I finished my pint of bitter and slunk off to the Tube, feeling somehow grubby and without checking for the bullet holes which some say remain in the bar woodwork. When I was next at a computer, I looked up on the internet some other people's impressions of the Blind Beggar. Most were complimentary, some were even gushing. One comment, posted at beerintheevening.com, read: 'One of the friendliest places I know. Bar staff are lovely and always welcoming. Never any trouble.'
Never any trouble? NEVER ANY TROUBLE? The only pub in England whose unique selling point is the fact that some poor sod got his brains blown out there? A pub that still has the pictures of the murderer on the wall where most pubs have a snap of Lulu or Frank Bough pushing over a pile of pennies? Never any trouble? Wouldn't a more accurate assessment have been: 'Never any trouble. Unless you count the infamous slaying.'
To try and get a more edifying take on London and its rich history and to perhaps dispel my now ingrained Lancastrian prejudices, I decided to visit the Museum of London. In this, I was seemingly unique among everyone I know, London native or not. No one knew where it was, or what it might entail. Even my cab driver was vague and despite their occasional bad press, London's famous cabbies are usually pretty knowledgeable and entertaining. Unlike their New York counterparts they aren't actually frightening and unlike their German brethren they don't consider it their patriotic duty to relieve you of all your money (I once saw the same Frankfurt traffic island three times before 'having a word').
Eventually, thanks to the nice brown tourist signs and one of those £1 maps you get from a dispenser, I found it in a squat neo-Brutalist structure behind the Barbican with an incongruously neat little garden and a doughnut-shaped balcony. As I arrived, three generations of a Spanish family were wheezing and panting up the stolidly unmoving escalator. It didn't seem auspicious. Nor did the snatch of conversation I overheard in the entrance hall between a kindly posh teacher and his young charge.
'Did you enjoy that, Rupert?'
'Yes, but I'd have enjoyed it more if so much of it hadn't been closed. And so dark. And confusing.'
Once inside, though, some of my fears are dispelled. There is no animatronic Dennis Waterman in costermonger garb doing a sinister clanking robotic knees-up. There are no short visual presentations on the history of pie and mash or rhyming slang. There is in fact a pretty bloody good visual representation of the growth of London as a settlement with lots of CGI cavemen with spears and the Ice Age in twenty seconds, that kind of thing. I don't know about you but I always start off round museums at an appropriately sedate pace with an expression of intense concentration but soon pick up speed and by the time I get to the gift shop I'm practically jogging. Thus I was soon into the section on early London civilisation. There was a tiny carved figure that had apparently been found in a mud flat in Dagenham, which was a stylised, sexualised representation of Odin. Small, sexy and from Dagenham, it could also have been the late Dudley Moore. In a charming tableau, a kaleidoscopically cosmopolitan class of eight-year-olds were listening with rapt attention to a young guide telling them about skeletons they'd found in nearby Cheapside. The riot of colour and headscarves, beads and braids and turbans, shapes and sizes of kid each asking eager questions in broad Cockernee said something profound and sweet about the city. There was no finer exhibit of real London life in the whole museum.
There was a great deal of signage which promised, thrillingly, The Great Fire of London Experience. Ascending a rather excessive ramp, I made my way into a tiny darkened room about the size of a prison cell. There was one other visitor already there an Eastern European man judging by his muttered mobile phone calls – who behaved really rather oddly, shuffling around, rooting through his bag and generally looking everywhere but at the tableau presented behind glass along the far wall. Perhaps, in his Moldovan home, he was used to something more exciting. It was certainly inconceivable that anything could have been less exciting. The tableau consisted of a quite dull, very murky sort of architect's model of seventeenth-century London which, over the course of several tedious minutes, glowed very gently, almost imperceptibly, with an ochre hue. Far too gently, in fact, to see what was going on. With my face pressed firmly against the glass, I still couldn't make out even the River Thames let alone any major conflagration. In the background a tape played and someone, Martin Jarvis probably, read out period accounts lurid with disaster and mayhem and flames licking the sky, none of which was visible. Perhaps in a concession to political correctness they had tried to downplay the horror of it all. Or perhaps it was just broken. Whatever, I felt The Great Fire of London Experience was putting it somewhat grandly. The Great Fire Mild Diversion would be nearer the truth.
