Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  So, in the absence of a Margaret Walk or a Thatcher Tour, I’m left to wander the drizzly streets of Grantham in a damp and desultory fashion. I really don’t know if it’s the most boring town in Britain as that impertinent radio show suggested; I’d have to spend a great deal more time in the town. And, frankly, I’ve no intention of doing that. It’s no Bath, let’s put it that way.

  Without wanting to labour or contrive any political point, Grantham’s ugly town centre is what happens when commercialism is let off the leash unchecked. Everywhere, the buildings of the old market town have been barnacled and carbuncled and muscled out by nasty new ones, mainly cheap and tawdry-looking retail outlets. One boasts, bizarrely, ‘Hessian sandbags! In stock now!’ I find myself wandering glumly in the George shopping centre; several of the shops are closed, there are dirty puddles on the floor reflecting the harsh fluorescent lighting and a bad, thin version of Joan Armatrading’s ‘Love and Affection’ is piped around the echoing galleries. It’s a dreary experience.

  But what’s most noticeable and most depressing is that Grantham today is more a slip road than a town. For every pedestrian I spot, a score of vans and cars come throbbing through the town at speed. The few of us on foot feel like an afterthought, an irrelevance, cowering and scuttling along the shopfronts while the lorries roar by.

  In the half-empty bookshop I notice a volume called Grantham in the News, a collection of cuttings from the local paper. It ends abruptly in 1979, just before its most famous daughter becomes Britain’s first and as yet only woman prime minister. I don’t know about you but I, ever the hard-nosed newshound, might just have put that snippet in. Possibly even given it a whole page. No mention, though, although there is a nice piece on a local bullock that was too big to fit in his shed.

  Eventually, down a back alley, opposite Griddle’s snack bar and Korky’s discount beers, I spot a dingy pub called Chequers, named after the PM’s Chilterns hideaway. I don’t go in. I don’t imagine Reagan or Gorbachev ever did either, unless they were really keen on Blue WKD and Big Screen Sky Sports. It is, however, the only even vague allusion I have seen to Grantham’s illustrious former resident: Alf’s daughter from the grocer’s shop. I wasn’t tempted. Whatever the myth that Thatcher forged, whatever she and her image-makers may have wanted us to believe, Grantham didn’t feel like Middle England to me, not in 2008 anyway. It felt like the edge and the fag-end of something.

  Which cannot be said for the vast, sleek, futuristic new St Pancras station complex in London. Wandering around it felt like being inside one of those architect’s scale models or artist’s impressions: cool, spacious and clean, in which we little people moved around in awe almost, gently transported here and there by escalator and moving walkway. Newly opened, which so often in England means ‘opened in a rushed, half-arsed way with no lifts or shops or running water and loads of bits cordoned off with yellow tape’, this is actually a model of quiet efficiency. You can buy nice cheese from the deli and look at the sky through a canopy of glass and read the computerised display boards and feel that you are living in a near future that works.

  I had come here to embark on a trip to a place that, though it meant little to a northerner, had come up in conversation a few times when I’d mentioned that I was going in search of Middle England. Grantham had been a myth, I felt, but this was the reality, according to people in the know. One of my colleagues at the BBC said it was ‘so cosy and comfortable and nice that you’d feel like sneering at it, but you don’t because you know secretly you’d love to live there. If you could afford a house that is.’ My friend Mike who grew up in nearby St Albans told me that it was even more Middle England than his home town, ‘and, believe me, that’s saying something’. He also told me that he had nearly lost his virginity there. I felt I ought to go, if only to see if there was a plaque.

  The moment I stepped from the train I knew what my friends had meant. Harpenden, Buckinghamshire embodies the entirely gruntled, utterly comfited, completely mayed spirit of Middle England, its quiet satisfaction, its ease and content. Now for all I know, underneath this calm and pleasant exterior is a hotbed of rage and discontent, a simmering, barely contained pressure cooker of suppressed anger. But I doubt it. It was on a very low light if it was.

