Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  In the romantic imagination, though, Cheshire was always a place of dairy cows luxuriating in deep-green fields amid half-timbered houses. In modern times its most memorable monument has become the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, peering above the hedgerows and into the heavens by the railway line to Manchester just north of Goostrey. More and more the county exists now only in apposition to the cities to its north, Liverpool and especially Manchester. Cheshire (like Bedfordshire and Berkshire) no longer has a county council whose job is to nurture it. The footballers are left to set the tone and the fashion.

  And the county town is suffering. Chester is a beautiful fake, showily tarted up like the racegoers: most of the black-and-white buildings are not medieval, as they pretend, but Victorian imitations. (And much of the twentieth-century infilling is disgusting – that’s the real Watergate Scandal.) The city has not been Cheshire’s centre of gravity since at least the Industrial Revolution. However the boundaries are drawn, it is nowhere near the middle of the county but on the western edge, guarding against marauding Welshmen. Stuff seems to wither here somehow: the old League football club went spectacularly bust; there is no professional theatre. If Cheshire wants to be entertained, be it sport or culture, it mostly heads to Manchester.

  Chester is best known now for Hollyoaks, the most quietly enduring of British soap operas. It has been going since 1995, little noticed even by the tabloids, though it is a staple for the teen magazines. It was devised for Channel 4 by Phil Redmond, inventor of Grange Hill and Brookside, and a legend in this business, in an attempt to get a series that was both younger and more middle class than the TV norm. The setting is Hollyoaks Community College, which is a notional further education college. According to Mark Lawson, who is an expert on these matters, the point of using a college is that it offers a natural means of bringing the characters together and is also a magnificent way of getting rid of them organically: they can graduate or get another job. In something like EastEnders they have to die some horrible death that the producers haven’t already used. ‘Very canny, Phil, about the grammar of it,’ says Lawson, who somehow manages to fit watching this stuff into a busy life as broadcaster and writer.

  From my experience as a viewer (one episode), most of the characters are in their late teens or early twenties with busy sex lives. The target audience appears to be a slightly younger age group, mostly female, who would like busier sex lives. The script is cliché-ridden and thus the authentic voice of the young middle class. No one seems to be doing any studying. And the female characters appear to be dressed for Chester Races, just on the off chance it’s the right week.

  According to Wikipedia, so this must be true, storylines since 1995 have included: ‘drug addiction, murder, arson, hit-and-run, abortion, suicide, homelessness, financial problems, interracial relationships, racism, religion, bisexuality, homosexuality, homophobia, sexual confusion, alcoholism, rape, cancer, child abuse, domestic violence, anorexia/bulimia, incest, sexual harassment, general bullying, carbon monoxide poisoning, living with epilepsy, HIV, pupil-teacher relationships, self-harm, schizophrenia, OCD, gambling addiction, shoplifting, fostering, teenage pregnancy, SIDS, miscarriage, kidnapping, brain aneurysm, Gender Identity Disorder and surrogacy.’

  All very Cheshire, I dare say.

  Liverpool and Manchester have very different relationships with their southern hinterland. Liverpool looks across from its gleaming waterfront to the Wirral peninsula as New York does to the Jersey shore. From the Mersey ferry, Cheshire looks like the municipal dump, and the dominant landmark is a ventilation shaft.

  The Wirral has always returned the contempt and was exceedingly cross about being bundled out of Cheshire and into ‘Merseyside’ after 1974, especially as the home insurers upped their premiums as a result. The Wirral is a mishmash, and little known too, somewhere outsiders almost never penetrate except when the Open Golf is staged amid the bungalows of Hoylake. Years ago I did a series for the Guardian called Fourth Division England, about the mostly downbeat towns whose struggling clubs made up the lower reaches of the Football League.

  I decided to include Tranmere Rovers. ‘Where’s Tranmere?’ someone in the office enquired, reasonably enough.

  ‘Birkenhead,’ I replied.

  ‘Where’s Birkenhead?’

  When I rang Directory Enquiries, I was asked if I meant Berkhamsted.