Emerging blinking into the strip-lighting of the museum, I found a display devoted to 'ordinary Londoners'. Prominent among this was one Arthur Harding, who turned out to be an East End criminal. Typical, I thought. It occurred to me that instead of talking up its thieves and thugs, its Jack the Rippers and Kray Twins, London should lionise the ordinary Londoners who marched down Cable Street against Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts. Or the Bryant and May match girls who went on strike in 1888 for better wages and conditions and succeeded against enormous odds in a landmark battle for women and the working class. You might not be able to find a part for Johnny Depp or the Kemp brothers in these films but London really does need to sort out its heroes.
On leaving the museum, I strolled down Cheapside itself. There were no skeletons there, I'm afraid to say, just the usual ubiquitous urban street panorama of Starbucks, Boots, Vodafone, Thomas Cook and Bovis construction work. (If the north is the land of Hovis, London is the land of Bovis, believe me.)
Tucked away unassumingly across from a branch of the Body Shop is Bow Church, at the heart of the financial 'City' and famous all over the world as the epicentre of Cockneydom. It's a nice little church too, good for a quiet moment in the middle of all that brisk trading in pork belly futures or whatever. But the most famous part about the church is its bells, which are, claims the noticeboard, 'woven into the folklore of the City of London'. In 1392 Dick Whittington, a Gloucester lad trying his luck in the big city, heard Bow Bells call him back to London to become Lord Mayor. The famous toll ends the medieval nursery rhyme 'Oranges And Lemons': 'I do not know say the Great Bells of Bow.' During the Second World War the BBC's World Service broadcast a recording of Bow Bells, made in 1926, as a symbol of hope to the free people of Europe. And most famous of all, to be born within the sound of Bow Bells is the mark of a true Cockney.
But, hurrah, the actual Bow Bells rang while I was there. Within the sound of them I heard hardly any actual Cockney accents. I heard American drawls, sensual Spanish, breathless Italian, Turkish and Latvian (I had to ask her, nice girl). The first Cockney I heard was from a newspaper vendor who seemed to be berating a customer for not having the right change. That would have been it, but for two surly youths, their pinched faces volcanic with pimples, dressed in the cheap, nasty uniform of the urban urchin: fake Nike, hoodies, flammable polyester trackie bottoms that would go up in a single whoosh, outsized jeans. They both smoked in that affected way that people who are trying really hard to be hard do; fag between crooked index and middle finger, eyes narrowed, sucking desperately as if trying to actually remove by suction the B&H logo. These two spoke the loud braying, lazy R-ed cockney of Loadsamoney, trying hard to intimidate those around them and signally failing. We were all too busy looking for St Paul's.
Prince Charles once described the buildings around St Paul's cathedral as 'a carbuncle on the face of a much-loved friend'. Unusually, he was right. From Cheapside, it's obscured almost entirely by a grim octagonal sixties thing which houses Ricco Menswear on its street level. As I pass by, a 50% off sale is in full swing and Ricco is doing a brisk trade in anonymous polyester suits, presumably to the less stylish of the young men that make big money hereabouts.
A little further on, though, and you suddenly find the kind of thing that might have inspired Wordsw
orth to make his disloyal and intemperate remarks. You get a whiff, a real brackish, ozoney whiff, of what makes native Londoners hook their thumbs behind their lapels and tap dance on bin lids, singing 'Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner' as they go. The riverside of the Thames at Bankside has blossomed these last few years; the old girl, or old Father if you prefer, has tarted itself up good and proper, 'had a makeover' in the modern parlance. A thin ribbon of steel flings itself from the St Paul's shore to the great brick cliff face of the Tate Modern. This is Norman Fosters' Millennium Bridge, which wobbled so terrifyingly under the weight of the opening-day crowds that they had to immediately close it again for six months. It's an impressive thing, though. There is, as we shall see, an even more impressive Millennium Bridge in Newcastle, but let's not be churlish. Credit where it is due. Walking across Millennium Bridge in either direction, between those two stunning buildings from two different eras, contemplating the vast muscular sweep of the river with Tower Bridge on the left and the vista from the Gherkin down to the Houses of Parliament on the right, with the launches and dredgers and river buses endlessly churning this majestic if slightly muddy waterway, you do feel at the centre of one of the world's undeniably great cities.