  Straight out of the station and past the elderly Muslim taxi drivers with their luxuriant beards, the first shop is a picture framer’s (exhibition by Ivan Taylor at the moment) and I get an inkling that Harpenden may well be a cut above. But hot on the heels of this, or cheek by jowl if you prefer, are Harpenden Grill and Kebab and Jack’s Famous Chippy. I have to say that this latter may be an idle boast. I had never heard of it, and I’m quite a connoisseur of chippies. I’ve heard of the Magpie in Whitby and George and Helen’s in Harborne – a place of pilgrimage across the Midlands – and. Perhaps Jack’s fame is more local, cultish, a sort of John Cassavetes or Van der Graaf Generator of chip shops. Mindful of the fact that I seem to be partaking of tasty but greasy, artery-clogging snacks in every town I visit, I walk briskly past, avoiding Jack’s (if it is he) alluring grin. Perhaps this is what he is famous for. At the side of his shop, whence come aromas that test my resolve, is a large red billboard on a gable end that says, bluntly, ‘Some People Are Gay. Get Over It!’

  In the window of the (obligatory) Help the Aged shop, a man with Down’s Syndrome in a huge, fluffy, white Fair Isle sweater is writing the prices on the CDs with infinite and infinitely touching patience and care. The street is crammed with darkly inviting Moroccan restaurants, quirky bookshops and bijou barbers. I could live here, I think, as I have found myself thinking with surprising regularity on my travels across Middle England. If I had the money, of course, since this is, according to the Daily Telegraph, the eighth richest town in Britain with an average house price of £500,000 as of spring 2008.

  Turning right onto the grand parade, I am met with newsstands announcing that Kosovo has proclaimed its independence. Harpenden looks fairly independent too, independently wealthy anyway as I make my way down a wide, handsome, prosperous street crowded in the mid-afternoon with healthy, affluent, well-scrubbed people radiating a glow of satisfaction but not smugness. This part of town is known as the Village, which isn’t as silly and affected as it sounds; with its unhurried, semi rural feel, Harpenden does seem a lot further than 25 minutes from the jangle and roar of Central London. I can see why so many people with no connection with the area came to live here, from the Aussie yodeller Frank Ifield to enigmatic American film director Stanley Kubrick to Morecambe-born comic and national treasure Eric Morecambe, who was a famously passionate fan of nearby Luton Town football club. The lounge there is named after him, as indeed are Harpenden’s public halls.

  On the high street, there’s a posh confectioner’s and women of all ages come and go, clutching beribboned boxes which must contain all manner of sinful pralines and forbidden fondants. They have the furtive, slightly embarrassed air of middle-aged men leaving a sex shop. Except much prettier and with more giggling. The Slug and Lettuce is full and the clientele spill out on to the pavement tables; most of the patrons are drinking big frothy lattes, though, rather than beer. The Methodist church seems to be having a coffee morning too. Outside is a poster of three smiling babies and the slogan: ‘You are Unique. Copyright God.’

  Pleasant though it is, walking the streets of Harpenden involves a certain amount of risk in that it is seemingly a town full of elderly ladies parking badly, reversing without looking, mounting pavements and crunching tyre walls against kerbs. There are estate agents galore and in this, the early months of the credit crunch, the prices are just this side of breathtaking for stolid, bland, detached houses. As I have found all across Middle England, every other shop on the high street is either a dry cleaner’s or a charity shop.

  The village feel is enhanced by a pretty church just off the high street whose grounds are dotted with spreading elms, a bit of the country right in the town. I take a turn around the churchyard, where Speci
al Brew and shouting are noticeable by their absence. A teenage girl in a Franz Ferdinand T-shirt sits on a bench with her knees up reading Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, whilst further away under the trees a silver-haired gentleman is trying to teach a bumptious spaniel to fetch. St Nicholas itself is closed but I content myself with a shufti in the foyer where there is a selection of parish notices and such. There’s a flyer for an appearance by Eric Knowles, ‘irreverent expert from Antiques Roadshow’, dapper in trademark bow-tie, at the Harpenden Eric Morecambe public halls. ‘Pre-show valuation at 6.30.’ A hand-typed notice says, ‘Handyman seeks work, I am honest and reliable.’ It could be a detail straight out of the young girl’s Hardy novel.

