Mark Steel’s In Town

COPYRIGHT

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

The right of Mark Steel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

IN TOWN. Copyright © Mark Steel 2011.

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Source ISBN: 9780007412426

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007412433

Version: 2015-01-21

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to all the people

who’ve lived in history, in towns or other places,

without whom it would not have been possible.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Penzance

New Towns: Basingstoke, Crawley, Milton Keynes

Birmingham

Didcot, Oxford

Wilmslow

Wigan

Horwich

London

Outer London

Hereford

Norwich

Boston

Surrey

Merthyr Tydfil

Edinburgh

Orkney

Dumfries

Andersonstown

Colchester

Exeter

Portland

Motorways

Yorkshire

Nottingham

Coventry

Walsall

Lewes

Gateshead

Kent

Bristol

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

What’s the point in going anywhere if the place you go to is the same as the one you left? Who’d bother going on a holiday that was advertised as: ‘Visit the magic of the Seychelles, it’s IDENTICAL to your own house.’

Imagine if in Tunisia, instead of the background of the call to prayers, the mosques played Magic FM. Or if Paris didn’t have that slightly exotic drainy smell, because EU regulations had compelled the place to be cleaned with Jif.

Once, in the New York subway, a huge woman barged into me and yelled, ‘Hey, out my way asshole!’ And it was marvellous, because that’s what’s supposed to happen in New York. It was as exciting as when I was nineteen and went to Amsterdam and bought a lump of dope off a man in a woolly hat but it turned out to be mud.

After taking the trouble to go to the Lake District you want it to smell of cow pats, and at Blackpool you want everything to look as if it should be in a Carry On film.

Having toured Britain plenty of times, usually to talk to an audience for the evening, I find these local quirks compelling. For example, on the way to Skipton, in North Yorkshire, I noticed a road sign to a town called Keighley. Later, during the show, I asked the audience, ‘Is Keighley your rival town?’ And the room went chillingly quiet, until one woman called out with understated menace, ‘Keighley – is a sink of evil.’

There was something delightful about this, because it was an expression of specifically Skipton malevolence.

Similarly, I went to Merthyr Tydfil, a blighted town at the top of the Rhondda Valley that’s been shut down bit by bit. After the show the manager of the theatre told me, ‘People often come in and ask what time a performance is starting, so I’ll tell them, “It starts at seven-thirty,” and they’ll say, “Oh, that’s a pity. I won’t be able to come to that, as I’ll be drunk by then.”’

And somehow there was a warmth to hearing that, because it was a story of distinctly Merthyr despair.

Before appearing in Stockton-on-Tees, in the North-East, I was sent a message on Twitter by a local resident that said: ‘This town is where Joseph Walker invented the safety match in 1834. Before that, when we wanted to set fire to upturned stolen cars we had to rub two sticks together.’

And before my visit to Cambridge, someone sent me a message about the town saying, ‘This place is Hogwarts for wankers.’ It was a cosy thought, because it could only apply to Cambridge, and ought to be the slogan on the masthead of the local paper.

The elements of a town that make it unique are what make it worth visiting. But also, any expression of local interest or eccentricity is becoming a yell of defiance.

Because the aim of society now seems to be to make every city centre so depressingly identical that if our town planners were put in charge of Athens, they’d knock down the Parthenon and replace it with a shopping mall called ‘The Acropolis Centre’, with an announcement that there was much excitement, as the new centre would have a River Island and a Nando’s.

You could be dropped blindfolded into a city centre you’d never been to before, and guess correctly that there’d be a Clinton Cards just there, then a Vodafone, Carphone Warehouse, Boots, Specsavers and Next just there, with the anti-vivisection stall there, and on a Saturday you’d hear a ‘pheep’ and know the Peruvians were about to start on the pan pipes just there, and within the hour they’d have pheeped their way through ‘Mull of Kintyre’ and ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ and ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-fucking-da’, as I believe it’s now officially called.

With equal confidence you could predict that just out of town there’d be a concrete expanse containing a giant Tesco, PC World, Majestic Wine Warehouse, Comet, Dreams, and an unfathomable junction with traffic lights facing in all directions that makes no difference anyway, as every turning forces you into the car park at Iceland and there seems to be no way of escaping except by reversing through the checkout at Carpet Right.

Somewhere in this world there must be someone who is immensely proud of having invented the multi-storey car park, which is often the introduction to a new town, as you sink into the trance that allows you to endure the shuffle through traffic towards this disturbing dungeon, where you descend and descend through a chilling gloom that would make Richard Dawkins say, ‘Bollocks to that, I’m sure there are ghosts down here,’ to level 5, where you think you spot a space but it turns out to be an illusion created by a snugly placed Fiat Uno, past levels 5a and 5b, so you’ve now forgotten what natural sunlight could ever be, like future generations forced to live in a bunker following a nuclear war, until you find a gap by a leaking pipe that leads to a line of green slime. At which point you’re unlikely to take a deep breath, like a nineteenth-century traveller, and exclaim, ‘Aha, and this is Taunton.’

