Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  ‘Oh, look at that! At ’em, lads!’

  ‘Come on, let’s have a cheeky goal.’

  ‘Oh, good try! Well played.’

  Nothing came of any of the attacks, and the cheeky goal – almost inevitably – came from York, consigning Stanley to their fourth successive defeat. When it went in, the old boy just sat there, shaking his head with a hint of ruefulness. Everyone else did much the same. It was like being with 1,505 Nelson Mandelas. He spent twenty-seven years in jail; this lot had been deprived of forty-four years of their football-watching lives when Accrington were out of business, but they had no time for bitterness.

  As we were filing out, I turned to my saintly neighbour. ‘What did you do for forty-four years when you didn’t have this lot to break your heart?’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘It did help to have Manchester United to fall back on.’

  Accrington’s civic glory has faded. The borough is now called Hyndburn, whatever that might be, and the town hall has space for body toning and zumba. The market hall next door is rather handsome, with architecture fit for at least a provincial governor somewhere in South America. The tripe stall was just outside.

  The market hall balcony was given over to tiny glass-fronted offices, one of which contained a lone reporter from the Accrington Observer, tapping away on her laptop. Her colleagues were all on the edge of Manchester, in a newsroom with seventeen other fading local papers. And the old Town Centre office was now a pop-up furniture shop. I worked out it was the old newspaper office because the sign said ccringt Observ r, though the middle R was now hanging loose so that in the next gale it would become the ccringt Obse v r.

  But not all old music-hall joke Lancashire towns seemed to be struggling. Nearby Oswaldtwistle looked jaunty, with a pleasing informality so that Ozzy Computers sat next to Sheila’s Wool Shop, Jack’s Bakery and Jim’s Barbers. And the centre of Wigan had an unexpected air of prosperity and charm, enhanced by a classical violinist busking outside WH Smith.

  However, Wigan is famous for one thing above all. The brown ‘tourist attraction’ signs begin way out of town, all pointing to Wigan Pier. I followed them slavishly, through a half-hour town centre traffic jam caused by roadworks. The one-way system doubled back, the signs petered out and I found myself at the beginning of the half-hour jam again. So I dived off to the side, found a parking place and walked.

  I had no idea what I might be looking for. The phrase Wigan Pier is world-famous. But most people outside Wigan, maybe inside Wigan too, have no idea what it means. George Orwell never found it. It turned out to mean a pub car park with a plaque commemorating that it had been opened by HM The Queen. I never knew she opened pub car parks.

  What she actually opened, it turned out, was the Wigan Pier Experience, a ‘heritage attraction’ which closed in 2007, pending regeneration into the Wigan Pier Quarter. That regeneration was still pending five years later. Much of this was explained to me by Damien, the barman at the pub, a converted cotton warehouse which was inevitably called the Orwell.

  The museum had gone. The Pier nightclub the other side of the canal had gone. Even the Tourist Information Centre had gone. ‘It’s all a bit of a dump really,’ said Damien, a reasonable comment from his standpoint, a few yards from all the debris floating down the canal. The ‘attractions’ were now all boarded up.

  The pier, however, still sort of existed, next to the defunct nightclub. A jetty, said Damien, but not much of one. It was not really even that, but a raised platform with a pair of what looked like broken railway buffers facing the canal. According to the information sign, it was a ‘tippler’, a place where coal wagons slid down tracks, hit the buffers and tipped their loads into waiting barges. In the Edwardian era, George Formby senior (father of the ukulele player) really did make Wigan Pier into a music-hall joke. But whether this bit of nothing was called the pier first or whether the name was a tribute to Formby’s imagination is unclear. Either way, the original buffers were sold for scrap in 1929, before Orwell arrived to beat Damien with the story that Wigan was a dump, and called his book The Road to Wigan Pier.

  I mentioned I was on my way to Blackpool, where there are three real piers. ‘It’s going downhill too, Blackpool,’ he replied.

  Oh, bloody hell, Damien, you’re only young. Don’t you start.

  In the autumn of 1933 J. B. Priestley arrived in Blackpool on his English Journey, perhaps the most famous book of its kind. ‘It is,’ he wrote, ‘a complete and essential product of industrial democracy. If you do not like industrial democracy, you will not like Blackpool.’

  Credentials for what would now be called political correctness duly established, he continued: ‘I know people who would have to go into a nursing home after three hours of it. (In the season, of course.) I am not one of those people.’

  So now he has added his credentials as a tough and imperturbable traveller.

  ‘I have never actually been in Blackpool at the crazy height of its season, during its various Lancashire “wakes” weeks –’

  Aha!

  ‘but I knew it before the war –’ The First War, that is.

  ‘and I have seen something of it since. It is not, in my opinion, as good as it used to be.’

  Damien, meet J. B. Priestley. J.B., Damien.

  Exactly forty years later, the master-diarist Alan Clark attended the 1973 Conservative conference there. He did not become an MP until the following year, but he was not exactly one of those starry-eyed young candidates.

  13 OCTOBER 1973 Isn’t Blackpool appalling, loathsome? … dirt, squalor, shantytown, broken pavements with pools of water lying in them – on the Promenade, vulgar, common ‘primitives’, drifting about in groups or standing, loitering, prominently.

  Well, I suppose Clark never pretended to like democracy much. And another forty autumns after that – well, thirty-nine, to be precise – I went back. And do you know, Blackpool’s still going downhill. The town centre is so run-down the competition mainly comprises pound-shops being undercut by 99p shops. Its rather imposing red-brick semis go for prices that wouldn’t buy you a beach hut in Bournemouth. It has ceased to be a venue for family summer holidays but, unlike the more southerly resorts, has found no real replacement. