by Nick Corble
All this was going through my mind as I passed through the village of Lilbourne and followed a diverted bridleway through a vast bank of wind turbines outside Rugby visible from the M1. I crossed this iconic modern artery via an ancient agricultural bridge, after which my route largely bypassed Crick, home to an annual narrowboat gathering, before heading south to Watford. No, not that one, but the one that gives its name to the Watford Gap, which in turn people probably recognise because of the motorway service station there. It is this Watford, not the one further south, that is the source of the phrase ‘north of Watford’, the traditional demarcation point between the north and the south of England. There is even a signpost at the service station pointing to the north one way and the south another. The gap in question is one between two hills and is significant, channelling transport links through the ages, from ancient roads, through canals (there’s a flight of locks a mile from the village) to modern highways (hence the service station).
I’d headed to Watford both out of a sense of homage (it may not be Watford, Herts where my football team was from, but I felt a completely irrational obligation to visit), and to see if this distinction between north and south might make it a better candidate for the middle of England. After all, if a place is the pivot between the north and the south it is surely the middle, right?
The village was picture-perfect. I was now in Northamptonshire, and many of the buildings were in Northamptonshire ironstone, a gold-coloured stone, or more traditional brick. A village of only around 320 souls (it would qualify for the Dr Frick Memorial Prize, if it had been in the right county and if anyone knew what it was for), this Watford has a fourteenth-century church and a long history going back as far as the Romans as well as evidence of Anglo-Saxon settlements, a mention in the Domesday Book, and links with the earliest American settlers. A Watford man, Thomas Rogers, was one of the passengers who left for the New World on the Mayflower. There’s even a Thomas Rogers Society in the USA which meets every three years, all descendants of this Watford resident.
Naturally, Watford has its local Lord of the Manor, most latterly coming from the Henley family. The second Lord Henley was married to the sister of the Victorian Prime Minister, Robert Peel. The local ‘big house’, Watford Court Manor, was demolished in 1975, which acted as a significant economic blow to the village, but probably a bigger blow to the Henleys. I passed through some of the grounds of the old house, along an avenue of young oak trees, making a wary detour round a herd of cows on the way, and before that under the ornate Lord Henley’s Bridge. This iron construction, painted a vivid green and bearing the Henley coat of arms, sits on the estate’s northern ride, and was built to carry the Hanslope-Northampton-Rugby Loop railway line. The story goes that it was designed as a feature to placate the locals, although the fact that it also acted as a halt to take the Lord to Westminster in order to vote is probably a coincidence.
So, was this the real middle of England? In part, yes, I concluded; but only in part. In being so busy looking for what has changed in England, I’d missed spotting what hadn’t. This village, along with many of the others I’d passed through, represented a crystallisation of the heart of England. The sort of image people held onto when they were away from the country for a while. The sort of place H.V. Morton summoned up when he thought he was pegging it in Palestine, of wood smoke, thatched cottages, church bells and happy farmers.
Many of those features have endured (except the happy farmers bit, obviously), and offered a sort of foundation myth for the rest of the country. Change could happen elsewhere, on the coast, in the grand cities; but things would remain pretty much as they had always been in these villages of Middle England. Their farms may consolidate, their manor houses be knocked down or suffer from water damage, their pubs disappear (never mind, we can always set one up in the village hall), and their post offices survive without internet access. They were resilient. They were at England’s core.
8
Shoetown, on a Cloudy Day
The following day, I was due to meet up with some more diagonal walkers: Moira, another cousin, and her friend Lesley. As such, I set off from my overnight stop in Long Buckby relatively early, my Airbnb host Gilly joining me with her dog for the first couple of miles. It was going to be a companionable day.
The previous evening had already been very sociable. I’d planned to look around Long Buckby, a reasonably sized town, which I’d hoped might give me further insight into my Middle England ruminations. In the end the only sight I got of it was wandering through the village green and high street and the inside of the local pharmacy to get some more sting cream. On first appearance the town looked like it was well provisioned with amenities such as shops, eateries, a Co-op supermarket and a selection of pubs. Once I got inside the door of the Airbnb however, I never left it again, other than a quick trip to the supermarket, of which more in a second.
