Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  Sorry, where was I? Oh yes. Crewe. Balham may be the gateway to the south (an actual Southern Railway advertisement from 1926, later a legendary Peter Sellers sketch) but Crewe is surely the gateway to the north. It's from here that you head on to Manchester and Liverpool, the Lake District, Lancashire, the Pennines, Yorkshire and the bracing coast. Northerners come here on those first exciting trips to London. At some point, most people have found themselves on Crewe station, trying to get some kip on a hard bench or stamping their feet and watching their breath cloud the night air, waiting for a milk train and coppering up for a hot chocolate.

  Making sure I have all my personal belongings with me, I detrain, as the current lingo has it, to find that the station clock reads 1398, which is more than a little disconcerting. I'm sure Jude Law and Kate Moss would find Crewe outre and behind the times but surely it's not still the end of the fourteenth century here. The clock, then, isn't working. The automatic doors at the information centre are broken. In fact the whole station is somewhat underwhelming, given its enormous strategic importance as a communication centre and the hub of the British rail network. Maybe it's just too busy to ponce about turning itself into a heritage site but it's a shame it's not as imposing as Grand Central or King's Cross. It's just as important. The Lemon Tree cafe seems to be doing well, though, and I note, with a little 'ahh', that two students are cuddled up fast asleep on rucksacks in the waiting room. If they do get round to a refurb, that would make a nice little statue, sweetly emblematic of Crewe.

  Crewe is younger than America. Before 1837, when the Grand Junction Railway opened its station in fields near Crewe Hall, the population of the nearest village was just seventy, all of them probably wearing smocks. But a new town grew up alongside the increasingly busy station, with the population exploding to reach 40,000 by 1871. The GJR's chief engineer Joseph Locke helped lay out the town and railway money brought prosperity, schools, churches, a gasworks, a hospital, a public baths and a large park. Strolling here on a fine chilly spring morning, watching a young mum teaching a toddler to ride a trike and two elderly ladies sharing a bar of Dairy Milk, you wouldn't guess that this fine patch of civic greenery is a product of ruthless Victorian railway politics. The London and North Western Railway (the GJR's successor) bought the land and donated it to the town as a park designed by their own engineer Francis Webb in order to prevent the rival Great Western Railway from building a railway line through it.

  Jonathan Glancey, the architectural writer, has spoken glowingly of Crewe's heritage, of it being one of the world's great workshops, building Rolls-Royce and Bentley cars as well as building the fine locomotives that sped expresses northward from Euston and south from Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Manchester, 'all of them pausing for water, tea and buns at Crewe'. He talks of a town bursting with civic pride, with workers' educational initiatives in every library and church hall, a true community 'that would have stayed a happily sustainable one if the railways hadn't been privatised a century on'. At Christmas 2005 (the timing of these things is always immaculate, don't you think?), the company that owns what remains of Crewe Works announced that a third of the 1,000 people still working there would be made redundant. At its peak, Crewe Works employed 20,000. Soon that figure will have dwindled to zero. It's the same old song with a bitter little refrain that you hear again and again in the blighted industrial towns of the north.

  But away with such gloom and into Crewe, gateway to the north. Out of the station onto a confusingly anonymous bridge that gives no clue where the actual town might be. Turning left at random, I immediately find I am on Gresty Road, which, as anyone who's spent swathes of their life poring over Rothman's football yearbooks or glued to Grandstand will tell you, is home to the exotically named Crewe Alexandra Football Club and what must be the most easily accessible football ground in England.

  Fairly quiet on a Thursday morning, though. Two youths in the ubiquitous hoodie style of the early twenty-first century are trying to be menacing by a bus stop but failing because of the utter ridiculousness of their appearance. I know it's a sure sign of middle age when you start chortling at how young people dress but, really, a hood worn over a flat cap. The effect is less lethal urban gangster than senile old bloke unaware that he's put two hats on.

