by Tim Moore
The museum was housed in Birkenhead Town Hall, a granite and sandstone edifice of a heft and grandeur tremendous even by Victorian standards, with half a Parthenon stuck on the front and a mighty 200-foot clock tower. I stepped over the chain strung across its leaf-scattered portico stairway, walked up and looked out across a gracious and expansive stretch of grass, statuary and noble old townhouses: Hamilton Square, home to more Grade 1 listed structures than any address in England but Trafalgar Square. A now familiar pathos took hold. Another symbol of a city’s bustling prime reduced to an abandoned mausoleum, another painful contrast between mighty, munificent past and fumbling, impoverished present. The fate of Birkenhead Town Hall – an enormous structure that fills an entire block – now lies ominously in the hands of a Strategic Asset Review panel. As things stand, the only active part of the place appears to be the magistrates’ court round the back.
The filthy beach proved a happier let-down. I parked Craig up on the promenade at Hoylake, by the tablecloth lawns of a crown-green bowls club, and saw at once that the rippled sands running off to the distant waters of Liverpool Bay had been ill served by whoever deemed this beach the second horridest in Britain. Little knots of weekend walkers were dotted across the enormous sunlit shore, Boden families in pink wellies, couples arm-in-arm behind hearty, panting dogs. The sky was big and the hilly fields to the west lay becomingly sprinkled with clean white snow. To cartographers, the Wirral Peninsula; to locals, the Scouse Riviera. Neither name did justice to this entirely wonderful prospect, and I couldn’t wait to walk far out into it and take wanky album-cover self-portraits with the new camera I’d got for Christmas.
Down on the sand I wandered past shells and seagulls and puddles full of starfish, and generally failed to find myself clambering over bloated livestock carcasses or kicking a path through drifts of faecal coliform and rusty hospital sharps. I was a good 400 yards out before I confronted my first item of human detritus: a single grey sock. To give the survey compilers more leeway than they probably deserve, I concluded that filth was truly in the eye of the beholder. As I gaze out of my window now, I see a back garden that some would doubtless view with disdain. Yet others might nod approvingly, and think: Here lives a man who knows a thing or two about bicycle maintenance (thing one: how to take a bicycle to pieces; thing two: how to pile those pieces up under an enormous blue tarpaulin).
I looked up from the sand with a start: the sun was almost down and I was miles and miles out, nearer to the windfarms and container ships than Craig and the crown-green bowlers. The local paper headline tolled up before me: PLAZZIE COCKNEY WHO WENT TOO FAR, above one of my recovered self-portraits (Woollyback haircut – the final straw?). I briskly pursued my lengthening shadow back across the sand, stamped half the Scouse Riviera into Craig’s footwells and set off back for Southport, full of ozone and good cheer. Driving in through the Pontin’s security gates felt like returning from day-release.
The heating had now been on for twenty-six hours straight, but my apartment was still no cosier than a branch-line waiting room. After a huddled half-bath I hurried away to the warmth and noise of the entertainment zone, where the previous night repeated itself in Orville-free form. Same failure to secure a dining table, same cheerless handheld roundel of flash-fried flesh, same pervasive air of beery unease. A dance troupe up on the stage stamped and smiled their way desperately through a medley of Barry Manilow hits, utterly ignored by an audience focused on texting and alcohol. Gum-chewing security operatives with headsets cast their dead-eyed gaze across the profane clamour. All the kids were either shooting zombies in the face or watching Ultimate Fight Championship in the bar. Those in the thinnest T-shirts were outside in the dark frost, amongst them a red-cheeked youngster of about seven or eight endeavouring to cajole some smoking teenage girls – I assume his big sister and a few friends – into a game of chase. ‘Come on, come on, I bet you couldn’t catch me even if I was just walking!’ As he hopped expectantly about beside them one of the girls half-turned to him, her face screwed up in disdain, and said, ‘You on the weed or something? Shut your bleeding head and piss off.’
I crawled into my tiny, tomb-cold bed feeling queasy and hollow, as if every scrap of those happy-camper fantasies had just been plucked from my childhood memory banks and nasally extracted. All through the night I imagined cheerful thoughts seeping out of my scalp, though the bathroom mirror at dawn explained this sensation in more prosaic terms: twelve hours after the stylist laid down her scissors, new things were still going wrong with my haircut. Even as I watched, two Yiddish ringlets bounced free from a craggy temple, like springs through an old sofa.
