Diagonal Walking

by Nick Corble

  Driven by my guide, which was proving very informative, I headed back out into the town. My Long Buckby hostess Gilly had described Northampton succinctly as ‘a shithole’, so my expectations weren’t high, but I was prepared to give it a go. Earlier that year, Northamptonshire County Council had effectively declared itself bankrupt, only the fourth council ever to do so. On top of that, a recent report had recommended its disbandment, the investigators involved stating that its problems were so deeply rooted it was impossible to rescue. In other words, things had got so bad the only option was to tear everything up and start again afresh. It wasn’t promising.

  The county’s problems were blamed upon either poor management or the cumulative impact of ten years of cuts and austerity. It didn’t matter really whose side you took or whose fault it was. Either way, the county was unsustainable in its current form. This wasn’t a problem unique to Northamptonshire, and could perhaps have contributed to Gilly’s perception of ‘those in the south-east’ living in some kind of separate world, even if the geographic reality was that many of those in the cities (sorry Northampton) of Liverpool and Stoke earlier on my travels might have regarded Northampton as sufficiently ‘down south’ to be alien. I remembered the BBC survey about Englishness published earlier on during this stage of my walk, which suggested that the further people live from London, the more they identify with their particular part of England.

  I wondered what part of England Northamptonites associated with? The East Midlands? I doubted it. The East Midlands has always seemed to me to be the blandest of local appellations, neither one thing or another. At least the West Midlands has Birmingham to coalesce around, as well as their distinctive accent. It was difficult to come up with any words or phrases inimitably East Midlands-ish. Maybe Polish had replaced them?

  I headed for the Cultural Quarter, but it appeared to be shut. The museum and art gallery was undergoing some refurbishment, which presented me with mixed feelings as the world’s biggest shoe museum had been on offer. Quite reasonably, given the hour, the Royal Theatre was also closed. Royal Theatre take note, not the more usual Theatre Royal, and these days combined with an Opera House, no less. Instead I headed for 78 Derngate, a privately-run attraction I was assured would be open, passing the very grand nineteenth-century Guildhall along the way. An imposing Victorian Gothic edifice, this offered an almost ironic face given the town’s difficulties. I would have liked to visit it, but, you’ve guessed it …

  78 Derngate is a modest affair, but quite possibly the jewel in the crown of the town’s offerings. It was the only house in England remodelled by the Scottish designer and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and it represents a dazzling example of the period between Art Nouveau and Art Deco, with its Japanese screens and colourful, almost too colourful at times, decorations above stairs, and its evocative kitchen, complete with green checked tablecloth and range below stairs.

  The remodelling was commissioned by the wonderfully named Joseph Bassett-Lowke to move into after his marriage in 1917 to a daughter of one of the town’s leading shoe-makers. I was largely on my own and wandered around the narrow house modelling the blue plastic shoe protectors given to me by the volunteer on reception. They took shoes seriously in Northampton. Despite being busy training a young woman on how to work the till, this volunteer also found the time to give me a personal introduction to the house from outside, looking up at the back. Bassett-Lowke ran a factory making models, garden railways and that sort of thing, and during both wars he’d made miniature replicas of enemy shipping to ease identification for those patrolling the seas.

  Back in Bassett-Lowke’s day, Northampton would have been a typical county town of just under 90,000 people, with thriving industry and an independent mindset fuelled by a belief in non-conformity. A few years before Derngate’s heyday, the town elected a radical reformer, and atheist no less, Charles Bradlaugh, to Parliament. Whatever Bradlaugh’s merits, he was certainly a contrast to an earlier representative, Spencer Perceval (not Percival for all you pedants out there), who still holds the distinction of being the only British Prime Minister to be assassinated. So far.

  Suitably uplifted, I wandered back into town, doing so via some splendid stone cenotaphs complete with stone flags. These were designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose other commissions included Whitehall in London, Manchester, Glasgow, Delhi, Johannesburg, Hong Kong and Auckland, all of which placed Northampton in pretty elevated company, and probably said something about relative changes in circumstances. I noted that a run of redundant red telephone boxes had been left empty, which given earlier experiences in the walk surely represented a missed opportunity?

  My guide informed me that the St. Giles Quarter of the city was named the country’s ‘Great British High Street in 2015’, although with its customary lack of context, omitted to say who had given it this accolade. The Sunday Times probably. Nevertheless, I doubled back and headed there anyway. It was refreshing to see a series of independent boutiques selling a range of things (as well as actually being open). It’s true there was a disproportionate number of coffee shops, but this was the case on most high streets I’d been down. At the top of the street, the railings outside the Church of St Giles displayed a row of old high-heeled women’s shoes (although, given the times, there was nothing to say that they could only be worn by women), used as flower planters for Alpine flowers, a lovely and relevant touch. It was also refreshing to see that they hadn’t been vandalised. I didn’t check too closely how they were secured for fear of attracting suspicion, of either the criminal or sexual variety.