Unlike Wordsworth, who dashed off a stanza or two, I react as all awestruck modern travellers do. I take a picture with my mobile phone. London, on the right night in the right light, is truly fabulous.
At heart, though, the northerner is never too downhearted to leave London behind and head up country. As the old-fashioned train guards would say on old-fashioned trains that still plumed themselves in smoke as they strained out of Euston and King's Cross, 'All aboard. . .'
We are for the north.
All Change
According to legend, the north begins at the RAC Traffic Centre on the M6 just at the point where the road surface changes from tarmac to cobbles. Michael Winner believes that the north begins at Oxford Circus. 'Anything north of Oxford Street is just ridiculous,' he once said, probably with his mouth full of a rare and cruel pâté made from otters. According to a posting on the Leyton Orient website, the north begins at Barnet. Absurd, but of course if you think Leyton is the Orient, you evidently have Mark Thatcher's sense of direction.
It's more common – axiomatic, in fact – to say that the north begins at the Watford Gap. Not, note, north of Watford. 'North of Watford', used incorrectly by residents of Fulham, accompanied by a wave of the hand, means bad restaurants, restricted shopping, spears, wolves and woad. But it's a modern misnomer. The Watford Gap has nothing to do with the nondescript Hertfordshire town whose football team is beloved of Elton John.
No, this Watford is a little village in Northamptonshire on the B5385 just outside Daventry. Its famous Gap is not a branch of that American place that sells chinos but a low pass through the gentle Northamptonshire hills that's been used by the Romans, the first canal and railway engineers and more latterly the Ml. Wading Street (now the A5) runs through it. So does the West Coast Main Line railway and the Grand Union Canal. For years this was the traditional crossing point between the Midlands and the south-east and hence, by extension, the gateway to the north as far as Londoners were concerned.
There used to be a well-known coaching inn here actually called the Watford Gap but you'd be hard pushed to get a pint there now; it was boarded up last time I looked. Instead, travellers going with heavy heart to London or with light step to the north can get a skinny decaf latte and a jaw-droppingly expensive pasty at the nearby Watford Gap service station located on the Ml between Junctions 16 and 17 and mildly celebrated as the first motorway service station in the UK. There's actually a plaque, just by the shelves full of lads' mags, gigantic cut-price quiz books and tins of speciality humbugs.
Motorway catering may begin here but as far as I'm concerned the north certainly doesn't. Northampton, despite its name, is not the north. It may not be exactly the south but it is undeniably, well, Midlands-ish. The accent is a sort of yokel Cockney. Des O'Connor comes from hereabouts, as do the goth group Bauhaus. Essentially I think Northampton is confused. But whereas Birmingham and Wolverhampton feel vaguely if inconclusively northern, Northampton's gravitational pull takes it south to the metropolis. In the eighties, the Northampton Development Council produced a really quite poor promotional seven-inch single in which aliens come to Northampton (Des O'Connor or Bauhaus fans, perhaps) and find that, as the cheesy chorus goes, 'It's only sixty miles by road or rail.' From where is never made clear but it doesn't have to be. Basically, whoop-de-do, it's sixty miles to London and that's a rather fawning, forelock-tugging gesture of kinship that no northern town would ever make.
