I stroll idly through the Local Studies section hoping to learn more about the town. Forgoing All You Need To Know About H20: The Story of Crewe's Water Supply and Branch Lines, I take down a red folder marked Crewe: A Town of Lost Opportunities. Compiled by Harry Jones. It's really just a collection of cuttings relating to the thwarted possibility of a transport museum in the town culled from fifty years of local papers. But it's also a sonata of quiet rage. Harry must have been so angry that he could hardly stop his hands from shaking. I bet there was glue everywhere. Having chronicled and lambasted the half-century-long short-sightedness of the local council, Harry seethes by way of conclusion: 'By contrast the photographs at the back of this folder show what one town with foresight and imagination can achieve . . . Swindon.' This is surely the most glowing tribute that particular Wiltshire town has ever received. As is always the way when you look through old newspapers, I quickly lose interest in the stuff I'm supposed to be reading and am drawn to those incidental stories elsewhere on the page: 'Methodist Queen Yvonne Is Crowned' and the brilliant 'Baths Car Park Plan Total Lunacy'.
The nice librarian has a definite hint of Welsh in her accent, a reminder that on a clear day you can see the hills of Snowdonia from Cheshire. As I leave, Beard and Bobble Hat are discussing the opening hours of the new Morrisons and the massive robbery from the Securitas depot in Kent that's dominating the news pages, the biggest in British history. 'They got greedy, that was their downfall,' Bobble Hat explains sagely, with the great worldly wisdom of a man who spends all his afternoons in a public library in Crewe.
Back at the station, you can glimpse in their natural habitat another kind of British male often thought of as melancholic and misfitted to the world: the trainspotter. I try to engage one in conversation but clearly he is elsewhere, his rapt face shining with pleasure and concentration as he studies the distant platforms for his quarry. You can understand it. For devotees of trainspotting, Crewe station must be a kind of Mecca, their Valhalla, their Nirvana, their, well, Crewe, I suppose. If Jeremy Clarkson were here, he would doubtless be pointing out in that plonking way of his that these individuals are 'sad'. Well, how come? Trainspotting doesn't appeal to me one bit but then neither does Jeremy Clarkson. How come if you're tragically obsessed with vile, globe-destroying, penis substitutes you get the nickname petrolhead but if you like trains, you're an anorak? Petrolhead sounds way sexier, you have to admit. It says something about our world that if you are an enthusiast for anything, if you dare lose your ironic modern detachment and world-weariness, you become 'sad' or 'a loser'.
As the Pendolino swings gently out of Britain's rail cathedral, you can see that Cheshire, damp and flat and green, is a dairy county. Old sayings still survive, like, 'In wet weather a cow has five mouths.' Bizarre at first or indeed second hearing, it means that each of the cow's feet destroy the sodden grass and ruin it for other grazers. Remember that: it may well win you an admiring audience from older drinkers in Knutsford or Nantwich. As well as milk, Cheshire has salt in its veins. They've been mining it here since the vast beds were accidentally discovered in early Victorian times and still each year enough salt is extracted from the Winsford mines to fill Wembley Stadium to the brim, pitch, terraces and all. Glance at any map of the county and you'll find it dotted with 'wich'es, denoting brine springs. One of them is Northwich, home to Tim Burgess and the Charlatans and my favourite British football derby. Northwich is not a big place but it has two decent non-league football sides, Witton Albion and Northwich Victoria, and the rivalry between them is ridiculously intense. A half-decent gob would carry from Witton's ground to the Drill Field where Northwich play and yet the rancorous schism divides the town to the bafflement of outsiders.
Fifteen minutes' train journey across those flat dairy lands of south Cheshire and soon comes along seven giant cooling towers and a cluster of chimneys with plumes of white smoke. At nearby Ellesmere Port stands the colossal Stanlow Refinery at the end of a fifteen-mile pipeline from the Tranmere plant on the Mersey. At the height of the eighties' 'industrial romanticism', local boys Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark wrote a song about it called 'Stanlow', a dreamy ballad awash with synthetic strings and harps. My mate John's dad, who had worked there, listened to it with a suspicious look and said, 'It doesn't sound much like bloody Stanlow to me.'
