Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  Sated on a variety of levels, I left the Pleasure Beach and emerged into the demi-monde of the South Shore. Even by Blackpool's own standards, the South Shore is sublimely tacky. There's a shop selling 'samurai and other themed swords', presumably for those off to a ritual killing later in the day. One fast-food stall featured a giant-size anthropomorphic hot dog smilingly slathering itself in mustard, a ghastly image of obeisance and self-sacrifice I found hard to shake off.

  That was quite near the Laughing Donkey Family Bar, which made my thoughts turn to Blackpool's equine population. They're all still there, slowly pottering up and down the beach, little kids gently swaying on their back, storing up a lifetime's Proustian scent memories of donkey manure, candy floss and seaweed. Two quid seems cheap for such delights. I looked into the donkeys' eyes for signs of melancholy and lassitude but they looked fairly impassive. I imagine it's hard for a donkey to look otherwise.

  As I strolled along the prom back to the station I noticed that Louis Tussaud's Waxworks had changed. Louis Tussaud's is a Blackpool institution. A holiday's not a holiday until you've spent an afternoon squinting at ghoulish figurines in semi-darkness going, 'That looks nothing like Virginia Wade.' Anyway, as you may have read in the papers, Madame Tussaud's has bowed to modern mores and renamed itself Celeb City. Now, you can waste an afternoon looking at ghoulish figurines in semi-darkness going, 'That looks nothing like Gordon Ramsay.'

  There was a kiosk next door selling rubber Osama Bin Laden masks but I couldn't work up the necessary enthusiasm. Blackpool is rather exhausting after a while and it was time to leave, I thought. While I was mulling this over I noticed a sign outside the Royal Oxford Hotel saying 'Coming Soon: Bernard Manning'. Definitely time to leave, and with not a moment to lose.

  Blackpool is unique. Not all the northern coast is like that. Hardly any of it, in fact. Over in the east, the beaches of Northumbria have never seen a donkey and are beautiful and unspoilt. Seahouses and Lindisfarne are almost magical. Further south, Whitby has goths, Robin Hood's Bay is quaint. Filey and Bridlington have some of Blackpool's 'honest vulgarity', but feel tangibly melancholic and fading while Blackpool thrusts itself into the twenty-first century in its inimitably coarse way. Scarborough has its share of Blackpool's tacky pizzazz and hen party bacchanals but is altogether more refined, thanks to the Sitwells, Alan Ayckbourn, the grave of Anne Brontë, the lunchtime concerts at the South Bay and the clifftops which add class to any mise en scène.

  Blackpool's neighbours on the north-western coast seem to actively stress their difference from that great lurid behemoth of tat. I once lived in Southport and locals ('sandgrounders', as they're known) were always desperate to tell you how much more classy and upscale Southport was as a resort. What they really meant was dull. They even had a Pontin's, the poor relation of the Butlins chain, which had all the latter's Hi-de-Hi! crapness but none of its rambunctious allure. I have to say I liked Southport, though, enough to live there for two years as a penurious, epicurean student. We would drink in the bar of the Scarisbrick Arms, have chicken pathia at the Oriental Grill and later go for long moonlit walks out on the beach in the vain hope of ever seeing the sea.

  Morecambe was once a rival to Blackpool in the popularity stakes. Then, like New Brighton on the Wirral, it became a byword for faded glamour and slow decline. The art deco masterpiece of the Midland Hotel, where once men in tuxedos and women in pearls would watch the sun go down over the Isle of Man with a daiquiri, was left to moulder, only used as a backdrop in the odd episode of Poirot. It once had two piers, the Central and the West End, but both are now gone. Most ignominiously of all, in 1994, Noel Edmonds opened his ill-judged (insane, if you ask me) World of Crinkley Bottom, a theme park based on his reviled but hugely popular Saturday teatime show Noel's House Party. Much in evidence was Mr Blobby, a hyperthyroidal psychedelic PVC monster alongside which Barney the dinosaur had gravitas and quiet authority. In a rare but gratifying show of taste, the British public stayed away in droves and it closed after thirteen weeks, although the ensuing Blobbygate legal wrangle between Lancaster City Council and Edmonds went on for some time. Not long afterwards Morecambe's indoor waterpark Bubbles closed, closely followed by Frontierland, its Pleasure Beach. The West End of Morecambe became a slum, in effect, the hotels used as DHSS hostels as house prices tumbled. The grisly, well-publicised deaths of twenty-three Chinese cockle-pickers on the bay's treacherous sands didn't exactly act as a boost to tourism either.