Later you’ll have to queue at the one paypoint that hasn’t got a sheet of paper with a wonky ‘Out of order’ sign Sellotaped to it, which will be two floors away and up some steps that are so grimy that if you meet someone coming the other way it seems impolite not to murder them.

It’s not the ugliness of modern towns, in a Prince Charles sense, that makes them so dispiriting; it’s the soullessness. You know they’ve been plonked there as a result of some regional coordinating business advisory committee that’s copied the model of what’s been built in 3,000 other towns.

It’s as if they’re part of a new world, of call centres and chain pubs and clubs, in which the faceless corporation dictates how a town looks and lives and even, with its scripts for the staff of restaurants and call centres, speaks.

So the shops, the customs, the traditions and accents, the hip-hop lyrics, the football chants, the absurd rivalries that apply to one area are preserved almost as an act of rebellion, in place because the people who live with them have kept them going, and not because they’ve been placed there following a board meeting in Basingstoke.

This book is about some of those glorious human differences that comprise the heart of each town. It follows a series I made for BBC radio. Sometimes I’m asked how I select the towns to write about, but I’m not sure of the answer. I did feel a twinge of power when a butcher told me he’d gone to Skipton with his wife for a weekend after hearing one of the shows – for a moment I knew how Nigella Lawson must feel when she mentions that she sometimes has a gherkin with cheese on toast, and by ten o’clock the next morning some idiot’s bought the world’s supply of gherkins.

But as far as I’m aware I choose them fairly randomly, because the main point is that you can look at anywhere at all, and within a day discover enough history, grubbiness, madness and inspiration to realise that it is a distinct and unique cauldron of humanity.

For example, one drizzly dark February afternoon as I came out of the station at Scunthorpe, I got in a minicab, and the driver didn’t even look at me, but kept staring straight ahead as he said, ‘I don’t know what you’ve come here for, it’s a fucking shithole.’

And that’s made me remember Scunthorpe ever since.

Penzance

In a spirit of rebellion, I’ll start at the end.

If you go to Penzance by train, you will get fooled, even if you’ve done it before. Less than three hours after leaving you get to Plymouth, and think, ‘Oh, we’re nearly there. I thought it took six hours to Penzance as that’s what it said at the station and it’s what the announcer said but it can’t take that long because we’ve gone 230 miles and there’s less than sixty left, so I’ll start collecting my things together.’

Then the train squeaks across the River Tamar into Cornwall and puffs to Liskeard at the speed of a family of refugees trudging through Somalia, stops at Bodmin and St Austell and places with no discernible buildings so the only reason to get off would be to study the station platform or the nearby flora and fauna, then the buffet bar shuts and the squeaks of the wheels get louder and you expect the next announcement to inform you that at Truro the train will be replaced by a mule and a man in a poncho chewing tobacco who mutters, ‘Head two days along the pass to Redruth and follow the track known as Devil’s Dump to Certain Death Passage, then take the right fork past Camborne.’

Penzance station is the end. It’s not like other terminals, where there’s a branch line to somewhere: the train rolls exhausted into a huge shed and stops in front of a wall. And the town feels as if it’s at the end, with a slight disregard even for the rest of Cornwall for making such a half-hearted effort at being west, an attitude of ‘Plymouth? That’s practically Japan.’ I can only imagine the contempt they have for Polperro, in eastern Cornwall, which boasts on its tourist website: ‘Polperro is easily accessible from everywhere in the world.’ There isn’t even a proper road into Polperro, so you need a couple of flights, a hovercraft and three days in a canoe to get there from the next village. So it seems unfair that a Bedouin tribesman in the middle of the desert might see this website and think, ‘At last, a holiday destination we can get to.’

There’s a sense that Penzance likes its isolation. Because it doesn’t feel as if it’s dependent on tourism, it’s a proper seaside town. There’s no pedalo hire and crazy golf, it carries on with its fishing and its High Street with charity shops and pubs that seem dark even in August, but then you look up and there are palm trees and a sunset over the Atlantic.

There’s even an endearing disdain for tourists, as expressed in the pamphlet How to be Proper Cornish, that tells us for example, ‘Though fish do form a large part of a Cornish man’s diet, not all fish is fit to be put on the table. Some, such as scad and ling, is only fit for the cat. Or for tourists.’