  Returning at a leisurely pace to the high street, I stop at the parish noticeboard by the drop-in centre. Peter Lilley seems to be the local MP and is holding some kind of public meeting or surgery. I never liked him. At best, I used to think of him as Andrew Ridgeley to Michael Portillo’s George Michael. The Marmalade for Marie Curie Cancer Evening sounds much more fun. Strolling on, I pass an attractive-looking specialist off licence. Or rather I don’t. As I run my eye along the shelves full of lustrous wheat-and honey-coloured Aberlours and Caol Ilas, Laphroaigs and Taliskers, a quartet of smartly dressed young mums come in (yummy mummies as some might have it, even, ahem, MILFs), chatting and joking and obviously stocking up for a girls’ night in. One small, dark-haired woman in a white fur-lined parka picks up a bottle of Lanson champagne and pretends to swig from it. She catches my eye, winks mischievously and says, ‘Just getting ready for the school run.’

  Sandra has lived in Harpenden for five years. She grew up not far away in Harlow New Town. ‘Harpenden’s much nicer but’ – and here she grows a little wistful – ‘Harlow was quite a fun place to be a teenager. Course I’m a sensible grown-up mum now,’ she says with the distinct air of someone who isn’t quite that yet. They’re having a send-off drink tonight for Colleen who’s going to live in Christchurch, New Zealand. ‘Very pretty apparently and very respectable. Just like Harpenden in fact,’ she says with a smile.

  The young guy behind the counter chips in and asks me what I’m doing here. I tell him and he says, ‘Oh, you’ve come to the right place. This is Middle England all right. The heart of the Shires,’ and then tells me about the history of various local church towers, an interesting and unexpected specialism for a twenty-something with a dyed maroon asymmetric haircut. I treat myself to a nice 15-year-old Dalwhinnie, wish Colleen bon voyage and all the girls a good night in. ‘Am I going to be in your book?’ asks Sandra, putting an extra Slimline Tonic in her basket for good measure. Yes, you are, I say. And so she is.

  The heart of the Shires. Yes, Harpenden did feel like that. But I had come to realise, indeed had probably known all along, that though phrases like Heart of the Shires, Gateway to the Cotswolds, Heart of England, Fulcrum of Median Albion (OK, I made that one up) abound on tourism websites and marketing brochures, they are place-specific but no one actually uses them. ‘Middle England’, on the other hand, is used thousand upon thousand of times a day, and, though every user may have a slightly different, nuanced concept in mind, it revolves around certain shared assumptions. It is not so much places as states of mind. And shared collective rituals. That sounds dauntingly sociological so I should point out that what I’m driving at is farmers’ markets.

  Farmers’ markets are the … well, I hate to say Nuremberg Rallies of Middle England because of the unpleasant connotations, but you know what I mean. They are Middle England made flesh and gathered in one place, actualising itself in a celebration of identity. But without the Horst Wessel song and the flaming torches. Though the notion may seem intensely English, farmers’ markets have been a feature of street life in Latin America and Europe for centuries. And the first farmers’ market as we know them now, or so they claim, occurred in 1934 and still occurs on the corner of Third and Fairfax in Los Angeles, of all places, the creation of a savvy advertising copywriter and a local businessman who invited eighteen farmers to sell their produce from the tailgates of their trucks. Thus was born the modern farmers’ market, like the ploughman’s lunch a romanticised, marketable nugget of wholesome, country living designed specifically for pressured, weary, eco-friendly city dwellers.

  If that sounds disparaging, let me say that I love farmers’ markets. In fact, they are about the only thing about farming I do love. I can spend hours and pounds there, under the stripy green canvas awnings and along the trestle tables, browsing the produce which, according to regulations, must be ‘grown, reared, caught, brewed, pickled, baked, smoked or processed by the stallholder’. In theory, anyway; a Times article of April 2008 revealed that some farmers employed a bit of sleight of hand and passed off ‘bought’ produce as their own. One was quoted as saying, ‘If you’ve got to buy it from the market, then just stick it in your own boxes before you go to the [farmers’] market. You’ve got to dress it up how you want it … Don’t take it in the Spanish black box or take it in a box that says “Lincolnshire Produce”. It’s common sense. You can work it out. There are times of the year [the customer] knows you can’t get it, so you have to be a bit shrewd.’