  Lately, though, Morecambe has shown signs of a recovery. That self-same dilapidated West End is becoming a desirable address and property prices are on the up. There's a massive redevelopment programme under way and the Midland is due to reopen in 2007. The tourist board are working hard to sell the area by emphasising its gorgeous if lethal bay and its closeness to the Lake District. To be honest, this is a bit like Hull selling itself on its proximity to the Yorkshire Dales but they mean well. And on a clear day the hills of Cumbria, seen across the glittering water, do seem both very spectacular and very near. Near enough certainly to wander off to, lonely as a cloud. And I'd like to take a detour there too.

  I say 'detour' because you could fill a decent mobile library just with Lake District literature. Melvyn Bragg and Hunter Davies have written a couple of shelves' worth between them. Hill-walking high priest Alfred Wainwright started a veritable cottage industry in Lakes books and a canon that's been added to by Bill Birkett, Bob Allen, John and Anne Nuttall and many another scribe. One day it might even be added to by me. But for now let me just add a few drops to those brimming reservoirs of Lake District literature.

  I love this place. Even though I wasn't born here, it's the landscape I've come to think of as home. Like Wainwright, I was born and raised in a sooty Lancashire mill town but, like him, I fell hard for this landscape; in my case from my first sight of Elterwater on a misty spring evening and the view from Loughrigg Fell in the haze of a warm August afternoon. As a teenager I'd come here in the holidays and camp with mates at Farmer Brass's place near Hawkshead. In the evening we'd nurse a few pints of Hartleys XB in The Outgate or The Sun or The Queen's Head and then, at closing time, we'd skulk off like poachers to the dark wooded shores of Esthwaite Water and cast weighted lines into the deepest parts of the lake, far out in the middle, far beyond the pool of light cast by our Woolies torches and storm lanterns. We'd sit, each in their own circle of battery light, strung out along the shore at intervals of a few feet and wait for the sudden pluck on the line, the thrilling tug that caught up the slack and made the washing-up bottle top we'd clipped across the line dance wildly, the sign that somewhere in the gloomy fathoms, an eel was taking our bait.

  Eel fishing is very exciting. Honestly. Why not try it for that special romantic weekend? An eel is, in its purest essence, a thick muscly inner tube with a primitive central nervous system. They give you a hell of a fight and they taste kind of nutty. We ate them for breakfast every morning in the oddest, often least palatable combinations – eels with fusilli pasta, eel omelette, eel kedgeree, eels on toast – until I became so heartily sick of them that one fateful morning I scooped my dish in the campsite bin and had a Variety Pack instead. A passing naturalist remarked, 'They come all the way from their spawning grounds in the Sargasso Sea just so you can do that, mate.' Perhaps because of this but probably more because I was absolutely flipping sick of the muscly, nutty so and sos, I haven't touched eel since 1980.

  The Lake District occupies a very special part of the north's actual and psychological landscape. Like Blackpool, every northerner goes there at some point, in fact probably as an antidote to Blackpool. That big blousy fleshpot is only really a few miles south down the coast.

  The Lakes, though, despite Jimmy McGovern's best efforts to paint them as a maelstrom of forbidden lust and telegenically unresolved issues in his TV drama of the same name, remain somehow aloof from the strident shore of Lanky to the south. If Blackpool is the north-west's hyperactive huckster super-ego, then the Lake Dist
rict is its deep-lying and spiritual subconscious. The Lake District is, at least in theory, everything that Blackpool is not. Blackpool is chip fat and sodium lights. The Lakes is crystalline air and twinkling stars. Blackpool is fizzy keg lager, the crash of slot machines and Robbie Williams. The Lakes is real ale, birdsong and Wordsworth. Blackpool is sluttishly demeaning. The Lakes is dreamily uplifting. In theory, anyway; Bowness has become as tasteless as the Carling that flows in gallons there at the weekend, a nasty fragment of Blackpool relocated by a once beautiful lake, now a playground for perma-tanned tossers with powerboats and jet-skis. And Keswick, a charming, almost alpine town nestling between the mighty Skiddaw and the delightful Derwentwater, hasn't got one decent butcher's shop any more but has a thousand identical discount stores selling waterproofs that will leak like a sieve before you've made it to the pay and display machine, let alone Scaféll Pike.