  A piece of venerable graffiti on a low wall claims 'Dario Gradi is God'. Now in case you think Crewe has a special affection for Italian film directors or left-wing playwrights, let me explain. Milanese by birth, Dario Gradi is, as of 2006, the longest-serving manager in the football league, arriving at the club in 1983 when Betamax was still slugging it out with VHS and digital music for computers meant Gary Numan. In an industry that's become synonymous with venal greed and posturing, Gradi is renowned for nurturing young talent and for his good humour and loyalty. In Crewe, there's a street named after him (Dario Gradi Close) as well as a band, Dario G, who had a handbag house hit in 1997 with 'Sunchyme'. He has the freedom of the borough and probably never needs to buy a pint in south Cheshire ever again. Crewe seems to encourage loyalty: local MP, the redoubtable Gwyneth Dunwoody, has represented the town since 1974. Crewe and Nantwich have a joint council and because Nantwich is substantially posher, resentment simmers in Crewe. According to a Crewe website, 'the borough treats Crewe as a shithole and anything worthwhile (decent baths, skate park, roller hockey rink, etc. . .) goes to Nantwich'. One for Gwyneth, I think.

  Out of Gresty Road, I am lured left by a sign on a lamp-post that promises excitingly the 'Nantwich Road Shopping Mile'. This would seem to be mainly of interest to people shopping for kebabs and Bacardi Breezers. I have never seen so many pubs and takeaways. The Station Hotel, oddly the focus for a recent novel by Alexei Sayle, has rooms for twenty-five quid a night and you might need them if you sampled the sundry wares of the Nantwich Road Shopping Mile. The Barrel is offering 2 for 1s on premium lagers, free birthday drinks and cut-price pitchers.

  Feeling peckish myself, I decide to try something a little more traditional. Goodwin's chip shop is, like George Orwell's mythical pub The Moon Under Water, the sort of place you feared no longer existed. As well as the chippy bit with the glass counter and the battered sausages and cod in neat glistening rows and the red-hot metal strip perfect for burning your forehead on, there's an adjoining cafe section. This has tables and those glass sugar servers that miraculously pour just one teaspoon when you tilt them. There are red leather booklets with menus inside. There are nice pine chairs and tables, a kiddies' menu, cans of Vimto and jam roly-poly for afters. There are ketchup dispensers in the form of those comedically outsized plastic tomatoes that always have a congealed bit of red on the nozzle.

  Elsie and Hazel behind the counter encourage me in the direction of the lunchtime special: fish, chips, mushy peas, mug of tea or soft drink and two rounds of bread and butter for four pounds. I take a seat feeling absurdly, childishly happy about having fish and chips for dinner in Crewe on a crisp February afternoon. And it was my dinner. Not my lunch. Gordon Gekko in Wall Street sneered that lunch was for wimps but it would have been more accurate to say that lunch is for southerners. Up north we have our dinner in the middle of the day and our tea at night. A little defiantly, my Scouse agent and I will still talk about going out 'for our tea' even if we're dining somewhere dreadfully chichi in the West End (which we don't do, obviously). And don't get me started on supper. A TV producer once invited me round for 'supper' and I was genuinely flummoxed. Supper means something very specific in the north and I was rather bemused by the prospect of going round to her house in Chiswick at half ten at night in my dressing gown to have digestive biscuits and cheese off my lap on the settee while watching the telly.

  Dave Goodwin, eponymous proprietor of the fine chippy where I had my dinner, is from London but has lived everywhere and is now domiciled in Winsford, a town some seven miles away, built on the salt industry. He worked in retail for years. After seventeen years' loyal service he was made redundant by Littlewoods and the next day joined BHS. Af
ter seven years they made him redundant too. 'So I thought I'd buy a chippy.' After consulting the maps, drawing circles with compasses and scrutinising the competition, he bought this one, a great big gleaming place on Crewe's Nantwich Road, a thoroughfare apparently famous among Crewe's hungry revellers.

  'There are forty-one takeaways on this street. Didn't you notice? Fish and chips are dying out. There'll always be some people who love their fish supper and won't have anything else but the glory days have gone.'

