The Road to Little Dribbling

by Bill Bryson

  For years all this felt like my little secret – even people in Bournemouth, I found, didn’t know about the grave – but when I passed it now I was interested to see that two bouquets had been laid on the lid, so someone must miss her. A couple of other mourners, lacking flowers, had left empty crisp packets, bless them, while someone else had placed an empty can of Carlsberg lager on the grave of a man named Duckett, who went to a greater reward, according to the inscription, in 1890.

  Across from the cemetery used to be an International Stores, but it is now a large Wetherspoon’s called, interestingly, the Mary Shelley. She really has been rediscovered. Around the corner there used to be a Forte’s café where the coffee machine sounded like a jet taking off (and the coffee tasted like jet fuel with milk in it), and where I stopped each morning for a coffee and to study one or two of the broadsheets in a desperate daily effort to swot up on English life and current affairs. And from there, suddenly vaguely nervous, I proceeded to work.

  Now it can’t be argued that being a downtable sub-editor on the Bournemouth Evening Echo was the most stressful and high-powered job in journalism in the 1970s, but it was stressful enough for me. The problem was that I knew nothing like as much as I ought to know to work safely as a journalist in Britain, and I lived in constant fear that my employers would discover the full extent of my ignorance and send me back to Iowa. Employing me was an act of kindness. I had only the barest working knowledge of British spelling, punctuation, grammar and idiom, and almost no acquaintance at all with vast areas of British history, politics and culture.

  I remember one day I was given a Press Association story to edit that I couldn’t follow at all – or actually could only partly follow, which made it even more confusing. The story was clearly about declining stocks of seafood off the west coast of Cornwall, or something like that – it was all about bivalves and molluscs, I remember – but scattered through it were frequent unrelated references to a certain well-known northern railway station. I didn’t know if this was a mistake or just the Press Association being eccentric in some way that I didn’t yet understand. I had no idea what to do, so I just read the story over and over. For two or three paragraphs the text would make sense and then suddenly there would be a mysterious, seemingly nonsensical reference to this railway station.

  As I sat there, helpless with uncertainty, a copy boy came past and dropped a slip of paper on my desk, and all suddenly became clear. The slip of paper was a correction, and it said: ‘In Cornish fisheries story, for “Crewe Station” please read “crustacean”.’

  And I thought then, ‘I will never master this country’ and I was right. I never have. Luckily for me, the people I worked with were kind and patient and looked after me. By sad coincidence two of them, Jack Straight and Martin Blaney, died within a couple of weeks of each other in early 2015, which is why I mention them, in affectionate commemoration, here.

  I looked now for the café where I used to have my morning coffee, but couldn’t find it anywhere – couldn’t even find the 1950s arcade of which it used to be a part – and then I strode up to Richmond Hill and examined the old and very slightly faded offices of the Echo.

  They dropped ‘Evening’ from the title a few years ago in recognition that no one wants an evening paper any more, but they can’t do anything about the fact that hardly anyone wants a paper at all. The Echo’s circulation was about sixty-five thousand in my day, which wasn’t very robust even then; it’s under twenty thousand now. In one recent six-month period it fell by 21 per cent. The Echo used to occupy the whole building, but now most of the downstairs belongs to a bar called the Ink Bar and a restaurant called the Print Room, both closed for refurbishment when I passed. But at least the Echo is still hanging in there. Since 2008, 150 local papers have closed in England, including some once-major ones like the Surrey Herald and Reading Post. That’s not good. Without local newspapers there’s no one to tell you when somebody’s been fined for having rats in their kitchens.

  The Echo doesn’t seem to be the only thing in Bournemouth that isn’t quite what it once was. The whole of the town centre was eerily quiet for a weekday afternoon. In my day, the streets of Bournemouth were nearly always busy – when I close my eyes and recall it, it’s always sunny, with men in suits and women in summer dresses – but now it was nearly as empty as Sundays used to be. Bournemouth has always had an interesting centre in that it consists of two shopping areas divided by the Pleasure Gardens, a long and lovely park, with a bandstand, flowerbeds and a little stream running through it. It used to be an agreeable intrusion, a leafy break from commerce when you were going from, say, Dingle’s Department Store on one side of the gardens to Habitat or British Home Stores on the other. But that was a pace for another age. Now people want to get everything accomplished in a hurry and not have a lot of trees and lawns in the way, so they seem to have abandoned the centre of town altogether, on both sides of the park.