  Birkenhead was the biggest town in historic Cheshire, though Chester has overtaken it since the days when Cammell Laird turned out a ship every twenty days. The ferry itself is a quaint survival, used mainly by cyclists: other commuters from the Wirral into the city go by car or train. In the autumn of 2011, I took the 7.50 ferry from the Pier Head to Seacombe, against the flow, with two other passengers. Most of the day the boat does tourist trips. On a fine morning, though, with the sun rising behind Liverpool’s Old Church, there may not be a lovelier journey to work anywhere in Britain.

  I had no idea what to do in Seacombe. But the three-mile promenade between there and New Brighton is pedestrianised and has encouraging markers every 100 metres. The sun was out and the view across the glinting Mersey to the Liverpool skyline was splendid. The walk felt carefree as well as car-free. At Egremont I spotted a small boy heading to school on his own, kicking a football as his grandfather might have done. He may even have been whistling.

  The problem here is Cheshire. The beach, if that is the correct word, is disgusting. It’s full of folklore: at Guinea Gap in 1849 the locals found a hoard of old coins washed ashore; I spotted two lorry tyres, a football, a good many bricks, an industrial trolley, lumps of concrete and what looked like a giant’s condom. And if that lot doesn’t put off potential sunbathers, the signs will. At Magazine Prom there were thirteen separate warning logos and messages along the shoreline.

  DO NOT …

  DIVE

  USE INFLATABLES

  JUMP

  SAND YACHT

  BEWARE …

  LARGE SURF OR HIGH BREAKING WAVES

  QUICKSAND

  SAILING

  SLIPWAY

  STRONG WINDS

  SUBMERGED OBJECTS

  TIDES

  PERSONAL WATERCRAFT

  SLIPPERY SURFACES

  Plus five other notices warning of soft sand, silt and mud near the breakwaters; rising tides; tidal flooding on the road; authorised vehicles on the roadway; and ‘Beware of slippery surfaces due to algae and marine growth’. Apart from that, there was nothing to worry about.

  By the time I got to New Brighton, where the river meets the open sea, the submerged objects were no longer an official threat; kitesurfing had been added, though. The Daily Mail, around the same time, found a dozen warnings at a paddling pool in Canvey Island, Essex, that had never had an accident. Pending further claims, the Wirral’s thirteen must stand as the record.

  There is one further risk in New Brighton: abject depression. It was a resort designed in the 1830s to rival its south coast namesake: ‘As New Brighton is likely to become a favourite and fashionable Watering Place, several gentlemen have proposed to erect there a handsome Hotel,’ said a contemporary report. With the railways just getting started, it should have been perfect timing. But it never happened for New Brighton. In 1900 came a tower that was bigger than Blackpool’s (621 feet v 500) but it was taken down just twenty years later. Though the fresh breezes made it a fair enough place from which to take the train into Liverpool, it did not become a favourite and fashionable Watering Place. And it never will. The seafront was redeveloped in the 1960s with predictably unfortunate results. And the map by the seafront makes the town sound more like an archaeological site than a resort: ‘Former site of the Tower’ … ‘Former site of the Pier’ … ‘Former site of the Pool’ …

  Manchester’s Cheshire is altogether different. Its heart is the footballing triangle bounded by Alderley Edge, Wilmslow and the stinkingly prosperous village of Prestbury, where flows the pleasant River Bollin, though nowhere near as fast as the lively Bollinger
.

  The centre of it all is a nothingy sprawl of a village called Mottram St Andrew. And the centre of that, in so far as it has one, is a little cul-de-sac called Collar House Drive, home – according to reports – of the aforesaid Mr and Mrs W. Rooney. I assume theirs was the house with the bird-box security cameras and the ‘PRIVATE LAND. NO PARKING’ signs.

  This area has been affluent since the railway reached Alderley Edge in 1842. It has long attracted wealthy footballers. And its reputation for hedonism is not new either. In 1999 the Rev. David Leaver left his parish in Wilmslow with this tribute to the locals: ‘I have never met people who are quite so obsessed with money. Who are so far removed from any sense of spiritual values, let alone organised Christian worship … In this part of north Cheshire the questions seem essentially materialistic: How much money do you earn? What car do you drive? How big is your car?’

