This is a slight twisting of a line from the Preface of William Blake's prophetic book Milton (ca. 1808), part of the section "And did those feet in ancient time" made famous as a hymn titled Jerusalem (music by Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, orchestrated by Sir Edward Elgar). (Note that you won't find the poem in Blake's Jerusalem!)
The original line reads:
In England's green and pleasant land.
By changing the line, Colin Moulding seems to be saying that there isn't any "green and pleasant land" left at all.
Blake, like both Moulding and Andy Partridge, wasn't impressed by "progress", and was particularly vehement in his view it doesn't necessarily mean "improvement". Blake saw clearly that industrialisation wasn't a panacea; much of his writing speaks of the horrors to be found in the London of his day.
Blake's need of certainty, whatever its personal roots, is also one of the great tragedies of modern capitalist society; particularly of that loss of personal status that was the immediate fate of millions in the industrial England of the "dark satanic mills." Blake was only one of many Englishmen who felt himself being slowly ground to death, in a world of such brutal exploitation and amid such inhuman ugliness, that the fires of the new industrial furnaces and the cries of the child laborers are always in his work. His poems and designs are meant to afford us spiritual vision; a vision beyond the factory system, the hideous new cities, the degredation of children for the sake of profit, the petty crimes for which children could still be hanged. "England," a man said to me in London on V-E day, "has never recovered from its industrial revolution"; Blake was afraid it could not survive it; the human cost was already too great. He never saw the North of Britain, but the gray squalor of the new Clydebank, the great industrial maw of Manchester and Liverpool, the slums, the broken families are remembered even in the apocalyptic rant of Jerusalem, where
Scotland pours out his Sons to labour at the Furnaces;
Wales gives his Daughters to the Loom.The lovely poem at the head of Milton, beginning
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?is so intense a vision of a world other than the real industrial England that it has long been a Socialist hymn of millions of its working people.
(Source: Alfred Kazan, "Introduction", The Portable Blake, Penguin, 1946, pp.31-32.)
It was, of course, the "dark satanic mills" that Blake wrote of elsewhere in the poem that contributed to the pollution problem which necessitated the creation of smokeless zones.
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