  Some years ago they pedestrianized the Old Christchurch Road, a pleasantly curving shopping street, and gave it benches and tubs of flowers and smart brick paving, but over the years wherever the bricks have been lifted to renew pipes or do other groundwork, the intrusions have been roughly patched with asphalt, leaving behind long black gashes and unsightly rectangles. This is the problem with Austerity Britain. Repairs are either not made at all or are done in a slapdash fashion. There is a gradual deterioration until at some indefinable point the place stops being agreeable and instead becomes run-down and depressing. Welcome to Bournemouth. The tragedy for so many councils is that they think they can quietly cut spending and no one will notice or care. The tragedy for the country may be that they are right.

  But then again, perhaps not. Bournemouth’s tourism numbers have plunged in recent years. Domestic visits fell from 5.6 million in 2000 to 3.3 million in 2011, and visitor nights in the same period more than halved from 23 million to 11.4 million. Bournemouth in my day prided itself on the range and elegance of its diversions. It had good theatres, stylish shops and restaurants, a renowned Sinfonietta Orchestra and many other outposts of culture and refinement, but much of that is gone now. The Sinfonietta closed in 1999. The Winter Gardens went in 2002. The Pier Theatre followed more recently. A giant Imax theatre opened on the front in 2002, but almost immediately ran into financial difficulties and closed three years later. In 2013, the council paid £7.5 million for the building just to tear it down. When I passed by now, the site was just a big hole in the ground.

  But at least it still has the sea. Bournemouth boasts seven miles of golden beaches lined with cliffs and beach huts and indented here and there with steep wooded valleys called chines. There are still some very fine neighbourhoods tucked up in those hills. I decided now to walk the four miles along the beachside promenade to Canford Cliffs, a neighbourhood of old homes and considerable wealth at the top of Branksome Chine, and then back along the clifftops.

  It was a better day for walking than bathing – cool and overcast. Still, there were a fair number of people on the beach. Some were pretending to enjoy themselves. A few were doggedly sunbathing in defiance of the fact that the sky was a duvet of clouds. A small number were actually swimming, or at least bouncing in the waves. Years ago, when my wife and I were just dating, she took me on a day trip to the seaside at Brighton. It was my first exposure to the British at play in a marine environment. It was a fairly warm day – I remember the sun came out for whole moments at a time – and large numbers of people were in the sea. They were shrieking with what I took to be pleasure, but now realize was agony. Naively, I pulled off my T-shirt and sprinted into the water. It was like running into liquid nitrogen. It was the only time in my life in which I have moved like someone does when a piece of film is reversed. I dived into the water and then straight back out again, backwards, and have never gone into an English sea again.

  Since that day, I have never assumed that anything is fun just because it looks like the English are enjoying themselves doing it, and mo
stly I have been right.

  Later that same day this lovely young English girl, this person in whom I was about to entrust my permanent happiness and well-being, took me to a seafood wagon and bought me a little tub of whelks. If you have never dined on this delicacy, you may get the same experience by finding an old golf ball, removing the cover and eating what remains. The whelk is the most flavourless and indestructible thing ever to be regarded as a food. I think I still have one of them in a jacket pocket somewhere.

  At some point along the way to Canford Cliffs you leave Bournemouth and enter the neighbouring town of Poole. I used to think Canford Cliffs was a perfect place, apart from a curious shortage of pubs. But it had pleasant residential streets on the wooded cliffs above the sea, a lovely little library and a proper village centre, and I was pleased to see now, as I hauled myself a touch breathlessly up the steep road from the beach to the village, that it was more or less unchanged from thirty-odd years ago. I was rather more dismayed, though not altogether surprised, to find that the village centre had lost a lot of shops – there was no greengrocer, butcher, bookshop, hardware store or proper tearoom, the things every good village must have if it longs for my goodwill and patronage. Long ago, when it had those things, I used to imagine how pleasant it would be to live in a big house in Canford Cliffs and stroll to the shops each day to run your errands, but now the greater bulk of those shops are occupied by estate agents. The one thing you can do well in Canford Cliffs these days is buy property, but of course that is the last thing you want to do if you are living there already. Or indeed if you want a cup of tea.