  One resident shocked by this was the then TV presenter Stuart Hall: ‘He’s got it all wrong. When my friends come round we sit in our kitchen and enjoy a steak and kidney pie and a glass of very ordinary claret.’ Even these days it is said that Wayne Rooney’s tastes are so homely that he always orders pizza margarita. One advantage of being as successful as Rooney is that it is possible to stop trying to impress anyone, eat what you want to eat, be what you want to be.

  It is easy to caricature this area. There is still a layer of the comfy old Manchester Guardian-reading bourgeoisie, who age gracefully attending the birdwatching and rambling groups organised by the Wilmslow Guild. But old people give way to young; old money gives way to new; old taste gives way to no taste at all. There is even a clash between old and new football money: the generation who got rich and moved here in the early days of the Premier League boom became appalled at the McMansions that were constructed for the new mega-million men of Manchester City.

  On a wet Friday morning Mottram St Andrew was far from a peaceful idyll. The place was alive with the sound of construction. The trees were festooned with planning notices seeking to demolish discreet old houses and replace them with indiscreet new ones. Outside one site I heard a builder talking into his mobile discussing some proposed design feature: ‘It was supposed to be ducks,’ he said, with some exasperation. ‘Now it’s reindeer.’ Very possibly real ones. Top of the range on offer was a three-storey eight-bedroom listed Georgian hall on Macclesfield Road, carefully restored to look modern, with pool, gym, cinema and tennis court: £8.75 million. Every Hollyoaks watcher’s wildest fantasy.

  There are fads and fashions in this market that have a life of their own. There is, or was, a craze for American black walnut flooring: no better than oak, say the experts, but vastly more expensive. It’s what their mates have. Footballers slightly less famous than Rooney still have to impress.

  And yet only a few miles away is Knutsford, where old money is likely to hold on until the day comes when Knutsford FC of the Cheshire League are taken over by Arab sheikhs to compete with United and City. This was the original of Mrs Gaskell’s Cranford. When the novel was – rather freely – adapted by the BBC in 2007, they opted to film it in Lacock in Wiltshire, which is everyone’s idea of what mid-nineteenth-century England ought to have looked like. The main drag in Knutsford, King Street, is genuinely Georgian, but poses problems: it is narrow, traffic-clogged and full of chain stores. And its most prominent building, the Gaskell Memorial Tower, would seem a bit odd in the midst of Mrs Gaskell’s most famous work.

  The tower was built in 1908 by a local glove merchant and architectural patron called Richard Harding Watt, whose contribution to Knutsford reduced Pevsner to spluttering rage. As well as the tower, he was responsible, in Legh Road, for what Pevsner called ‘the maddest sequence of villas in all England’ and ‘a witches’ sabbath’. I think they are a splendid jumble of architectural styles – here a bit baronial, here Italianate, here a curly bit – which Watt built using whatever he could collect from demolition contractors. They have far more going for them than that bland almost £9 million buggered-up Georgian hall on offer to the footballers. The Legh Road Watt house that came on the market in 2010 looked a snip to me at £2.35 million. Fastidious Pevsnerites should know it would not look remotely out of place in southern California.

  And, after all, what was Cranford if not a pioneering form of soap opera? And what is southern California if not a very distant outpost of Cheshire?

  May 2012

  In 2014 Wayne Rooney’s salary was reportedly increased to £300,000 a week. After two seasons in training Pippy had raced seventeen times and won just once: on the fourth-division all-weather track at Wolverhampton. His total earnings, £6,501, equalled – by my rough calculation – Rooney’s earnings in about three minutes playing football. And, poor Pippy, for all the innuendo in his name, had been gelded. Unlike Stuart Hall, who in 2013 and 2014 was sentenced to a total of five years’ imprisonment for historic sexual offences. Steak and kidney pie, indeed!

  16. Location, location

  KENT

  When Rose and James Rouse retired from commuterdom, they bought a house overlooking St Margaret’s Bay, tucked inside a couple of headlands high above the Straits of Dover. Their garden is sheltered from every wind except a straight-up sou’easter, and palm, fig and olive trees thrive there as if they were in a more southerly country. Which they almost are.