  Because of its proximity to big industrial cities like Sheffield and Manchester, the Peak District has always been more of a workers' playground than the Lakes. You can be on the foothills of Kinder Scout and the Dark Peak in forty minutes from dense city estates and suburbs. So there's a long tradition of factory workers hiking out there on their Sundays off, forming societies, cycling and tramping and fell-walking and, as they walked and talked and looked down on the smoking chimneys and the serried terraces and hovels, maybe wondering why some of this beautiful landscape was closed to them, fermenting radical thoughts and eventually and famously trespassing on Kinder Scout in 1932, an act as much to do with class struggle as callisthenics. Out of this came the Ramblers Society, of whom the lazy stereotype is a cuddly sinecure for geriatrics when in fact its true spirit is far more radical and bolshy than any of those Westminster village idiots.

  Lakeland's flash of red, though, was more likely to be seen on a huntsman's coat than a worker's flag. The Lake District is wild, high country; compact compared to the Scottish Highlands but still, in British terms, an untamed wilderness with no cities or heavy industry near. Left and right, up and down, from Whitehaven to Wakefield, from Carnforth to Carlisle, it still is all fields around here. And dark, chilly lakes, bleak ridges, shattered peaks and impenetrable forests.

  Revolutions, as old Karl Marx pointed out, are very rarely fostered in the milking shed or the top field, and so for centuries Cumbria has been happier wrestling in tights than wresting power from the hands of the establishment. In fact, gentry and peasantry have rubbed along pretty well up here, with a nice lubrication of forelock tugging and nary a Peterloo in sight. The hills are scoured and dotted with evidence of the Lakes' very own light industry – slate and copper mines – where men worked hard day and night miles from civilisation and for a pittance. And yet I can find no record of industrial conflict or unionism. Perhaps working in one of the world's most beautiful landscapes distracted their minds from such things. Or perhaps they were just too tired.

  Free of grime and insubordination among its lower orders, the Lake District has always had something of a rarefied air, the domain of climbers, dreamers, poets, teachers and Guardian readers rather than the proletariat. When north-westerners get high ideas (in every sense) they head for Cumbria, as this chunk of north-west England has been called since 1974. The newish nomenclature has stuck fairly well, really; it's used reasonably naturally in most people's daily speech as well as more official usages like the BBC's local radio station and local government circles. This may be because the name has a good, solid pedigree. Cumbria, sometimes Rheged, was the name given by the Celts to the kingdom that flourished here between the fall of the Romans and the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. Rheged as a name has reappeared of late as the name of a rather good and very tastefully done mountain exhibition centre cum cinema cum retail and restaurant outlet just off Junction 40 of the M6. Here, if the rain comes as it will, you can buy fabulously decadent home-made chocolates or a Gore-Tex hat and eat and wear both while watching cool stuff about the Himalayas on a massive Imax screen going, 'Ooooh! Look at that crevasse!'

