Icons of England

by Bill Bryson

  It is true that you can still find idyllic ovals here and there, perfectly manicured and loved. Although most are not enclosed by magnificent stands, nor surrounded by thousands of supporters, each sports field is worth preserving because thereon ordinary people play out extraordinary dreams of triumph. They allow us to try and emulate our heroes’ deeds, feats and victories.

  Sports fields are needed now more than ever, because they offer so much that makes us better. Successive promises by politicians that sports fields are safe in their hands have proved worthless, and their disingenuousness is not only foolhardy, it is destructive.

  It is not just the disappearance of visually attractive green spaces that matters when we lose another sports field, though that in itself is of huge regret; it is all that goes with it that is lost.

  Camaraderie through sport creates lasting friendships. Working as a team for a greater good can curb destructive individualism, and prepare young people for life’s inevitable setbacks and losses. Our general health is improved by physical exertion, and with it our state of mind. On our sports fields there are no barriers of class, race or wealth, each person is set free to compete on equal terms, to challenge themselves to give of their best without having to contend with prejudices over which they have no control.

  Perhaps it is because sports fields are not seen as ‘countryside’ that they are not regarded as being as important and worth saving as areas of natural beauty.

  However, given all the benefits that stem from them we must fight to preserve them as much as any special view or endangered wood or river.

  These fields of sporting endeavour take us beyond the present and create memories of contests past and matches still to come. The winning run, the final goal and the flowing try live on in the minds of the players and spectators, and so with the aesthetic come the athletic memories that do not dim. Sports fields have always been part of us, and must continue to be valued as an important asset of England.

  AN ENDURING AFFAIR

  Richard Muir

  on Nidderdale and history

  WHY WAS IT THAT lads of the 1950S – we ramblers through nettle-, bramble- and thistle-infested countrysides – were always clad in shorts? I can picture myself in shorts of brown corduroy, with a windjammer to match. I am out in the hollowed lanes, following riverside tracks where only anglers should go, or cutting across country along the branch line, where I certainly should not have been. A border collie, sometimes two of them, would also figure in the scene.

  As I roamed in that Yorkshire dale I was forever aware of heaviness in the air and a tense ache inside. It was the burden of history. I could feel the past encroaching with every breath and step, and shimmering in every wall, track, farmstead or hedgerow. It seemed like the ghosts of old Nidderdale – Cistercian monks, legionaries on the move or stooped lead miners – were tugging at my shoulders or whispering in a gibberish I could not comprehend.

  History did not feature much in the affairs of the village school, where most time was devoted to rehearsals for the Christmas concert. One day, however, we learned about a Dr Raistrick, who ‘discovered ancient objects’. (This was Arthur Raistrick, geologist, archaeologist and the remarkable biographer of the Dales landscape, who inspired cohorts of followers and revealed his personal courage when interned as a pacifist during the First World War.) Knowing nothing of academic doctorates, I imagined that Dr Raistrick – plainly a keen-eyed fellow – must spot his ancient objects when out doing the rounds of his patients in a pony and trap. I added a little colour to my supposition by imagining that, every so often, these spectacular objects would be displayed to an admiring audience in Harrogate’s Royal Hall. Though my interpretation was unsound, I had, in realizing that countryside places and features have histories that can be studied, passed an important milestone.

  My escalating infatuation with the rural landscape proved a bad preparation for a career based on studying historic landscape. Having miraculously passed my elevenplus, I found myself a yokel and bumpkin among the urbane achievers of the grammar school. Never having encountered a decimal point in the village school, I would have no truck with them thereafter (O Level maths: twenty-five per cent). My bike was always waiting by the village store, so I could leap from school bus to bike and then charge for the fields in a blur of pedals and flying grit. No number of detentions could divert me from village cricket or the school’s teams, and I can never recall doing any homework – certainly not during daylight hours, anyway.

  The countryside has remained my haven, my challenge and my sweetheart. Since the coming of the mobile phone, my love of travel has become a dread. But I still get more excited at the prospect of arriving and encountering new countrysides than I ever have before. There is an old pop song by the Teddy Bears proclaiming that to know him was to love him. I believe that the better one knows the countryside – its evolution, its lost communities and its history – then the more one will love it.

  MY CORNER SHOP

  Daljit Nagra

  on local stores

  NAPOLEON ONCE MOCKINGLY DESCRIBED Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. And in many ways, when I consider the corner shops from my childhood, I think he was right. These shops were neatly ordered establishments. They pleased the eye as much as they displeased the pocket. They were convenience stores that were rarely convenient.

  My parents often worked overtime at a factory, so if we ever fancied a dessert of tinned fruit cocktail with Carnation Evaporated Milk, the corner shop at the end of our road would certainly be shut. In fact, as I recall, it used to shut at 5 p.m. on weekdays, with a half-day opening on Saturdays, and was closed all day Sunday. There were frequent impromptu tea breaks (when a placard would be strung up saying ‘Back in a minute’), and one-hour breaks for lunch.