Light overnight snow had laid a patchy white veneer over the exercise-yard mud. Every window looking down on it was steamed up and curtained. Standing there wrapped in my bedding, hair akimbo, I looked out and suddenly felt desperate and alone, as if I was on the run and holed up. ‘Police traced Moore to a Pontin’s holiday camp in Southport, Merseyside,’ I said aloud, and in that instant resolved to leave this place at once and for good, even if it meant passing up a night’s accommodation that I’d paid for in advance, and a thick wad of unused electrocards (they’re still in my wallet: any offer over 25p per kwH considered). Five minutes later I was throwing my bags into Craig’s boot. And half an hour after that, with the legacy of my frenzied efforts at manual frost dispersal smeared and streaked across the windscreen, I finally inched out of the compound. Matey nods were exchanged with the security guard, though I might as well have given him a great big slobbery kiss of death: within a year, Pontin’s found itself in receivership.
Chapter Thirteen
IT WAS ANOTHER crisp and magnificent day – and this one came with scenery to match, though appreciating the majesty of North Wales without windscreen wipers necessitated several hard-shoulder stops, four litres of Tesco Value table water and an entire box of mansize tissues. Muscular, snow-capped foothills of Snowdonia to the left, sun-dappled Irish Sea to the right, and ahead long miles of empty tarmac and – whoa there, young Craig! – the odd slick of black ice.
Ozzy’s announcement that we had reached our fucking destination took me rather by surprise. Lost in the landscapes, and the surprisingly extensive acoustic hinterland charted by the Wombles’ second album, I’d forgotten that my 65-mile journey had a goal, and that this goal was Sw Môr Môn. An unusually economic use of the Welsh language – the nearest settlement had announced itself, mercifully not aloud, as Llanfairpwllgwynyll – this was the translation emblazoned beneath the cartoon prawn who welcomed me to Anglesey Sea Zoo. To some visitors ‘shoddy’, to others ‘weird’, but to all an unmissable opportunity to indulge the abysmal pun reflex that fish seem fated to trigger. From the zoo’s website comments: ‘It was eely good’, ‘we don’t think it cod be batter’, ‘we had a whale of a time in a great plaice’. I pulled up in the empty carp-ark and thought: Fins can only get wetter.
‘That’ll be £7.25,’ said the young man at the entrance desk, sounding a little apologetic, and then a little desperate: ‘Though your ticket does entitle you to come back as often as you like for the next seven days.’ Consultation of the opening hours posted beside him inspired a brief, wild fantasy in which I sought to extract forty-nine hours’ worth of enjoyment from his establishment.
Anglesey Sea Zoo, I very quickly gathered, is a showcase of the underwater quotidian. Its first dim chamber was dominated by a shallow tank full of plaice doing what they do best, namely very little beyond blending in with the seabed. Those that followed allowed many further native marine creatures to demonstrate a similar appetite for humble inertia: mussels, starfish, anemones. In short, anyone who arrives at Sw Môr Môn hoping to ride a manatee or watch dolphins vault through laser hoops will leave underwhelmed. This is a place for those whose sober aquatic interests are not catered for by the more prevalent breed of glitzy aquaria: the kind of people who don’t snigger when invited to adopt a grey mullet, or to press a button labelled, Bellamy on flat fish (sadly
not on a snack vending machine).
For two hours I walked alone through the dark and dripping cold, pressing my numb nose up to laminated information sheets about the common prawn, gazing at bland and cod-like British sharks, and being severally reminded of the dangers posed to marine life by plastic waste. There was standing water, a pervasive smell of fuel oil, and much stooping through corroded bulkheads. A low-tech wave machine periodically dumped a rusty skipful of brine onto some mocked-up rock pools with a great booming crash. I began to feel like a captain going down with his stricken trawler. This strange and ominous vibe encapsulated the shoddy weirdness that previous visitors had referred to, and which was now keenly emoted by a very straight-faced middle-aged couple who passed me at the speed of a Benny Hill title sequence. But in my new capacity as a connoisseur of the odd and the awful, I liked it. It was so mundane, yet so mad. I found myself drawing especial vicarious pleasure from the Welsh translations, imagining the happy challenge presented by ‘skates and rays can detect electrical pulses through tiny pores on their undersides’ to a native linguist more commonly obliged to earn his or her crust from ‘give way to sheep’ or ‘driver carries no cash, look you’.