I caught a similar attitude when I hired a pushbike to cycle to the very very end, Land’s End itself, and the man in the shop answered my request with a grunt, but one that was in a Cornish accent, which was impressive and rude at the same time, as if he’d picked up a handful of balls and juggled with them so they spelt ‘Fuck off’. Eventually he fetched the rustiest, clankiest bike in the shop, almost threw it at me and said, ‘There you are – you know how to use it, do you?’ The bike and I clattered across the hills the ten miles to Land’s End, and it was thrilling, this sense of getting right to the far end of the country, especially as it was windy and thick with a deep sweet aroma of compost, and then everything is called the Last of its kind, so there’s a Last Inn and a Last Post Office and probably a Last Nail Salon and a Last Branch of Social Services, and as I descended through the village of Sennen and even past that I anticipated the absolute end, where there’d be nothing but a blustery cliff and I’d stand on a rock for a poignant moment, but instead I turned a corner into the Land’s End Experience, where there’s a tiny shopping mall with a sweet shop, a clothes shop, a cinema and a permanent Doctor Who exhibition.

Why? Who thought this would attract people to Land’s End? There’s only one reason for going to Land’s End, which is that it’s at the end of the land. That’s its unique selling point, whereas if you try to get people there for any other reason, the fact that it’s so far tends to work against it. For example if you lived in Leicester and fancied looking at a replica Cyberman before buying a shirt and some butterscotch, you still wouldn’t go to this shopping mall, because it’s at Land’s Fucking End.

I felt cheated, as Captain Scott would have if he’d arrived at the South Pole to find a branch of Caffè Nero.

But right at the end was the famous signpost, saying John o’Groats 874 miles, New York 3,147 miles, so I decided I’d take a picture of that. Except that I had a cup of tea, went out to the signpost, and it had gone. There were some moments of panic, the sort you’d have if you were at the Taj Mahal, bent down to tie up your laces then looked up and it had disappeared. Then I noticed a sign saying it’s £10 to have your picture taken there, and at half past five the people who take the money lock away the signpost and leave. It’s literally locked away, in a metal trunk, and secured in a hut. And that, I contend, makes it the most magnificently mean-spirited tourist attraction in the country.

It’s even worse when you consider that at the other end of this expanse of sea is the Statue of Liberty, resplendently marking its territory, and not, as far as I know, above a plaque saying ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses – from 9.00 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. sharp when we close.’

In Penzance, however, there’s a grudging acceptance that tourists have to be catered for, even if they’re frustratingly demanding for locals who just want to get on with their normal lives. So you feel like a six-year-old at half term, pestering your dad for attention while he’s trying to work. But the real disdain is reserved for those who rent a cottage in the summer and convince themselves it’s so magical and far away from urban din and the sunset’s so divine that they move down. Then a few months later they’re screaming, ‘I can’t believe there’s nowhere to get stuffed olives after nine at night. And the estate agents never mentioned it would get dark this early in January. Take me home!’

For many people, living in the area has a rugged romance, but it flows from a shared sense of struggle, of sticking it out despite the lowest incomes in Britain, the remoteness, the feeling that no one in the big cities is bothered about their problems, such as the dramatic collapse of the fishing industry. One expression of this disgruntlement is how some of the ways of the rest of the country haven’t quite made it down there. I was shown round one of the big pubs by a proud landlord, who explained to me the origins of the ship’s wheel propped against one wall, and his paintings of Nelson, and then in one bar he said, ‘Women weren’t allowed in this room until about twenty-five year ago – before all this PC shit.’

It’s quite endearing, this unexpected sense of what’s normal. On my first trip to Penzance I heard a couple of people make remarks about the snotty ways of St Ives, a town a few miles to the north. So when I was on stage I asked the audience if there was a general feeling that St Ives was posh, and a woman called out, ‘It’s posh all right – they’ve got a dentist.’ As a definition of posh that is unsurpassable, and leaves you assuming that anyone with an infected tooth in Penzance ties a rope round it, with the other end tethered to the Isles of Scilly ferry so that as it sails off it yanks the bastard out.

It takes a couple of days in Penzance to become aware that almost everything is slightly out of sync with the rest of Britain. There’s a celebrated pub, called the Admiral Benbow, with a statue of a smuggler lying on the roof, in memory of an early-eighteenth-century shoot-out with a customs official. During a meal in this pub, the landlord came up to a group of four of us and said there was live music upstairs, and we’d be fools to miss it as they were astounding musicians. So we went up, and there were twelve people sat in a circle, each taking turns to sing a Cornish song, except for a man in his fifties with spiky blond hair, nose studs and implausibly red cheeks like a sunburned Johnny Rotten who recited a poem about a man who divorced his wife because he didn’t like her pasties.