The UK edition of the popular Lonely Planet travel guidebooks posits that the north begins in the Derbyshire Dales somewhere around Bakewell, home of Britain's most celebrated tart. Now there may be some truth in this. Hereabouts the soft chalkiness of southern England starts to stiffen with grit and limestone; there are proper ridges, escarpments and big bleak brawny moors. The grit is philosophical as well as conceptual; on Kinder Scout in April 1932, hundreds of ramblers wilfully 'trespassed' to reclaim ancient rights of way on to the mountain, a hugely significant event commemorated in song by Ewan MacColl and Chumbawamba. It should be said, though, that most of the trespassers came from Manchester.
Head a little further north and a little further west and you reach the debatable lands of Staffordshire, perhaps England's most enigmatic county. It has pottery and a bull terrier. It has its own local delicacy, the oatcake, a sort of heavy-duty tortilla with the texture of flannel, which exiled 'clayheads' get all tearful about and is actually pretty good with cheese and bacon. Also, in Port Vale FC, it has the only football team in England not named after a place – it's actually in Burslem – but a building, Port Vale House, where the inaugural meeting took place. As I write these words, Vale's most famous supporter Robbie Williams has pledged an undisclosed but substantial sum of money to help the club. In doing so, he has shot up in my estimation, so much so that I have almost forgiven him for 'Angels'.
Burslem (along with Stoke, Longton, Hanley and Tunstall) is one of the five towns which make up what's thought of as Stoke-on-Trent. Say this in the pubs of Fenton, though (town number six) and you might get your head kicked in by local geography casuals, should they exist. From my experience of the denizens of Stoke-on-Trent, largely gleaned by the unscientific procedure of studying who gets on and off the train there as I pass through en route to Manchester, it would seem the people of the area need little encouragement to turn nasty. I always feel quietly relieved when we get to Macclesfield. Taken from a Stoke-on-Trent online forum comes this proud assertion, which I quote uncorrected: 'If your from there it is the friendliest city in the world which is great we don't want shitty southerners coming and telling us how shit our home is we know it already. Oh and the fact that were the hardest and Oatcakes.'
But for all the funny foods and simmering aggression, I'm still not having it that Staffordshire is the north. For one thing, the football teams aren't good enough. Sorry but it's true. Its sing-song accent is undeniably of a Midlands lilt. Wolverhampton is in Staffordshire, for God's sake, and how much more Midlands can you get than Dave Hill and kipper ties?
But go a little further north and you reach the spot where I would say that the north undeniably begins. Though it's in a very classy and grand county, it's far from classy and grand. It's an iconic structure though it isn't architecturally impressive or visually striking. For homecoming northerners it is the first sign that they are back in the right place, their moral and cultural compass righted. For southrons heading up country, it is here that the realisation begins that you may be in foreign country, as the vowels flatten and the skies grow leaden and the track curves away from you to the hills and moors and chimneys of the north. Welcome to Crewe station. Please make sure you have all your belongings with you before leaving the train.
As a non-driver without a desk job, I spend my life on trains. I have become sk
illed in reading every nuance of train travel. I can tell by the timbre of the intercom's chime whether it's good or bad news. I know by the way the engine dies just how long we'll be in this siding in Nuneaton. I know instinctively when we're going to be diverted via Leighton Buzzard. I can play the network like one of those American railway hobos Bob Dylan wanted to be, knowing just where to change for Penrith on a Friday night, which carriage to sit in to make the quickest time from platform six into the new Bullring shopping centre in Birmingham, how much the Opal Fruits are on the trolley. I have become immune to and philosophical about some railway irritants and increasingly irritated by others. I'm currently obsessed with the way the 'senior conductor', drunk with power and the sound of his own voice crackling through the PA, will declaim with the verbiage and prolixity of Larry Olivier doing Shakespeare, until something goes wrong, when he suddenly turns into Buster Keaton doing Harold Pinter, all mysterious pauses and menacing silences. They lovingly list, as if this were the 12.20 from Frankfurt to Dusseldorf circa 1938, all the things you can't do, the tickets you can't travel with, the noises you can't make, the things you can't eat, the places you can't put your bag and so on before becoming oddly mute and uninformative when you actually need to know something useful, like why we've been stuck in a tunnel near High Wycombe for three hours.
Pies and Prejudice Page 4