  Alas, St Giles wasn’t the main shopping drag in the town. That title belonged to Abington Street. If my respect for the town had been slowly inflating, Abington Street did a fair job in puncturing it. Even my guide was light on what Abington Street offered, focussing more on a couple of sculptures erected there, one showing a Cobblers Last, the other a tribute to the Northampton-born scientist Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA; rather than the actual shops.

  These shops were a fairly motley collection, with what were once fine facades now home to either discount stores or the occasional national chain. Those that were empty housed the more fortunate homeless dwellers, free to leave their tents up all day. Taken as a whole, it wasn’t an elevating sight. Abington Street was, if anything, merely a fairly extreme example of many of the traditional high streets I’d seen on my walk. That day there’d been the news that even Poundland was struggling nationally. Any shops still able to make a living, plus some which were teetering on the edge, had consolidated into malls, seeking safety in numbers. I wandered into the open space of the Market Square, but it didn’t offer much other than space.

  As it was near lunchtime, I headed for the Albion microbrewery, taking in a detour to the River Nene first, where a widebeam boat was gliding gently past the large Carlsberg Brewery located on the waterfront. This was the first Carlsberg Brewery outside Denmark, taking over the site previously occupied by the merged Phipps and Co and Northampton Brewing Company, which itself had been taken over by Watney Mann in 1968.

  I reached the Albion just in time to miss a brewery tour, so I was largely left alone in a traditionally furnished bar, except for some extravagantly dressed individuals who’d parked an elegant row of vintage scooters outside. They recommended the Phipps IPA, and it was a good call. Northampton’s beer was always known for its high hop content, required to counteract the effect of all the tannin the local shoe workers came into contact with, but not, I felt, added in the overwhelming way favoured by so many modern ‘craft breweries’.

  The Albion has revived Northampton’s old beer marques and had made a brilliant job of it. It was an absolute pleasure to sit in the bar and recover my wits, surrounded by old pub fittings and ancient pub games. These included Northamptonshire skittles, which was like bar billiards, except with nine skittles on a netted table, which needed to be knocked down using small solid discs ca
lled cheeses. Okay, the brewery is another nod to the past, but in a positive way, in that it isn’t just a playground, but a working business, providing innovation, skills and employment. All in all, a good example of the resilience and an eye to the future needed to cope with changing times.

  A second pint was extremely tempting, but would have required a little wander back to the hotel to rest my eyelids. The weather outside, though, didn’t look inviting: smoky-grey clouds tinged with darker rims, and of course I was missing a coat. What to do? My guide’s logic was sending me towards Abington Park, but I didn’t really want to go down Abington Street again, and I wanted to get wet even less.

  I ventured uphill back towards All Saints when I heard a tuba, accompanied by a descant of shiny-sounding trumpets belting out what sounded like a melody of popular show hits. Where I’d stood a couple of hours before, staring up to read the inscription along the top of the church, now sat a whole brass band, the Virtuosi GUS Band, which their conductor told us in between numbers, was shortly to represent the county at the brass band finals in the Albert Hall in London. Stop to think about that for a moment.

  They were brilliant, and brave. The conductor knew he was tempting fate, but he cued his band up anyway, and they launched into ‘Singing in the Rain’. Sure enough, the drops started to fall and people began to cast around for shelter, but it was as if Mother Nature was just having a bit of fun, for just as the band came to the end of the song, the rain stopped, never to come back. I took a programme from a volunteer handing them out and discovered that I’d chanced upon the Northampton Music Festival.

  The whole town was transformed, with people acting as if they were at Glastonbury, spilling out onto the streets, bravely defying the threatening grey skies, clutching Festival programmes in one hand, a coffee or a pint of beer in the other, wandering easily from venue to venue. A variety of genres was on offer, with the jazz stage actually in the courtyard of the Guildhall. This meant I was able to peek inside after all, even if it was only the recently refurbished courtyard, with its bronze statues to famous town worthies, of which there were a surprising number.

  Even the previously empty Market Square was transformed, hosting the main stage along with a row of artisan food stalls. It only seemed polite to sample the free-range Scotch eggs while listening to a mixture of local bands providing both covers and original material. I was so contented I even wandered around the inevitable stalls of ‘retro’ goods. This was the eleventh year of the festival, which meant it had only started this century. I could only conclude it was a good thing. It brought people together and showed the town off a bit. It was impossible not to get caught up in the vibe, and I found myself having a number of conversations with people next to me throughout the afternoon, a cheeky kip having been wiped off the agenda. In fact, despite this supposedly being a day of rest, by the end of it I’d walked nearly as much as I did on a non-rest day. Still, it was worth it.

  I’d enjoyed my day in Northampton, and that wasn’t a sentence I’d expected to write. I supposed I’d been lucky, but I’d been enjoying myself before the music festival, and that had just added cream on top of the experience. Yes, Northampton was down, but it wasn’t quite out. It had shown strength of character and was trying to re-define itself in a changing world, and good for it.

  Only one experience spoiled things. As the evening approached, I could see that things in the Market Square were going to hot up. A fair bit had been drunk, and from the programme it was clear that the music was going to continue and get louder. I was not familiar with the oeuvre of The Jets, the final band on the list, but I had a suspicion they weren’t going to cover Sinatra or Abba. After dinner, I therefore made the call to head back to the hotel and get my head down, ready for another day’s diagonal walking the next morning.

  Having left the centre, making my way up to the Polish delis, I was accosted by a tall man in his forties or fifties, dressed fairly respectably, with a generously proportioned tattooed woman on his arm.

  ‘Excuse me mate,’ he enquired, making me stop. ‘Got any change?’

  I wasn’t that well-dressed myself. Perhaps it was the fact that I was holding a book that marked me out as a potential mug. I knew exactly where he was headed, and what he wanted money for. I’d just seen him and his companion come out of a pub.

  All day, I’d been surrounded by individuals and families from Eastern Europe having a good time, spending the money I knew they worked hard to earn. Welcoming people, making the best of themselves. Polite. Exactly the kind of people I suspected this man would resent and label scroungers.

  I knew who the real scrounger was.

  9

  Progress

  Impressively, by 9am the next day, the music festival venues had been tidied away, along with nearly all the litter. Only the main stage remained up, and even that was clear of any random sleeping drunk or homeless person. Following a short stretch of walking along the Nene, and then past the lock that marked the end of the Grand Union Canal’s Northampton branch, my umpteenth canal, I was back into the familiar territory of open countryside. The town had presented a last hurrah with a large office building housing the headquarters of Avon Cosmetics. Not the UK headquarters, the global headquarters. Northampton must have been made up when they got that.

  Almost as impressive were the new buildings still being erected, which were going to house the relocated University of Northampton. It turned out that new building was to be a theme for the day. Where my maps indicated open countryside, I often found myself amongst fresh housing, and having to pick out footpaths preserved between brick walls. I’d bought older editions of the OS maps off eBay, but not that old. This was very recent development. New mini-villages tacked onto traditional old villages, the name retained, the character redefined. The development wasn’t obtrusive, and don’t get me wrong, I accept houses have to be built somewhere. It was a surprise as much as anything.

  This housing had certainly gone up since my previous trip through the heart of England, and as such was a tangible sign of progress – desirable or not depending upon your viewpoint. Was I beginning to enter commuter land? Was all this housing to accommodate people catching the convenient nearby trains to London? In that sense, was I now beginning to leave the fringes of Middle England and into the derided ‘south-east’, or was this a sort of no man’s land?

  Normal service was eventually reached when I battled through a large field of the rape I thought, hoped, I’d finally left behind. I crossed the M1 once again, this time around Junction 15, with a bridleway and a fresh array of wind turbines waiting to greet me the other side. Despite my earlier shock at the rate of building, I was reminded how much of England’s green and pleasant land is precisely that (and also how much of it was laid to rape), as I continued along my way.

  As I was thinking this, I thought I sensed a mirage ahead. A strange shimmer, a hint of water. None was marked on the map, and neither was what it turned out to be: yet another massive solar farm. These wind and solar installations, slightly hidden away, a secret to anyone other than their owners and walkers, were a real feature of this part of the country. Fenced off, and presided over by CCTV, the panels silently did their job without fuss and, in this particular case, without sheep, lost or otherwise.

  Sheep were about to feature again though. As I walked over the latest in a succession of stiles following the tops of a run of fields, I thought I could make out a four-wheel drive with its bonnet up. My first thought was they’d chosen an inconvenient place to break down, and my second was it was an even stranger place to have a shave, for the sound rending the air was that of an electric razor, albeit a bloody powerful one, but then again bushy beards were all the rage.

  Shearers, and I didn’t mean ex-England centre forwards. Sheep shearers, two of them, clipping sheep, yanking them out of a pen, turning them on their backs and trimming their coats off, starting at the tail and working their way up along
their sides. Meanwhile, an older, less muscular man gathered up the fleeces and sewed them into a large bag. I stopped for a chat, and they offered me a go, but by the time I’d taken my rucksack off and put my camera down, they’d yanked the last two remaining sheep out of the pen and set to work. I don’t think they really meant it, and besides, they probably wanted to get home. These sheep were only one year old and it was the first time they’d been sheared. Who could blame those recently shorn for bleating angrily at me as I made my way down the edge of the field and into Stoke Goldington?

  As I entered the village, I realised it was clearly a day for rural crafts, as a pair of thatchers were wrapping up their day’s work from the top of scaffolding embracing a delightful old cottage. I popped into the appropriately named Lamb pub, the village local. It was a Monday and I knew I would be visiting later as I wanted to watch England’s first game in the World Cup amongst company. I could see they had a television, so I sought an answer to my second question – did they serve food on a Monday?

  ‘Sorry, no. It’s a Monday.’ There was no challenging that kind of logic. I waited, sensing there might be more.

  ‘A chip van comes around later,’ the barman offered. He carried a general air of nonchalance, as if he was somehow one step removed from the problem. Chips were something, something hot, but I didn’t want to miss any of the action eating them outside. ‘They’re not very good though,’ the barman added.