Disembarking at Bank Quay station, you can smell the 'pear drops' tang in the dusk, just as you used to be hit by the earthy scent of hops from the Boddingtons brewery when you pulled into Manchester Victoria. The Lever plant looms over the platforms and the early-evening air seems to be full of ether and sodium.
Warrington is notoriously hard to pin down. These days it's the largest town in Cheshire, being absorbed by that county in 1974 though traditionally it was in Lancashire. It certainly feels Lancastrian, built on heavy industry from steel to beer to wire-making. The town stands on the muddy banks of the Manchester Ship Canal and they take their rugby league very seriously around here.
The gap – no, make that a chasm – between the two codes of rugby is one of the great north-south divides. On the one hand, there's union, 'a game for ruffians played by gentlemen', and on the other there's league, 'tough as teak . . . as northern as hotpot and Yorkhire pudding', as the absurd Eddie Waring once said. Or to quote Michael Herd of the Evening Standard, 'a sport that Londoners don't give a toss for ... a game for ape-like creatures watched by gloomy men in cloth caps'.
It was a very simple schism once. Rugby union was for toffs from the south, league was for working men from the north. As far as most northerners see it, union was invented when a public schoolboy too stupid and unskilled to play football properly picked up the ball and ran off with it like a girl. In fact, like a Blackpool barmaid, rugby union's roots are always showing through. Look at how many Joshes and Simons and Nigels and Robs – working-class people always abbreviate Robert to Bob – there are in the England union squad. They may allow professionalism now and not have to reach for the smelling salts whenever money is mentioned, but in essence it's still a game for the middle classes, the southern middle classes to boot.
I will readily admit to a whole panoply of prejudices against union – except that some of them aren't just class and regional bigotry, they are founded in solid scientific fact. My dad's theory, one instilled in me at an early age, is that thirty people is far too many to have on a pitch at one time and hope to produce anything remotely skilful or attractive. The reason there are fifteen players on each side in union is that you can keep a lot of unruly, spotty schoolboys occupied at one time on a Wednesday afternoon. I went to a Catholic grammar school in Wigan – arguably the rugby league capital of the world - and we played union rather than league in what was clearly a pathetic attempt to ape the mores of the public schools. This – alongside being hit with a strap by forty-year-old male virgins in frocks – is one of the many things that rankle about my alma mater.
League, I contend, is the vastly superior code: faster, harder, infinitely more skilful. The ball is actually passed at speed from one player to another rather than merely hoofed skyward and then bundled upon en masse on its snow-flecked return to earth. Until relatively recently, union almost prided itself on its lack of application, fitness and rigour, on what it treasured as its amateur status. Indeed, as my old friend the comedy performer Neil Ashurst would say, 'The only good thing about rugby union is that it's always nice to see policemen and barristers getting knocked about a bit on their day off.'
Worryingly for those of us who like our prejudices intact, things are more complex now. Union has become professional and unarguably a better sport for it, though to these eyes it's still an ugly free-for-all. Rugby league doesn't really even exist any more. It's called Super League now, and Murdoch's Sky money - initially regarded as tainted but now grudgingly welcomed - has transformed the game, clubs and stadia. The most obvious and least edifying change has been in nomenclature. I will gladly take Murdoch's dosh if it means a great sport is kept alive and kic
king, well, passing and running. But no one outside of the branding consultancies can have welcomed the coming of those stupid nicknames with their second-hand American football feel. The Keighley Cougars, The Oldham Bears, The Halifax Blue Sox; almost none have caught on with the public, with the possible exception of The Bradford Bulls. If anyone in Wigan said that they were going along to the JJB to watch 'The Warriors' you would know instantly that they were an impostor, like when Gordon Jackson speaks English to the sneaky SS man in The Great Escape.
Rugby league is a proud sport, proud of its working-class lineage, proud of its family values, a phrase which actually has some meaning here. If you ever went to a Wigan and Warrington game in the late seventies or a Good Friday Humberside derby, you'll have learned first-hand from the dodging of flying bricks that rugby league has not always been hooligan-free, despite what it cosily likes to think, but these were brief aberrations in what has generally been a game watched and played in the very best of spirits, a man's game where women and children have always been made welcome and secure on the terraces. In his book on rugby league, To Jerusalem and Back, Simon Kelner recounts a wonderful story of the 1982 Challenge Cup Final in Leeds where, in a crowd of 44,000 people, there was just one arrest, for drunkenness, and outside the ground. Kelner recalls how, on that day, the only minor incident he witnessed was a mild fracas when a Hull supporter, dressed in black and white kit and wearing a stripy top hat, tried to push into a taxi queue. He was insisting he was the Minister for Sport.
Warrington, or the Wires, are one of the stalwarts of the thirteen-a-side game. I always loved the name of their old ground, Wilderspool, more Tolkien than Eddie Waring. But for all this, Warrington seems different from the rest of Lancashire. There is something faintly Scouse about the people and their speech (Chris Evans and Kerry Katona are well-known Warringtonians of today and may still be by the time you read this). Also, right here in Labour's Lancastrian heartlands, Warrington has a place in political history for being the first place to field a candidate for the SDP-Liberal Alliance back in 1981, when 'Woy' Jenkins lost narrowly to Doug Hoyle.
Perhaps of more cultural import than its industrial past or its importance in the Civil War or its place in modern political history, Warrington was chosen as the site of Britain's first Ikea. I remember well it opening in 1987. My friend Geoff suggested we drive out from Wigan in search of some cheap furniture for college and we spent the afternoon chuckling at the sofas called Billy and bookshelves called Git. No one laughs now. In fact, some people think there's something rather sinister about those funny names. Joe Kerr, head of the Department of Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, has argued that, 'They have subtle techniques for encouraging compliance. And in following them you become evangelists for Ikea. If you look at police interrogation techniques, for example, you see that one of the ways you break somebody's will is to get them to speak in your language. Once you've gone to a shop and asked for an Egg McMuffin, or a skinny grande latte, or a piece of Ikea furniture with a ludicrous name, you're putty in their hands.' Blimey. Come on, Joe, lighten up. Those tea lights are a real bargain.
As you leave Bank Quay station, one of the very first signs you see promises directions to 'The Cultural Quarter', not a particularly northern notion, certainly one that would be chortled at in the Chelsea Arts Club. Naturally I set off in the gathering dusk with a spring in my step.
When I soon encounter another sign pointing back the way I have come and also bearing the legend 'The Cultural Quarter', I realise I have walked through the quarter without noticing. Disappointing. Perhaps I am being unfair. Perhaps it was unrealistic to expect bearded bohemians setting up easels by the dry cleaners or men in berets playing atonal jazz saxophone on the town hall steps but I had expected something more. So I go back and have another look.
The Pyramid Arts Centre, focus of the cultural quarter, is closing as I arrive at 5 p.m., which must make it rather less than useful for Warringtonians with day jobs. And there are plenty. Warrington has one of Britain's lowest unemployment rates with a booming hi-tech sector. A pity: I would have liked to look at an exhibition or two or maybe caught Warrington's Improvised Music Collective 'back with their blend of Balinese and Javanese Gamelan for multiple Guitars, a celebration of the ancient Japanese form for electronics and an evocation of the inter-war serialism of Schoenberg and Webern with live electronics'. And you thought it was all brass bands, didn't you?
Warrington has mushroomed in modern times. Northern readers of an eighties vintage may well remember being constantly urged by excitable TV ads to 'ring Eileen Bilton' about relocating to Warrington Runcorn New Town. The projected Chapelford Urban Village is the largest brownfield redevelopment in the north-west. Thousands of new homes are scheduled on the site of World War Two's largest air base, Burtonwood, once home to all those US airmen who were 'oversexed, overpaid and over here'.