  I can remember those glory days well. When I was a little kid in Wigan, seemingly everyone went to the chippy on a Friday night. I'm not sure why this was. Maybe something to do with being flush with the week's wages or not being bothered to cook if you were going out on the town or maybe because the Catholic church forbade meat on Fridays but took a pretty relaxed attitude to cod, plaice and whiting.

  Whatever the reason, the Friday night chippy run was a ritual. They queued on the pavement. Some took bowls with them, the sort you might put on a child's head to help with a cheap haircut, and asked for them to be filled with chips, which they'd take home covered with a tea towel. (We didn't do this because my mum thought it was common.)

  But as for Crewe, I didn't come here just to have a good feed. I came to find out whether, as I contend, Crewe is really the north. By one fabled criteria, it certainly is; namely the friendliness of the locals and their use of affectionate terms. Within twenty minutes of arriving, I have been loved by several women. Several more have petted me, lover-ed me, one or two even luvvie-d me. Mainly, it has to be said, by ladies of a certain age but twice by women in their twenties, which hopefully proves that this great northern tradition is not dying out.

  If you're not used to being talked to in this way, it can be a little disconcerting at first but it's also utterly delightful. And if you want to be really disconcerted, go to Sheffield or Rotherham, where even brawny men will address you as 'love'.

  But what do Dave and Elsie and Hazel think? Is Crewe the north? Dave says yes emphatically. Hazel says, 'No, it's the middle,' and goes on to explain a little obliquely, 'On the farm where I grew up there's a tree and that's in the middle of the Cheshire plain. We are in the middle of England, between the hills and the sea.' Then, when Dave's back is turned, she chuckles to me conspiratorially, 'It's the north really. I'm just saying that to wind him up,' implying that the subject is hotly debated every day in this cracking little chip shop.

  Back on the Nantwich Road, I decide to test Dave's claim by counting all the takeaways. I give up at twenty-one, though, as my head is spinning with Bombay Gardens and Kebablands and Thai Palaces. My favourite, though, is Full Bellies, which has a kind of winning vulgarity, don't you think?

  Armed with some directions to the town centre ('blink and you'll miss it'), I head off down Eddleston Road. According to local legend, Bedford Street is renowned for having the largest number of different house types in south Cheshire. The street (which was bombed during World War Two) features terraced houses, semis, detached houses, flats, three-storey houses and bungalows as well as a prominent church, a scout hut and scout shop as well as a chequered history of nefarious activity. Eddleston Road may have less of a flavour of the souk about it but it's an entertaining stroll up a classically northern street. There are back-to-backs as well as posh double fronteds. Plus there's an array of quirky entrepreneurial ventures: a sex shop coyly offering 'marital aids', Snakey Jakes (Custom Amplification Since 1971), Picnic Basket Quality Sandwiches and Al Trophies, the sort of little shop selling tiny snooker cups and wooden shields that you often find in northern backstreets and whose continued existence is both mystifying and heartening. There are a number of hairdressers with the now compulsory punning titles, the best of which is Style Counsel, the worst Hair 2 Day Fade Tomorrow, which doesn't exactly sound like a ringing endorsement.

  The unexpected appearance in the midst of all this of a Polish delicatessen reflects the town's large and fast-growing population of workers from Eastern Europe. Many have been here since World War Two, hence the long-established Polish Working Men's Club on West Street. But thousands more have come in search of work after Poland's accession to the European Community in 2004. Three thousand arrived in the first eighteen months and now Poles comprise six per cent of Crewe's population. According to a Polish proverb, 'Home is wherever you find your bread.' Well, you can find your bread at Grodziny's as well as your kielbasa and golabki, your poppy seed cake and borsch.