I’d had an email exchange with Gilly beforehand as I wanted to see if she’d let me use her washing machine. This had been a ploy to reduce the amount of clothes I needed to carry with me and had worked, although I was now down to my final pair of smalls. She was intrigued by my walk and we spent some time talking about it before I could get away to my room, have a shower and fill her laundry basket.
I asked about the best place to eat, and she suggested a deal. She and her husband Richard would provide the meal if I provided the booze – hence the short trot to the Co-op. I’d liked what I’d seen of Long Buckby, and Gilly described it as ‘Cotswolds-lite’. There were good transport connections and a good community vibe. Gilly was originally from Canada, but has lived in the UK for thirty-five years and she and Richard run a cattery in the village. This explained the clutter of felines around the house, all of which were theirs, not guests at the cattery (or, indeed, the Airbnb).
She claimed that 75 per cent of Long Buckby had voted Leave in the referendum,16 something I put down to locals wanting to maintain what they had. I was slightly taken aback when she shared that she was one of them, on the grounds that she was a libertarian. This didn’t mean she was a fan of a certain London garage punk band fronted by Pete Doherty, although she may have been, but that in her eyes the removal of any tier of government was a good thing. Her language was also thought-provoking, including references to ‘those in the south-east’ who didn’t understand how everyone else felt. This jarred a bit with me, not least because pleasant picture-postcard Long Buckby would probably qualify, for most of those earlier in my walk at least, as in ‘the south-east’, or ‘the south’ anyway. In my experience most English people’s appreciation of their country’s geography was on a par with that of the shipping forecast areas.
I snuck a look at local house prices on my iPad. A brand-new five-bedroom house on the edge of the village was available for £650,000. A comparable house in my neck of the woods (ahem, the south-east) would probably cost half as much again. What about a starter pad? A two-bedroom Victorian terraced house, a perfect first-time buyer’s place, could be had for £160,000, which with two earners in reasonable jobs would probably be affordable. Life wasn’t so bad in Long Buckby.
Gilly’s motivations for voting Leave spoke of something else, too, I thought. This was a distrust of elites, of being ruled by faceless, unelected, bureaucrats, a perception that had haunted the EU for decades. Trust of politicians in general has also loosened, weakened by things such as the MPs expenses scandals, and of elites in general, finding its ultimate expression in Michael Gove’s infamous comment about ‘not trusting experts’ during the referendum campaign. Add to this mix the way the EU, or those in the Euro-zone at least, handled the banking crisis and their imposition of austerity on the so-called PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain), perceived by some to have been heartless, and a growing sense of not wanting to be associated with ‘that lot’ is perhaps unsurprising. Besides, it was easier to hate those you could not put a face to.
Gilly and Richard
were perfect hosts and I enjoyed our discussions. Having said my goodbyes to Gilly and her dog, I carried on alone for three miles to Little Brington, passing copses of pines trees last seen in such density outside Formby on the first day of the walk. The path was covered in cones, and as I stopped to take a picture a pair of squirrels leapt out of the adjacent wheat field, raced across my path and up into the trees.
Moira and Lesley joined me outside the pub, where a wedding reception was in full swing – a good effort seeing as it was only 11am. I’d been slightly concerned about dragging these two women through nettles and fields of ripening crops, but as it happened our route coincided with a stretch of long-distance path known as the Midshires Way, a name offering further evidence I was in the middle of the country. As any experienced walker knows, a marked long-distance path represents something of the Holy of Holies of walking, usually clearly marked and well maintained, the sort of path that even Staffordshire would keep up. This proved to be largely the case, the route leading us through obvious stiles and gates rather than obliging us to seek them out.