As I walked on I came to appreciate and then internally applaud Anglesey Sea Zoo’s dogged repudiation of the gloss and glamour that defines their better-known rivals. At Seaworld, a demonstration of marine biology in action would mean some perma-tanned high-fiver in a cutdown wetsuit counting clown fish aloud. Here, through streaky Perspex, I watched a silent Open University type in a crumpled lab coat do painstaking things with a pipette. A yellowy Sellotaped sheet laid out his scientific agenda: an incest-proof breeding programme for short-snouted seahorses. For whatever reason, this was not explained in Welsh.
Having failed to squeeze into my itinerary the roundly denounced National Lobster Hatchery in Cornwall – ‘smaller than my bedroom, with some portholes through which you can see a lobster’ – you may imagine how my already buoyant enjoyment levels now soared on finding that Anglesey Sea Zoo incorporated the National Lobster Hatchery of Wales. It wasn’t a sprawling complex. A newspaper clipping stuck to the relevant viewing area recounted a ‘scandal’ in which hot lobster-on-lobster content filmed here had been passed off as natural-environment footage in the BBC series Blue Planet. The evidence of my eyes suggested this deception would have required some very lavish set-dressing. ‘When a mummy lobster and a daddy lobster love each other very much,’ an honest information panel might have read, ‘they get it on in a big white bucket.’
At length I made it to the cafeteria, where I sat down with a cup of tea and a big bun and concluded that Anglesey Sea Zoo’s perceived shortcomings were all of society’s own making. On the face of it, beyond a little light seahorse-sexing, the place offered nothing a family couldn’t experience for free on any of the long stretches of shoreline available close at hand. But then these days families can’t seem to face combing beaches or poking about in rock pools, in fact can’t seem to face anything that isn’t a packaged and processed experience presented by some half-arsed cartoon mascot, and which doesn’t offer en-suite refreshments and a hateful giftshop packed full of tenuously relevant rubbish (in ASZ’s case, anything with a picture of Sponge Bob Square Pants on it was considered fair game). And though £7.25 did seem a bit much, I strongly suspected this barely covered the insurance premiums in an age where a splashed pair of shoes might spark off ruinous litigation. We sue sea zoos on the sea shore. With all that said, I drove out of Sw Môr Môn vowing to bring my children here should the family find itself in the Anglesey area. Apart from anything else, it would be worth it just to see their faces when we drew up in the car park for the seventh morning in a row.
A stiff wind blew me back over the Menai Straits, past fields of hunkered-down static caravans and into the doyenne of terrible North Welsh seaside resorts. Its introductory thoroughfare was impressively unwelcoming: scrubby dunes to one side, and to the other an endless blue hoarding that kept at bay a mountain range of demolished rubble. This, I knew, was all that remained of a once famous old funfair, home to a number of historic rides, amongst them the world’s last surviving circular water chute. But the developers had just gone bust, leaving their vision for the site no more than faded words on a weatherbeaten ‘coming soon’ billboard: a 92,000-square-foot Asda, and the legend, RHYL – GOING FORWARD.
From residents to erstwhile holidaymakers, it’s hard to find anyone with a good word to say about Rhyl. ‘My aunt is the Mayor of Rhyl,’ began my favourite onslaught, ‘but family loyalty aside, it’s the most awful place I know.’ The town was ‘an absolute scum-hole’, a place where ‘seagulls fly upside-down because there’s nothing worth shitting on’. The Times called it ‘Britain’s first shanty town’, and the Consumer Association took a break from testing dishwashers to slag off Rhyl as ‘depressing and down at heel’. The last time the place made the news was when John Prescott punched a man in the face there, and with the waning of Carol Vorderman’s celebrity the mantle of Rhyl’s most famous daughter has passed back to Ruth Ellis, the last British woman to be hanged. Then there’s the issue of nomenclature. Rhyl: it’s another of those stark and plug-ugly town-names, hanging over the place like an albatross, with a beakful of your chips.