  Before Cumbria came into being for a second time, the Lake District as a concept – later enshrined as a National Park – loosely spanned three counties: Westmorland, Cumberland and Lancashire. Yes, Lancashire. One of the iconic Lake District mountains, the Old Man of Coniston, as well as Coniston Water and several fine hills, valleys and tarns lay squarely into north Lancashire, a fact I brandish like a pitchfork whenever someone accuses me of being an offcomer or interloper. Westmorland sits between Lancashire, Yorkshire, County Durham and Cumberland and claims most of the well-known beauty spots while Cumberland, which will tell you over a pint of Jennings that it's the real Cumbria, curves around the north of the district and has its most unspoilt tracts. There is a faint but readily discernible rivalry and suspicion between these different Cumbrians. For a week's walking, I once rented a house in Broughton-in-Furness from a local builder. As he was showing me around, he asked me convivially what I was hoping to do here. 'Well, climb those for one,' I said, pointing out the dramatic skyline of the Buttermere valley, the mountain tops of Grasmoor, High Stile and Haystacks, these and more all clearly seen from the upstairs bedroom window. 'Oh, Buttermere. Yes, I've heard about it. Is it nice? I've never been.' I was staggered. Here was a man living within a well-chucked crampon of the most stunning valley in England and he'd never bothered to go, preferring instead to hang around the branch of Spar and the billiard club in Millom and his little corner of north Lancashire. There was, I felt, some deliberate cussedness in his stupidity. Similarly, I once tried to buy a particular knitted garment, a gift for an elderly relative, in the Edinburgh Woollen Mill in Penrith. 'Oh, we don't stock that. Try our branch in Keswick. It's more geared for tourists,' said the country-set lady with a haughty toss of her silver rinse, as if Keswick were Las Vegas and I'd asked for a pair of crotchless panties rather than a nice cable-knit cardie.

  The place where all three counties meet is called the Three Shires Stone, a slender rock pillar sitting high above the Wrynose Pass in the heart of the hills and a favourite walkers' haunt. Here, at dusk, you will always find a damp, dishevelled man or woman, tugging their sodden socks off, perched on the boot lip of their muddy estate car and eating the mangled remains of what seems to have become a pork pie and banana sandwich due to rough carriage in a rucksack and drinking hot Nescafe from a thermos. Bliss.

  The first tourists did it in rather more style, in frock coats and bumping around in stagecoaches, looking at the mountains backwards through bijou hand-held mirrors because, bless, they were too frightened to look directly at them. They had been inspired by the romantic poets who had decamped here in the early part of the nineteenth century in much the same way as British avant-garde painters went to Cornwall in the 1950s or every addled London dance music bunny went to Brighton in the nineties. The Lake Poets were hardier souls than those first perfumed, salt-smelling, shrinking violets of tourists, I'm glad to say. They could certainly hold their laudanum, and Coleridge, the best and boldest of the lot, made the first recorded ascent of Scaféll Pike, England's highest mountain, in the dark without an anorak – a century and a half too early, sadly – but with a quill pen and writing desk. Read his account. It's utterly thrilling. He would also think nothing of walking the thirteen or so miles over Dunmail Raise from Keswick to Grasmere to see his mates the Wordsworths. Dorothy W. would walk halfway back with him at night and I'm pretty sure Coleridge used this time profitably in trying to put his hand up Dot's skirt but clearly I can't be definitively sure. Wordsworth, an altogether more boring fellow in his middle age, skulked around at home, perhaps writing one of his thirty-two sonnets about the River Duddon. I love Wordsworth and he is a genuine poetic revolutionary but like Prince, who shared his dress sense too, he wrote too much and was woefully inconsistent. 'The Prelude' and the 'Lyrical Ballads' changed English poetry forever but he could also come up with this clunker in 'The Thorn', the best example of bathos I know:

  And to the left, three yards beyond,

  You s
ee a little muddy pond

  Of water, never dry;

  I've measured it from side to side:

  'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide

  For me, the quintessential Lake District writer isn't one of those opiated and dissolute romantics, geniuses though they were, but a squat bloke from Blackburn who seemingly wore the same anorak for twenty years. The aforementioned Alfred Wainwright, 'the blessed AW' as some but not all of the walking fraternity refer to him, came with his cousin to Windermere in 1930 and climbed Orrest Head overlooking the district's largest lake on its eastern shore. It was love at first sight. 'Those few hours on Orrest Head cast a spell that changed my life,' he later wrote. The die of the rest of his long life was cast.

  Orrest Head is a tiddler really compared to the big Lakeland hills. You won't get rime clinging to your beard here or ever use your ice axe in anger. It doesn't even make it into AW's own canonical list of Lake District summits, being relegated to his Outlying Fells volume of strolls for oldies. But Orrest Head turned Wainwright's head completely. He devoted the rest of his life to walking and writing about the Lake District fells, taking a pay cut in order to become borough treasurer in Kendal and thus closer to the landscape that had ensnared him.