  The only place I could find for refreshment was a modest establishment called the Coffee Saloon, which, as the name suggests, is like a saloon that sells coffee. It was fine – the tea was perfectly all right, the service friendly – but it wasn’t exactly the atmosphere I had in mind. As I sat drinking my tea, thinking that, with the best will in the world, this was not the most fun I had had in a long time, my mobile phone rang.

  It never rings. I had no idea where it was. I had to feel in every pocket and search through my backpack before I finally located it, down on the bottom under a couple of old whelks, on about the fifteenth ring. It was my wife. She sounded happy.

  ‘You have a new granddaughter,’ she said. ‘Come home.’

  Chapter 9

  Day Trips

  I

  STAND ON THE eastern slopes of Noar Hill in Hampshire and you have a view that is pretty well unimprovable. Orchards, fields and dark woods sit handsomely upon the landscape. Here and there village rooftops and church spires poke through the trees. It is lovely and timeless and tranquilly spacious, as English views so often are. It seems miles from anywhere, yet not far off over the Surrey Hills is London. Get in a car and in an hour you can be in Piccadilly Circus or Trafalgar Square. To me, that is a miracle, that a city as vast and demanding as London can have prospects like this on its very doorstep, on every side.

  What accounts for the great bulk of this sumptuousness is the Metropolitan Green Belt, a ring of preserved landscape, mostly woods and farmland, encircling London and several other English towns and cities with the single-minded intention of alleviating sprawl. The notion of green belts was enshrined in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and is to my mind the most intelligent, far-sighted, thrillingly and self-evidently successful land management policy any nation has ever devised.

  And now many people want to take it away.

  The Economist magazine, for one, has for years argued that the green belts should be cast aside as a hindrance to growth. As an Economist writer editorializes from a dementia facility somewhere in the Home Counties: ‘The green belts that stop development around big cities should go, or at least be greatly weakened. They increase journey times without adding to human happiness.’

  Well, they add a great deal to my happiness, you pompous, over-educated twit. Perhaps I see this differently from others because I come from the Land of Shocking Sprawl. From time to time these days I drive with my wife from Denver International Airport to Vail, high in the Colorado Rockies, to visit our son Sam. It is a two-hour drive and the first hour is taken up with just getting out of Denver. It is a permanent astonishment to me how much support an American lifestyle needs – shopping malls, distribution centres, storage depots, gas stations, zillion-screen multiplex cinemas, gyms, teeth-whitening clinics, business parks, motels, propane storage facilities, compounds holding fleets of U-Haul trailers, FedEx trucks or school buses, car dealerships, food outlets of a million types, and endless miles of suburban houses all straining to get a view of distant mountains.

  Travel twenty-five or thirty miles out from London and you get Windsor Great Park or Epping Forest or Box Hill. Travel twenty-five or thirty miles out from Denver and you just get more Denver. I suppose Britain must have all this infrastructure, too, though I don’t honestly know where most of it is. What I do know is that it isn’t in the fields and farmland that ring every city. If that is not a glory, I don’t know what is.

  The arithmetic of the British countryside is simple and compelling. Britain has about 60 million acres of land and about 60 million people – one acre for each person. Every time you give up ten acres of greenfield site to build a superstore, in effect ten people lose their acres. By developing countryside you force more and more people to share less and less space. Trying to limit that growth isn’t nimbyism, it’s common sense.