Then a woman with no teeth at all sang a song about a Cornish woman with twelve sons, all of whom became soldiers, and in each verse another one got killed until there were none left. Then her friend sang a song about a ship setting off with a hundred men on board, and you knew those poor fuckers would be lucky to make it to the chorus. As expected, every one of them was drowned, though I’d been hoping for a twist in which they all came back with sacks full of fish, but were eaten by a runaway leopard. Then they turned to me. ‘What song do you have for us, dear?’ they asked, and I thought, ‘What sort of fishing disaster song do I know? I’m from London.’ Unless I made one up that went, ‘In nineteen hundred and ninety-six old Dave went out in the rain, to buy some cod in parsley sauce but was never seen again.’

‘So the moment has arrived that I’ve been dreading,’ I said, and considered knocking out a version of Eminem’s ‘The Real Slim Shady’ or ‘The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round’, but instead we all said we were a bit tired and left, so instead they drew a raffle for a packet of biscuits. Funnily enough, a similar thing happened when I went to see the Wu-Tang Clan.

It isn’t just a prejudice, this sense of being somewhere that doesn’t fit in. Cornwall has a tradition of wanting to keep its distance. The most strident expression of that sentiment comes from Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish nationalist party, which has several councillors. It was founded in 1951, and by 1964 it had five separate branches. Ask someone to guess where those branches were, and see how long it is before they get the correct answer: Penzance, Padstow, Redruth, Truro and Nigeria.

For a while there was a militant wing of the Cornish movement, called An Gof. According to the official history of Mebyon Kernow, ‘They claimed responsibility for a blaze at a Penzance hairdresser’s, attacked in mistake for the Bristol and West Building Society.’

You might think that after a mishap like that they’d keep quiet and hope the police assumed it was revenge for a dodgy perm, but they thought the cause of Cornish nationalism would be advanced if they claimed responsibility, although it’s hard to think of any other combination of shops it would be more difficult to mix up when trying to burn one of them down: not a scrap metal yard for a branch of World of Leather, or a vegan café for a place that changes tyres.

But these movements are marginal to the vague but widespread sense that Cornwall isn’t entirely Britain. It has its own flag, a little white cross and the rest entirely black, as if it was designed by a fourteen-year-old boy who sits in his room all day listening to My Chemical Romance. It has a patron saint, called St Piran, and an annual holiday on which most towns put on a procession.

This semi-dislocation from the rest of Britain is probably a result of Cornwall remaining Celtic while the rest of England was occupied by the Romans. So at unexpected moments as you turn a corner you’ll find an enigmatic stone monument or Celtic cross poking lopsidedly from the edge of a field, whereas anywhere else in England the Romans would have torn it down and replaced it with an aqueduct.

One consequence of this is that there remained a separate Cornish language. Penzance was the last area where it was the first language, up until the sixteenth century.

By the seventeenth century Cornish had mostly died out. But since the 1930s there’s been a movement to revive it, and now about two hundred people speak it. I got a book called Teach Yourself Cornish from the Penzance library, and the librarian said, ‘Would you like book two as well?’ which seemed a bit optimistic Anyway, even a militant Cornishman only needs a few essential phrases, like ‘Ogh! Ni re settyas an gempenoryon-gols gans tan dre wall,’ which translates as, ‘Oh no, we’ve set the hair-dressers on fire by mistake.’

Cornish is a Gaelic language, similar to Welsh and Irish and Breton, and now there’s an English-Cornish dictionary, a novel’s been written in Cornish, and there’s a weekly Cornish radio show, which is impressive for two hundred people. I imagine the radio show must have dialogue such as:

‘And now our mystery voice competition: “Myttin da.”’

‘Is it Stan from the Cornish class again?’

‘Yes, you’ve won £4.’

To make it more complicated, a row broke out because some people wanted to speak the old historic Cornish, which I’m sure was lovely but which died out three hundred years ago. Not only would it have no words for Twitter or Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, it would only have words for things that were around before 1760, so the lessons must go: ‘Repeat after me: “Yth esov vy ow merwel dres an pla” – I’m dying of the plague.’

So some people added modern words, and the two factions split apart, then someone tried to solve the problem by merging the two Cornish languages and calling the result ‘Unified Cornish’. This was rejected as unspeakable heresy by both the other sides.

Maybe more pertinently, as you leave the railway station there’s a large stone sign on which ‘Welcome to Penzance’ is inscribed in Cornish, and while few people speak the language, they all know there is one, and that it makes them just a bit different. This sense of slight difference seems to have been around for a while. For example, Cornwall’s early trade unions were part socialist and part Cornish nationalist. So according to the book on Mebyon Kernow by Bernard Deacon, in 1847 the quarrymen went on demonstrations carrying the red flag, but with a pasty stuck on the end of each flagpole. (Perhaps their anthem went ‘The workers’ flag is highly priced, with onions, beef and carrots diced.’)