Ian Marchant, who has died aged 67 from prostate cancer, was a writer, performer, teacher and broadcaster with a unique perspective on the lesser-known highways and byways of British life. He had a talent for being interested in everything, inspiring others to realise that they, too, might be interested in the psychogeography of Legoland, the Witham navigable drains or how to grow underpants from flax.
As a writer, Ian found his voice in a hybrid style of nonfiction that combined memoir, travel writing, humour and considered social observation. Parallel Lines (2003) is a deeply researched history of Britain’s railways that does not exclude a gonzo approach to the Great Little Railways of Wales. In The Longest Crawl (2006) he traces the history of Britain’s relationship with alcohol from The Turk’s Head in the Isles of Scilly to The Baa Bar in Shetland.
Something of the Night (2012) looks at what Britons do in the night-time, while A Hero for High Times lives up to its extravagant subtitle: A Younger Reader’s Guide to the Beats, Hippies, Freaks, Punks, Ravers, New-Age Travellers and Dog-on-a-Rope Brew Crew Crusties of the British Isles, 1956-1994. In the Guardian, the writer Iain Sinclair recognised a “monumental defence of the alternative way”, a book celebrating those who had chosen their own path, as Ian had himself.
His youthful ambition was to be a rock star, and in the early 1980s his 10-piece Brighton band the Mood Index Continuum had some local success, including live sessions on Radio Sussex and a loyal fanbase, but despite record label interest they were never signed. From then on Ian accepted that the enemy of achievement was perfectionism, and he found a better fit for his various talents and warm, generous charisma in a diverse career that, as well as writing and teaching, encompassed live musical and comedy acts, and broadcasting on radio and television.
Born in Shalford, Surrey, to Jean (nee Bulbeck) and Alan Marchant, an engineer, Ian moved to the Sussex town of Newhaven aged eight when his parents separated. There, Jean worked in the Co-op and married Ralph Foxwell, a forklift driver.
After Tideway comprehensive school, Ian went to St David’s University College (now part of the University of Wales Trinity Saint David), Lampeter, to study philosophy, where he threw himself into student life but failed to sit his final exams. He spent the 80s in Brighton singing in bands and earning money as a board-marker and cashier in betting shops. During this period he married Rowan Manby, who died in 1987 from a brain haemorrhage. They had a daughter, Esme, and he had a second daughter, Eleanor, from his 1989 marriage to Jillian Stuteley, which ended in divorce in 1994.
In 1990, Ian returned to full-time education at Lancaster University, this time completing his degree in the history and philosophy of science. While there he began performing at the music pub The Yorkshire House, where he met the keyboard-player Chas Ambler and formed the comedy loungecore duo Your Dad, who at Glastonbury festival were bottom of the bill (by popular demand) seven years in a row.
During this period he also wrote a novel, In Southern Waters, which was published in 1999. Spirits lifted, he moved to a housing co-op in Canonbury, north London, and for two years managed the Quinto bookshop on Charing Cross Road. In 2001 he published a second novel, The Battle for Dole Acre, and the following year left London to become residential director, along with the novelist Monique Roffey, of the Arvon writing centre at Totleigh Barton in Devon.
In 2006, Ian settled in the Welsh border town of Presteigne, where he founded Radio Free Radnorshire and commuted to Birmingham City University to teach creative writing. A star of the annual Presteigne panto, he started yet another career as presenter of an ITV Border documentary about the Scottish engineer Thomas Telford. This was followed by Fun for Some (2008), a series in which Ian explored minority hobbies with unfeigned enthusiasm. From 2011, on BBC Radio 3 and 4, often in the latter’s Open Country slot, he fronted programmes on a wide range of subjects, including the north-south divide, the situationists and the history of barbed wire. Unsurprisingly, he was magnificent at a pub quiz.
He married Hilary Wallace, also a champion quizzer, in 2010, and began a regular Diary column in the Church Times: his later-life Church of England faith complemented his predisposition for tolerance and eccentric Englishness.
During Covid, with Hilary’s help, Ian discovered a distant ancestor of his father was the land-owning Sussex yeoman Thomas Marchant, author of a published diary covering the years 1714-28. Ian’s final nonfiction book, One Fine Day (2023), gives full voice to the family conversation between now and then.
His final novel, The Breaking Wave (2025), is about getting an 80s band back together in late middle-age, which in September he launched to a packed house at the Assembly Rooms in Presteigne. Despite his illness he was in his element, relishing banter with latecomers, fallible technology and the telling of a comic story – being, as he always had been, funny, engaging, engaged.
Ian is survived by Hilary, Esme and Eleanor, two stepdaughters, Victoria and Stephanie, and four grandchildren, Cordelia, Aurelia, Rafael and Miguel.
• Ian Peter Marchant, writer, performer, teacher and broadcaster, born 14 March 1958; died 14 November 2025