The dunes disappeared behind a flank of bare concrete desultorily topped with brown-leaved yucca plants, and the mothballed building site gave way to Homebase-sized amusement sheds – bleeping and open, as such places always seem to be whenever there are helpless fruit-machine addicts to amuse. Then it was into a long, ramshackle parade of towering Victorian boarding houses, some boarded up, some knocked down, and most of the rest – according to locals and the press – divided into bedsitting accommodation for the benefit of unemployed Liverpudlian opiate enthusiasts.
I pulled up in a pay-and-display bay and set off up the promenade with a whistle, the sound a budget-conscious motorist makes when it’s Sunday. But jaunty tootling quickly proved ill-suited to my environment. A local website had informed me that ‘Rhyl basks in a micro-climate said to match the temperatures in Torbay’. Said by who? The bitter Irish Sea wind forcing itself up my sleeves and trouser legs had the answer: said by liars. I think you’ll find that at least 98 per cent of all ‘micro-climates’ are complete fabrications, made up by tourist boards or friends who have moved somewhere horrid but still want you to visit them.
The seafront parade, in sympathy with the conditions, proved comfortably more dreadful than any I had yet experienced. Some of it was shut down for the season, but most of it was shut down for ever. Rhyl had even managed to kill off its retailers of last resort, those elsewhere indestructible commercial cockroaches who moved in when all else failed: CHEAP STORE – MANY ITEMS £1 – EVERYTHING NOW 50P – WE HAVE CLOSED DOWN. Every frontage was peeling and scabbed. A lot of upper floors had been completely painted over with thick magnolia emulsion, windows and all. Day-glo starbursts blared shabby inducements like FREE LAGER WITH ROAST MEAL! and CHEAPEST CHIPS IN RHYL. An invisible asterisk had hovered above most of the previous scenes of decay and decline I’d passed through, reminding me that whatever was no longer being done there, it probably hadn’t been much fun to do in the first place, like mining coal or making sulphuric acid. But there was no asterisk here: just the betrayed and haunting air of a place that had been purpose-built for having a good time, and now wasn’t.
In desperation I struck off down a side street. A mistake: it was worse. The pavement looked like it had been cluster bombed, and half the boarding-house hulks that lined it were shedding roof tiles and had their doors and windows sealed up behind drilled-metal shutters. Looping back round I passed an estate agent’s window, and saw houses priced in four figures. I plunged my hands deep into my coat pockets, bowed my head to the incoming bluster and hurried back to the seafront.
The first bathing machines were wheeled out onto the Rhyl sands in the early years of Victoria’s reign, but in accordance with the usual pattern, the place took off as a
seaside destination when the railway came to town in 1848. At a stroke this opened up the resort to millions of city dwellers – most of them in the deeply land-locked West Midlands, who found that despite being 100 miles from Birmingham, Rhyl was nonetheless their nearest beach. For over a hundred years the Brummies came in happy droves. Rhyl was soon home to the largest fairground in Wales, a half-mile pier, and the splendidly ornate five-domed Pavilion Theatre, whose massive, illuminated central hemisphere was visible from way out to sea. A mechanical elephant carried children along the prom. So too did the oldest miniature railway in Britain.
Unusually for those in charge of a post-war British seaside town, Rhyl’s elders saw the cheap-flight package-holiday crisis coming and took action – but because they did so in the early 1970s, all of it was horribly wrongheaded. The pier was pulled down in 1972, and the wondrous Pavilion Theatre a year later – reborn soon after as a corrugated oatmeal hangar with all the ritzy good-time appeal of a supermarket distribution centre. A number of shopping arcades were built in homage to the most dispiriting trends in period retail architecture, and the mechanical elephant was tarred and feathered and pushed down a well. In a few short years, every trace of the character that had made Rhyl seem glamorous and exuberant was brutally stripped away. People go on holiday to find something different, even if that difference is only the weather. But by the end of the 1970s, Rhyl was beginning to look and feel like every other slightly downbeat, grey-skied town in Britain – a process completed once the funfair went and the beach was shielded from sight by that big concrete wall. Holidaymakers from Wolverhampton got off the train or out of their cars and found themselves in Wolverhampton-by-Sea – in fact, Wolverhampton-by-Wall. Llandudno, just up the coast from Rhyl and for a century its poor and backward relation, was run by clueless Luddites who wouldn’t knock down their pier and other outdated embarrassments. As a result, the town has cleaned up from the current boom in genteel and nostalgic mini-breaks, and now counts itself the largest seaside resort in Wales.