  I still love them, though. At the farmers’ market on the high street in Harborne, a leafy, affluent suburb of Birmingham, there’s a stall run by the Handmade Scotch Eggs Company that sells thirty different varieties of the ovoid breadcrumby snack. One is called Baz. They do six vegetarian ones. When I was there last I spent twenty-six pounds, which I think may be the most amount of money ever spent on Scotch eggs, though it’s hard to ratify this claim, of course. At a farmers’ market in Kent I bought several jars of olives stuffed with all manner of ingredients: red pepper, lemon, garlic, probably kippers and liver and powdered Crunchie. I don’t even like olives. I don’t actually believe anyone does. Let’s face it, they taste of TCP. But I still bought them. At the same market, I stood and drank a plastic cup of hot apple juice – again which I’m not wild about – just so I could pretend for a moment I was in Madrid or Cadiz. I bought more goat’s cheese than anyone could have wanted, particularly since, yes, you’ve guessed it, I prefer Dairylea. I then spent a happy half hour in the company of Khalid Ishmael, proprietor of Ishmael’s Mother, who made me eat a variety of ferociously delicious Asian curries and dals. The company motto is. ‘Eat this, you’ll like it’, which I find winningly to the point. By his own admission, he’s ‘a good south London boy’ with a nice line in cheeky patter with the mildly scandalised ladies. The dal ‘sneaks up and takes you from behind’ and the lamb mussaman ‘will be the most interesting thing you’ve had in your mouth all year, madam’.

  The spiritual cousin of the farmers’ market is the craft centre. Also known as the ‘craft centre cum antiques and shopping thingy’. There’s a cracking example of the genre just outside Lichfield and called, yes!, the Heart of the Country Shopping Village. Well, I suppose it is a kind of village, if your definition of a village is ‘no houses but with a boutique and a crêperie that’s built next to an open prison’. Actually, this is unfair. It is genuinely an old farm dating back to the 1700s and in 1991 it received ‘the Arthur Brown trophy, given in recognition of projects that have made a significant contribution to the preservation of Staffordshire’s built heritage’.

  The undoubted appeal of such places – and come here on a bank holiday Monday and you’ll be engaging in hand-to-hand combat for a crêpe – is actually outlined in the village’s own literature. ‘In this age when high streets all over the country tend to look and feel exactly the same; be it shops, eating places or car parks with high fees; Heart of the Country Shopping Village provides a welcome alternative and in a way, a step back in time. Individual shops and distinctive restaurants, free parking, a safe, attractive and vehicle-free environment are the backdrop to a relaxed experience for our visitors. The Village strives to maintain the rural feel, and the buildings are unmistakably a former farmstead. The Village is particularly proud of the biodiversity in a
nd around the buildings, quite apart from the adjoining woodland and hedgerows. There are 10 species of birds, including goldfinches and pied wagtails nesting in and on the buildings, and a colony of 40-50 bats breeding in one of the roofs.’

  I didn’t know any of this when I went. I just thought there might be some Scotch egg or stuffed olive opportunities. There weren’t but there was pretty much everything else, including a microbrewery and a garden furniture shop that charged a grand for a frightening statue of a sinister cowled monk. He was a lot like the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water in that 1970s Public Information Film, here making an unexpected second appearance in a book, surely some kind of record. I looked at some ace ‘fire-pits’, which are basically barbecues that wouldn’t look out of place in a Shinto temple. I knew, though, that I wouldn’t have anywhere to put it. And I was distracted that every bloke in the village was wearing autumnal cords and a scarf. Including me.

  Given the village’s location, there’s a faintly French feel to it all. There are lads bustling around in aprons carrying baskets of baguettes. The furniture shop is called Ooh La La, which makes it sound like it sells knickers but in fact it sells little cane chairs and Beatrix Potter-ish beds and bottles of Crabtree and Evelyn shampoo and L’Occitane shaving oil. The girl behind the counter was from Coventry, though. She gave my friend Lydia, aged three, a chocolate egg, which I thought was very nice of her. In the Alessi shop I buy a stupidly expensive egg cup which sets off the fabulously camp young man (I hesitate to say that he was the only gay in the village) on dreamy reminisces of his childhood in the far-off days of, I guess, around 1989. ‘OOOH, an egg cup! Do you know every Easter we’d have our Creme Eggs in an egg cup round at my gran’s in Cannock. Do you think people still do that? Happy days!’ I also buy yet another garlic chopper, something that will stone a mango – always a chore, don’t you find? – and something ridged and silver whose use I had forgotten even before I got out of the store. As I leave I notice that the garden centre next door has just opened for business, and a passing gardener in green wellies clutching a hoe recognises me, saying, ‘Hello, you could have been our guest of honour and cut the ribbon! Actually I don’t know if we’ve got a pair of giant scissors.’