TOM KITCHING’S recent experiences of busking the length and breadth of England for 18 months, recounted in the blog Busk England, led to Seasons of Change: an album, a live show and a book under the same name.

Now the 35-year-old is releasing a series of half-hour podcasts created from live readings of his written words.

The first two feature snippets of music from the album and are interspersed with field recordings of sounds he came across on his travels, from trains in Redcar to the shouts of market traders in Leeds and Widnes.

Kitching’s voice is nothing out of the ordinary and it’s not ideally suited to mellifluous storytelling, and his somewhat unadorned readings from the book occasionally make one yearn for a more chatty, spontaneous delivery.

But against the happy background atmosphere of what sounds like a full house at the Guide Bridge Theatre in Manchester, his gently humorous and sometimes poignant observations draw an appreciative response from an animated audience.

Gentle musings on the everyday comings and goings in drizzly high streets and shopping centres, there’s little drama in the tales. In Carlisle, he witnesses the evening closure of the city gates in preparation for the Friday-night swill of pubbing and nightclubbing, while in Braintree he’s dragged along for a visit to the “most haunted auto-park centre in Britain.”

In Deal, he spots a sign outside a fishmonger’s that reads: “Fish of the month – July: no winner.”

There are more enervating moments. In Norwich he meets a murderer, in Berwick he attracts some noisy but friendly drunks and in Bolton he witnesses a chaotic Easter egg theft. But in general, Kitching is not looking for excitement, he just wants to understand a few new things about the country he lives in.

On a visit to the quiet Norfolk community of Erpingham, he has a revelation that the contented idyll of English village life “where social norms are stronger than law” is really “anarchy in its truest form,” delivering an orderly society without coercive forms of hierarchy.

In Bolton — “a tough busk as there are so many needy people in every doorway” — he discovers that the turning of an economic corner in the town is actually increasing the number of rough sleepers in the area, as private landlords raise their rents or sell off property. Progress, he says, “is unaffordable to the weakest.”

Given that Kitching’s busking often puts him into contact with the homeless, we might expect more thoughts on their predicament in podcasts to come.

He went to 50 towns during his 18 months of travel, from picture-postcard Cotswold villages to former mining towns, and it’ll be interesting to hear if he has any overriding conclusions about English life by the time his journey came to an end.

 Podcast epIsodes 1 and 2 are available on buzzsprout.com/1037575/3487342 and buzzsprout.com/1037575/3578035.