  In front of them, the busiest shipping route in the world: 350 ships a day passing through the straits east-west, with another 150 going between England and France. And behind that, the not-so-distant shore. One of the neighbouring houses is called Calais View. On a summer’s evening, when the sun moves into the right position, it is possible, with a good pair of binoculars, to tell the (French) time by the clock on the Calais mairie, and see the back of Napoleon’s statue on la colonne de la grande armée outside Boulogne. That’s what they told me. Rose’s welcoming email had, however, contained a very English warning: the view, she said, ‘does have a tendency to disappear in the mist as soon as visitors arrive’.

  The day had been near-perfect. In Broadstairs, I had padded across the sands in T-shirt and shorts, licking a gelato. It changed the moment I reached the outskirts of Dover. But this was not mist. It was old-fashioned English fog. By the time I got to the Rouses’ house, it was barely possible to glimpse the Channel, never mind Bonaparte’s bum.

  So they offered me a gin and tonic and a roast chicken dinner; James got out his Imray nautical chart and explained the geography; and, before the midsummer dusk, the weather had abated a little. The coastguard cutter Valiant hove into view; the Dover lifeboat passed by, towing a boat. ‘Probably got stuck on the Goodwin Sands,’ said James.

  After dark, the Varne lightship made its presence known, and the buoy on the south-western edge of the Goodwins. ‘It’ll be beautiful again by morning,’ I said cheerfully as James showed me to my room. ‘Perhaps,’ he replied. You can guess the next bit. By the time he took me up on the White Cliffs next morning, it was foggier than ever. Oh well, as the old Daily Mail headline had it: ‘FOG IN CHANNEL. CONTINENT ISOLATED.’

  Assuming that ‘abroad’ is not all an elaborate hoax, the South Foreland lighthouse, just along from here, is the nearest point in the British Isles to the rest of the world: less than twenty-one miles to the Channel swimmers’ destination of Cap Gris Nez; about the same distance as it is to Ashford, as long as you travel by crow rather than the M20. It is this stretch of water, both its narrowness and its very existence, that has defined England since the land link was broken (without a referendum) about 8,000 years ago.

  Kent has been the obvious target of external threat, from Caesar’s landing – probably near Walmer – to the German bombardments of the Second World War, when the area round St Margaret’s was known as Hellfire Corner. The iconography of war continues to dominate Kent. Even the local bitter is called Spitfire.

  It has also been the route in and out of Britain for less aggressive purposes, from St Augustine’s landing in AD 597 to the Channel Tunnel. Because Augustine
settled here, Canterbury became the centre of English Christianity, a position that still matters more than 1,400 years later: the sixteen-strong selection panel that chose Justin Welby as the 105th Archbishop of Canterbury, a line started by Augustine, comprised six members from East Kent and one representing all the foreigners in Christendom. Yet Canterbury’s real potency derived not from its 105 archbishops but from one: the forty-first, Thomas Becket, whose martyred bones were enshrined within the cathedral for more than three centuries, until Henry VIII – who understood the power of symbolism – got rid of them.

  One way and another, no one has ever been able to rule England without securing not just the coastline but Kent itself: London’s rear. And this task has always been a little problematic. Caesar himself referred to Cantium, so this county is almost certainly the most ancient of all. It was an independent kingdom until the end of the eighth century, when it was conquered first by Mercia and then by Wessex, which devised the system of shires to maintain the governance of most of England. However, Wessex did not attempt to split up this place, as they did others. ‘I suspect they found Kent rather indigestible,’ said John Barnes, scholar and former chairman of the Kent Education Committee. And thus the boundaries of this kingdom would have remained pretty much unchanged from the Dark Ages to the 1960s.

  Kent is now renowned as the HQ of opposition to progressive thought of all kinds. In their 1985 play Pravda, David Hare and Howard Brenton created a thinly disguised version of Rupert Murdoch: the South African newspaper tycoon Lambert Le Roux, played in London by Anthony Hopkins. In one scene he spelled out his recipe for the perfect newspaper. ‘A page of letters,’ he said evenly, before pausing with glorious relish. ‘All from Kent.’

  Yet Kent’s prickliness was not always on the side of authority. The Peasants’ Revolt (1381), led by Wat Tyler of Maidstone; Jack Cade’s march against Henry VI (1450); Wyatt’s Rebellion against Bloody Mary (1554) – they all came out of Kent. Even now one might say that it is necessary to hold Kent to rule England: whenever the marginals round the Medway start falling to Labour on a general election night, the Tories know they are done for.