English culture and living: "Village Green" (1966), "Afternoon Tea" and "Autumn Almanac" (both 1967), "The Last of the Steam-Powered Trains" (1968), "Victoria" (1969), "Have a Cuppa Tea" (1971) and "Cricket" (1973).
'Shangri-La' always makes me wince at its implications about myself.
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