  The corner shop I revere is the Indian type that sprang up around the country from the late 1970s. The owners worked on the principle that shops should be emporia, and set about fulfilling this macro-ambition despite the shortage of spaces, cheerily ignoring the logic that says things should be easy to find and to reach if you expect people to buy them.

  In 1982, my parents bought a shop in Sheffield. The first thing we did was increase the opening hours to a simple numeric of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., every day of the week – with no sneaky tea or lunch breaks. It had been the kind of store that sold basic groceries, cigarettes and fresh bread from one bakery. But we soon had bread delivered from three bakeries to extend the choice; a video-loan service;bouquets of flowers; daily copies of the Sheffield newspaper, The Star; a fresh fruit and veg corner; a broken-biscuit discount rack; stacks of 55lb sacks of potatoes; two deep freezers; a wide range of dairy produce in open-shelved fridges and, best of all, we obtained an off-licence and sold alcohol. We would have incorporated a postal service but, sadly, there was a post office in the area (which kept to the old British opening hours that left locals moaning in our shop …).

  Our shop was like most Indian corner shops. We sold everything we could and packed it all in, on the simple principle of ‘anything goes’. Sure enough, anything did go, and while I rarely knew where things were (mops would sometimes be found alongside the video display and a stack of pink biscuits would peer from the crisps area), this approach seemed to encourage the customers to look harder, so they would end up purchasing things they didn’t even know they had wanted.

  Despite the threat from supermarkets that seem to never, ever close, I am sure the corner shop will survive because people will always appreciate the local touch. After all, where else is a brief chat about the weather all part of the service?

  ANCIENT JEWELS

  John Julius Norwich

  on village churches

  LOOK AT ANY OF those old travel posters – for the railways, perhaps, or for Shell – or the jackets of those lovely Batsford guidebooks, and there you will see it: the quintessential English village, nestling in a fold of the hills, with the church at its heart. More often than not, the church will have a spire – a r
elative rarity unless we happen to be in Northamptonshire – but who cares? The point has been made: no other building, not the manor house, not the market cross, not the war memorial, can hope to take the place of the church as the central focus of the community.

  It will be far older than any of them, for a start. It might easily go back to the eleventh century; the church at Bradwell in Essex is four centuries older still. In all too many, the Victorian restorers have done their worst – Gilbert Scott, in particular, has a lot to answer for – but several thousand have, thank God, remained essentially unspoilt, a collection of historical and architectural jewels that no other country can begin to match.

  Today’s church crawlers, however, face a problem unknown to their grandparents. Until the 1950s or thereabouts, village churches were always open in daylight hours: today, alas, where there is thought to be a risk of robbery or vandalism, the casual visitor may arrive to discover the door firmly locked against him. He should accept this philosophically, provided only that there is a notice in the porch informing him where the key may be obtained.

  Were I a bishop, I should insist not only on such notices, but also on the proper disposition of the electric light switches inside the building. How often does one arrive at a small parish church on a November afternoon, only for one’s relief at finding the door unlocked to change to frustration at the impossibility of seeing anything at all amid the encircling gloom – a frustration increased by the knowledge that the switches have almost certainly been hidden on purpose, presumably to prevent wastage of electricity. Experience, admittedly, gradually reveals the usual hiding places: try looking behind the chancel or tower arches, inside the vestry or beside the organ.

  But why will parish councils not install coin machines, which – at a deliberately inflated price – will flood the building with light for five minutes or so and then automatically switch themselves off? Until they do, we must continue to arm ourselves with the most powerful torch we can find, and never stir without it.

  Experience also brings expertise. It goes without saying that the more we know about churches, the more we shall enjoy them. There are two essential books on the subject that no respectable crawler should be without. The first – long out of print, but I am sure obtainable from Amazon – is The Parish Church as a Work of Art by the much-lamented Alec Clifton-Taylor. No one ever knew as much about the subject as he did; he made long and detailed notes of every church he visited, revising them when he returned, perhaps thirty or forty years later. Virtually everything I know on the subject I owe to him.

  The second is England’s Thousand Best Churches, by Simon Jenkins. This too is an astonishing achievement. A frighteningly busy and hugely prolific journalist, now Chairman of the National Trust, he has somehow found the time to travel the length and breadth of the country, not only visiting the churches but thinking long and hard about them and describing them unforgettably.

  With these two volumes safely tucked in the glove compartment, you will need no other. And what delights lie in store …

  THE POINT OF NO RETURN

  Sean O’Brien

  on Spurn Point

  EAST YORKSHIRE IS A little-known part of England. East of Hull – a city of three hundred thousand – rich arable farmlands stretch to the North Sea, which is rapidly reclaiming much of the coast. It’s a place of silence; somewhere history seems to have finished with. The land narrows southwards past a heavily secured gas depot and a mysterious MoD museum, and then the sea and the Humber Estuary converge, and you’re heading down to Spurn Point – the boom of the sea to one side, the quiet of the mudflats to the other. You’re here, wherever ‘here’ is.