  As warned, I don't blink so I find the town centre. Apparently this is due to be demolished and rebuilt soon. The locals I spoke to were very keen on this ('About bloody time too. Eyesore,' said an old man with a sticky bun in the bus station cafe), but I thought Crewe town centre had rather a pleasant 1930s air about it. There's an imposing clock tower in a vaguely modernist architectural style I can't name, although I have to say I am always a little disappointed when a bus station dominates a town centre. At night, though, it must be a great place to drink your own bodyweight in Smirnoff Ice.

  Most days in the broadsheets, Hampstead-based cultural commentators can be found bemoaning the homogenisation of our towns. When they do, they always cite the prevalence of McDonald's, probably because it's a soft American target and the first thing to pop into their head. From my travels, there are two far more inescapable icons that are the ubiquitous emblems of modern Britain: Greggs and the high-visibility tabard.

  Crewe has a Greggs and like every other Greggs in the UK it was rammed. Greggs' tasty home-baked fare has become synonymous with that other contemporary phenomenon, the chav, a tasteless, pallid, Burberry-wearing, jewellery-encrusted prole usually found as freakish exhibits on mid-morning TV after they have married their probation officer's mum or some such. While, like every other clear-headed Marxist analyst, I bemoan the fact that the working class has become enfeebled in this way, I do detect a pungent strain of good old-fashioned snobbery in the middle-class demonisation of the chav. Also, I quite like Greggs pasties. You wouldn't want to live off them but after a night on the Breezers, I'd certainly prefer one of their chicken and mushroom jobs to a rocket and shaved Parmesan salad.

  Everyone knows about Greggs. The high-visibility tabard, though, now the unofficial uniform of all British working men and women, is something of a personal obsession. Once upon a time these luminescent lime-yellow plastic creations were only sported by AA men, railtrack maintenance men and lollipop ladies, people who genuinely had to a) stand in the pissing rain for hours and b) be quite visible. Now everyone wears them. Doctors, novelists, priests: they're like the leggings and baseball cap of the twenty-first century. And don't tell me that, strictly speaking, a lot of them are actually jackets rather than tabards. I can bang on about that for twenty minutes with a following wind.

  Cheshire fantasy writer Alan Garner once described Crewe as 'the ultimate reality'. I'm not entirely sure what he meant by this but I don't think it's complimentary. But get this: Crewe has a crater named after it on Mars approximately 3 km in diameter located at 25° South, 10° West. Beat that, Hampstead. The sun comes out as I stroll by the Lyceum Theatre and I spot with some pleasure the library, a neat municipal building in that same thirties vernacular as the rest of Crewe's town centre.

  I love libraries. As a kid I practically lived in Powell Street Library in Wigan, devouring everything from Norse myths to football reference books to Richmal Crompton's William stories to books about Romania, a country I was strangely fascinated by. Margaret Thatcher tried her best to bleed Britain's libraries to death (well, it stands to reason that if you want to read, you should buy a book – what do you think this is, the Soviet Union?) but they seem to be holding their own. Crewe's is the very model of a modern local library: bright, well laid out, festooned with posters of smiling multi-ethnic readers.

  Public libraries in the afternoon attract a certain kind of melancholic misfit whom life, it seems, has somehow passed by. I don't know if this is a good description of me but I do like a nice public library of an
afternoon. Crewe's was all quiet British busyness: fresh-faced students with reading lists and businessmen returning their Andy McNabs and John Grishams as well as the more conventional, even caricatured daytime library clientele. For instance, the man sitting opposite me reading a doorstop-sized sci-fi tract that could stun an ox is wearing the wonkiest glasses I have ever seen. They have only one arm and that sticks out at a right angle like a wayward car radio aerial. Maybe he really is getting coded messages from an alien government beamed into his brain. Whatever, they must be staying on his face by sheer force of will. Now he is gently snorting to himself like a bull. In another corner are two men who clearly rendezvous here every day. One wears a seventies bobble hat; the other has an absurdly long beard, way beyond common sense, like those Indian blokes who are always trying to get into the Guinness Book of Records. They are discussing the raging toothache one is suffering from but this doesn't stop him eulogising, in a stage whisper, a new range of linseed bread in the local Tesco.