Taking advantage of the fact that for once Moira and I weren’t meeting at a funeral, we caught up on each other’s family news and all too quickly we were meeting up with another friend of hers and Lesley’s at a garden centre. After that, I was back on my own and walking through another large pine plantation. The pines seen earlier had simply been an amuse bouche. This was Harlestone Firs, part of the Althorp Estate owned by the Earl Spencer, better known as the man who won ‘man of the match’ at his sister, Princess Diana’s, funeral where he stuck one to the royal family, and thereby captured the mood of the country.
Twenty-foot-wide paths made it impossible to get lost, and when I did reach open fields there was a sense that wheat crops were finally triumphing over rape. I hoped so. In fact, the vista that lay before me just outside Northampton was of a vast prairie over a mile wide with a single tree on the horizon, as if it had been planted to give the tractor drivers something to look forward to when it came to ploughing. The scene was a brooding one, with dark grey clouds gathering over that horizon and I could feel a few spots of rain on my cheeks. While my next bed was the only one I’d booked for two nights on this leg, I didn’t want to arrive there sopping. I had to press on, and quickly.
Two miles of urban walking, dipping into bus shelters when it looked like the clouds were finally going to empty, felt heavy on the feet; but then again, most days when the finishing line came into view, the miles magically doubled in length. As it happened the rain was just playing games with me, and I arrived at my hotel in an unexpectedly dry state.
The hotel was perfectly decent, and ridiculously good value. Clean, with my own bathroom and breakfast thrown in for £40. Okay, it was ten minutes out of town in an area with a prominent Co-op Funeralcare centre (shop? outlet?) cheek by jowl with cheap fast-food emporia, exotic shops selling fatty sausages which might hasten demand for the Co-op’s services and a Polish off-licence with a recent delivery of whole watermelons outside (four cans of Tyskie please, and go on, I’ll take a watermelon while I’m here). The hotel was family run, with a silent matriarch holding brooding court in the reception area, making sure that everything was done just so, and a pair of identical twins apparently doing everything else. At least, I think they were twins.
Suitably refreshed, I wandered into town to find the best bit of Northampton, and I think I succeeded, although it was difficult to be sure. Everywhere was surprisingly quiet for a Saturday night, although to be fair it was still early. Some decent architecture offered variety, but most of this was at least a 150 years old. The most recent attempt at something interesting was the Northgate Bus Station, the effect of which was diminished by some pretty hideous multi-storey car parks. These looked as if the architects had delegated their design to their children, with the help of some Lego bricks, lolly sticks and shirt cardboard.
Too tired to experiment, I settled for a chain Italian restaurant and settled down with my book. I couldn’t concentrate, though, my eye constantly drawn to a fresh-faced Deliveroo guy wearing a cycle helmet which he never took off, who kept wandering in, and then out again, always empty-handed. Initially eager, he went through various stages of sagaciousness and then boredom, before eventually settling down in a corner, his helmet still strapped firmly to his chin.
His plight offered a perfect illustration of the social divides that have grown up in the last two decades, of the gap between those who ordered their Saturday night meal sitting on their sofa using an app, and the gig-economy ‘slaves’ expected to fetch it for them by bicycle. As I waited for my own meal to arrive I couldn’t resist going over to talk to him.
He was Polish (I didn’t ask him where he stood on watermelons with beer) and he was happy to share that he got paid £6 an hour come what may. As such, having to wait for this order wasn’t a disaster for him, other than he also got paid £1 per job, so he was losing out on the possibility of maybe another pound that hour. I asked if people tipped, but he pulled a face. It turned out these were discretionary and, I deduced, meagre. People generally paid online for the delivery, so it wasn’t as if he could benefit from loose change. If he was really lucky he might earn £10 an hour, more than the £7.05 national minimum wage for someone of his age, but barely, and not guaranteed (an hour spent waiting for a job would be below that rate). I asked him where he was headed, and the answer was the Marriott Hotel, a fifteen-minute ride away.
‘Wouldn’t it be cold by the time you get there?’ I asked.
‘Maybe,’ he shrugged. Not his problem.