In 1973, Warrington town centre was pretty much razed to the ground in an orgy of 'planning'. Said planners felt that only Palmyra Square and the town hall had any architectural merit and the rest was gone with the wave of a draughtsman's ruler. You can see why they spared Palmyra Square. It's rather grand with famous venue the Parr Hall on one side and the fine old houses of long-dead soap barons on the other. In between, they've laid out a long thin square – OK, geometrists, a rectangle – called Queens Gardens, and in it there's a plaque that reads: 'These Russian Guns, captured on the eighth day of September 1855 by the victorious arms of Her Majesty and her allies in the Fortress of Sebastopol, were presented to the Mayor and the Corporation of the Borough of Warrington by Her Majesty's Government as a memorial to the sufferings and the triumphs of the British Army in the Crimea.' Unfortunately there are no guns anywhere to be seen. Maybe the Russkis came and snatched them back in a dawn raid from St Helens.
The result of the planning fest of the seventies and beyond is a city centre that is positively crowded with a hotchpotch of development, huddling and looming everywhere, towering above you and blocking out the sky. It feels a bit like a central European market town circa 1500. But with a Greggs and a Superdrug, of course.
Peter Andre is appearing soon at the Chicago Rock Café (evidently Warrington Rock Café was thought too literal) and there are real ales at the Friar Penketh. A blackboard outside the Postengate pub reads 'Your fun starts and ends here', which is meant to sound alluring but actually comes across as faintly threatening. If you're peckish, you can eat at Cromwell's, just as Oliver Cromwell did himself when the town was much smaller and the site of a decisive Civil War encounter.
In among all this ersatz antiquity and twenty-first-century redbrick gothic, you turn a corner and come up against something genuinely 'getting on a bit' and really fabulous. Golden Square has given its name to a typically soulless modern shopping development but it's a real square with a covered piazza that could hold its own with Covent Garden's. The Barley Mow pub lounging attractively to one side is one of the oldest pubs in Britain and a building that wouldn't look out of place in Stratford-upon-Avon with its lovely, fussy Tudor frontage. A plaque tells you that the pub dates from 1561 and that it is reputed to be haunted. At lighting-up time on a chilly late winter dusk, it is haunted by a particular kind of drinker. Chefs on their way to other shifts at pubs, elderly men on barstools slowly turning the pages of racing papers as their cigarette smoulders in a nearby ashtray, indie kids comparing CD purchases. A resolutely unsmiling knot of regulars eye me suspiciously from the bar corner where they are in hushed conversation with a glacially cool barmaid. The Barley Mow promises more than it delivers though perhaps I just caught it on a bad day. I necked a warming Jamesons and left.
If these old northerners were taciturn, the new northerners I spotted having a crafty gasper in the doorway of the shopping precinct were much more warm and voluble: two dark-haired young women smoking furiously, waving their hands and flicking their raven tresses as they talked at staggering speed and volume in Italian. I wanted to ask wha
t they were doing in Warrington but I was afraid I wouldn't get a word in edgeways. Less lively was Cockhedge Shopping Arcade which, maybe because of its fantastically unappealing name, was a ghostly alley of To Let signs and Closing Down Sale notices.
Bridge Street runs through the centre of town and plays host to a pretty rum selection of street sculpture. A sort of water trough dribbles onto a partly submerged cupola covered with little handprints. I couldn't see a name but I bet it was called 'Zeitgeist 5' or 'Resolution'. There are also some big sticks that light up for a purpose I couldn't fathom. At the very top of the street are ten outsize translucent green tent pegs. It turns out that these are the Ten Guardians of Warrington, representing the people of the town over 200 years. Representing them fairly obliquely, I'd say, but quite nice.
Pies and Prejudice Page 6