  Spurn Point is a narrow, curving landspit of sand, shingle and low grassy dunes. It’s a RSPB sanctuary and home to England’s only full-time lifeboat crew and their families. The Humber river pilots have their dock here. Beyond the huddle of lifeboatmen’s houses, a wood of hawthorns masks old gun emplacements. It feels like the end of the world – which is why, I think, as children we liked it so much. To travel there in the old red bus from Hull Central Library was like going to the draughty doorway of the world and looking through. You could see the jolt where the North Sea and the Humber met, and the old fort at Bull Island, the ships sliding in and out – and beyond it all, a vast emptiness under the grey-white weather of childhood.

  You can still see these things, but Spurn Head is changing. The locals don’t like it when people say that high tides breach the landspit. They prefer the phrase ‘washed over’, as though language itself is a defence against rising sea levels. The last time I was there – last autumn – Spurn had just been washed over. A section of shingle and sand had been shipped off elsewhere and a section of the road had been shunted thirty yards west. Visitors had to walk the last mile. Two workmen were repairing the road with flexible nets of concrete laid down like engineering Elastoplast. They knew they’d be back soon. They, too, love the place, quite aside from making a living there.

  At some time, though, someone will make a decision on economic grounds that the place is beyond saving. The sea means to have Spurn, like most of East Yorkshire – which is, after all, merely the 12,000-year-old detritus left by the last Ice Age. The sea will take back Sunk Island, that chill and eerie stretch of hard-won farmland just inland from Spurn. It will revisit Hull, which was disastrously flooded in 2007. And at some point, not too far off, it will not go away again. W. H. Auden said that poets love scenes of disaster, and I understand what he meant – the challenge of a big set piece; the wreck of the fleet or an army gone under the sand. But what he didn’t mention was that it helps to have somewhere to stand and witness or imagine the catastrophe. When the ground is gone from under your feet, the poet’s role changes from observer to elegist. Spurn Point will see me out, but others will not be so lucky. Go there if you can, before it’s too late.

  LIVING ON THE EDGE

  Michael Palin

  on crags

  I WAS BORN AND brought up in Sheffield. In the 1950s, before the ascendancy of her near neighbour, Leeds, Sheffield was the fourth largest city in England. Some half a million people were squeezed into her hills and valleys, and a pall of pollution from a succession of huge steel foundries smothered the long rows of back-to-back houses on the east side of the city.

  I was unequivocally a city boy. My father worked in the heart of the steel-producing district. The shops, schools and cinemas that marked my territorial bounds were all to the east, drawing me back into the city. But there was one exception. Somewhere, not far from my home, where nature still ruled, a young boy could have great dreams. He could see, in their pristine state, the valleys and rivers that had driven the mills and the forges that had made Sheffield famous. The very word for this place was evocative of something strong and uncompromising, like Sheffielders themselves: crags.

  The approach to the crags was suitably difficult, but for the most banal of reasons. They were accessed via a public footpath across a private golf course. I think my general, non-specific dislike of clubs and those who join them was certainly strengthened, if not originally founded, by having to creep across the fairway with the warning shouts of the privileged ringing in my ears. Once safely across the course, a tall iron-barred gate gave way to a rocky path, which for a while clung claustrophobically to the side of a formidable stone wall. As the darkened wings in a theatre lead out on to the space and light of the stage, so this uneven, awkward little trail opened quite suddenly on to the edge of the earth and the sky.

  It was as abrupt and epic a transformation from city to country as you could imagine. There were no fences, no restraints and, provided your father wasn’t looking, you could shuffle, stomach churning, to the very end of the land, where sharp-cut parapets of millstone grit teased us towards the abyss. Far down below – or so it seemed to a schoolboy – tiny vehicles swished along the A57. Below that, glimpsed between a line of trees and bushes, ran the tiny Rivelin, a stream now, but one that had cut this valley over
millions of years. And across the river, rose our sister slope – one very different from ours, not jagged and precipitous but broad and benign – dotted with sturdy farmhouses and green fields partitioned by dry-stone walls.

  It was a cracker of a view. To the west, the road wound its way towards Manchester, eventually disappearing as the valley narrowed and climbed towards the Pennine foothills. To the east, you might, on a rare clear day, catch sight of the dark satanic mills of the steelworks. Such a confluence of man and nature could coax the romantic out of anyone.

  When I was old enough to go up to the crags by myself, I’d walk along the sandy, precipitous paths with my imagination romping ahead of me – taking me to the Wild West, the Grand Canyon or the Lost World. As I grew older, my father increasingly deferred to the quieter countryside of his native East Anglia. Here I saw the sea for the first time, churches made of flint and the spooky reedbeds of the Norfolk Broads. Lovely country, but for one who had passed through that metal gate at the end of the golf course, it was pretty tame stuff. When I hear Elgar, it’s not East Anglia I imagine, but the inimitable grandeur of the crags that loom over the Rivelin Valley.

  TAKING ROOT

  Jonathon Porritt

  on stand-alone trees

  WHEN I WAS AT Oxford University in the early 1970s, I lived outside the city for a year, in a place called Boars Hill. Being somewhat disaffected with oxford at that time, I rarely went into the centre and managed to keep tutors and others happy from afar. As a result, I got to know the surrounding countryside extremely well, with many long walks – and even more short walks en route to the local pub!