At that point, his order finally arrived, the kitchen staff full of apologies. I sensed they were empathetic to his plight and may even have been related to him, given some of the accents I heard coming from the kitchen. The moral here was, if you use one of these services, remember how lucky you are and for goodness sake, tip! Those of us who’d managed to find our own way to the restaurant to be served by a waiter, who presented us with our food direct from the kitchen and without a fifteen-minute cycle ride, tipped him (at least I hoped we did), so the Deliveroo guy who used his own muscle power in all weathers surely deserved one too?
I wandered back to my table, passing a group of five elegantly dressed young women, four of them wearing headscarves, politely giving presents to one of their number whose birthday it presumably was. Behind them, two other young women, about the same age, had recently come in, their long hair defiantly on show, along with a significant proportion of their breasts, which they appeared particularly keen to display. Both sets of young women existed in their own worlds and both had a perfect right to do so. They did, however, provide a contrast to each other.
Outside, things had livened up. It wasn’t exactly Liverpool, but then again I hadn’t expected it to be, although the two shared a common problem with homelessness. As early as 8:30 there was a man flat out on a broken-down cardboard box in the churchyard of the centrally located All Saints’ Church. Elsewhere, tents were being erected in shop doorways.
My day was done, and I wandered back to my hotel. Along the way, roughly every third voice I heard carried an Eastern Europe accent. Earlier, I’d fancied an Indian meal but had struggled to find a suitable restaurant, certainly in the centre. It seemed the sub-continent was passé in immigration terms. Safely back at the hotel, I perused the tourist leaflets in the reception area. Eschewing an evocation to ‘Discover Rutland’ (Eric Idle had made Rutland impossible to take seriously), I did pick up a ‘Guide to Northampton’ for a little light reading before bed.
After a surreal breakfast, during which the man on reception, the one enquiring whether I’d prefer coffee or tea and the one vacuuming the carpet outside all appeared to be the same person, I plunged myself into the town. Town mark you, not city. Northampton has made repeated attempts to gain city status and been denied each time. It has a cathedral, but this belongs to the Catholic persuasion, so doesn’t count. It also has
the magnificent All Saints, whose churchyard had been used as a temporary bedroom the previous evening, bang in the centre, and this was where I headed.
Along the way, I also passed the Holy Sepulchre Church. Dating back to 1100, this was modelled on its namesake in Jerusalem and built by returning Crusaders, notably Simon de St Liz, the first Norman Earl of Northampton; although I doubt he actually wielded a trowel personally. Apparently, it is one of only four round churches in the world.
The weather forecasters predicted possible rain, so I took this as a sign not to bother with a coat. Like Atherstone with its hats and Hinckley with its hosiery, Northampton also once had its speciality, shoes, earning it the local moniker of ‘Shoetown’. In fact, the guide I’d picked up the previous evening boasted that the town’s Boot and Shoe Quarter (yes, really) enjoyed the ‘highest density of boot and shoe factories and the greatest survival of buildings associated with the business’, although it was non-specific as to where it was comparing itself to. Was this the greatest concentration in Northamptonshire, the East Midlands, England, Europe, the world, the universe?
Like the Holy Sepulchre, All Saints can also trace its antecedents back a long way, the eleventh century in fact, even if the current building replaced the ‘Collegiate Church’ that burned down during the Great Fire of Northampton of 1675, an event omitted from my school’s history textbook. A sign fixed near to the entrance claimed the building was ‘amongst the foremost examples of Seventeenth Century Church Architecture outside London’. It looked like they’d got stuck on title case when painting the sign.
I’m no expert on Seventeenth Century Church Architecture, but it came across as very fine. An inscription along the top of the building either side of a statue of Charles II proclaimed ‘This statue was erected in memory of King Charles II who gave a thousand tun of timber towards the rebuilding of this church and to this town seven years of chimney money attracted within it.’ Inside, I could confirm it was chimney money well spent. I was offered an order of service on the way in but I waved it away, preferring to sit and listen as the choir, resplendent in their scarlet robes, practised that day’s hymns.