  If it was only The Economist calling for the destruction of the green belt, my despair would be manageable, but lately the Guardian has decided to come down on the side of dismemberment, with a series of articles mostly suggesting that the green belt is a kind of elitist conspiracy that stops affordable housing from getting built. As Prof Paul Cheshire of the London School of Economics puts it in one of the Guardian’s articles: ‘What green belt really seems to be is a very British form of discriminatory zoning, keeping the urban unwashed out of the Home Counties.’ Well, let me say at once that I have uttered huge amounts of tosh in my time, but I take my hat off to Prof Cheshire.

  The article in which the wise professor was quoted was ‘Six Reasons Why We Should Build on the Green Belt’ by Colin Wiles, a planning consultant. This book is not a polemic, so I am not going to itemize his reasons for wanting to destroy the green belt or respond to each (though believe me I could), but on the other hand at least two of the ideas are so recklessly wrong, and so close to becoming received wisdom, that I can’t let them pass without comment.

  The first and most dangerous charge routinely laid against the green belt is that it isn’t actually all that special, that much of the land is scrubby and degraded. Well, you decide. According to a study by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, green belts in England contain 30,000 kilometres of footpaths and other rights of way, 220,000 hectares of woodland, 250,000 hectares of top quality farmland, and 89,000 hectares of Sites of Special Scientific Interest. That sounds to me like things worth keeping. If any green belt land is degraded, the answer surely is not to build on it but to make the owner improve it or sell it to someone who will improve it. Allowing owners to cash in on poorly managed land is the quickest way to get lots more poorly managed land.

  The other common charge against the green belt is that it doesn’t work, that it just forces people to move further and further away from cities to find affordable housing. Wiles offers nothing in the way of evidence to support this other than that he has noticed that a lot of people live outside London. If his view is going to have any credence, he needs to explain why Americans, who have no green belts and never have had them, have for over a hundred years been moving further and further out from their own cities. It isn’t house prices that drive them out; the outer suburbs usually have the most expensive housing. What the people on the outer edge are always looking for, in fact, is the thing that England has already: countryside.

  The one charge against the green belt that has some foundation is that it keeps a lot of land off the market.
Yes, it does. That is actually the idea of it. But that land isn’t sitting there doing nothing. It shelters wildlife, transpires oxygen, sequesters carbon and pollutants, grows food, provides quiet lanes for cycling and footpaths for walking, adds grace and tranquillity to the landscape. It is already under enormous pressure. Fifty thousand houses have been built on green belt land in the last ten years. Sussex alone lost thirteen ancient woodlands to development in the same period, according to the Woodland Trust. We ought to be appalled to see this happening, not clamouring for more of it.

  Southeast England is already as densely populated as the Netherlands, yet thanks to the softening influence of the green belt large expanses of it remain verdant and attractive and seemingly timeless – the England that most of us appreciate and love. There is absolutely no need to throw that away. The most conservative estimates show that there is enough previously developed land in England – ‘brownfield land’, as it is known – to accommodate a million homes at average densities. Colin Wiles’s article doesn’t even mention the possibility of building on brownfield land. Why?

  People are simply being misled. At about the same time the Guardian ran Wiles’s article, it ran another article headlined ‘Why Surrey Has More Land for Golf Courses Than for Homes’. This was based on a study by Paul Cheshire, the professor quoted above, which declared that houses in Surrey occupy about 2.5 per cent of the county, less than golf courses. The point was to show just how dangerously skewed Britain’s land use has become. But Radio 4’s blessed and peerless fact-checking programme More or Less looked into the figures, and found that Prof Cheshire had been a little selective with his calculations. He counted only the space occupied literally by the houses themselves, not their gardens or any of the other land around them. So if all the houses in Surrey were squeezed together without any space in between, then they would indeed occupy less space than golf courses, but that was not what the report implied and it was certainly not the way the Guardian or any other publication interpreted it. When gardens are added back, Surrey’s domestic properties turn out to occupy 14 per cent of the county’s land, roughly three times the average for England as a whole. There is, in short, nothing irregular about the volume of housing in Surrey and nothing to support the suggestion that its land has been profligately misused. But you can find wildly inaccurate interpretations of Prof Cheshire’s claim all over the internet now. That’s unfortunate, to put it mildly.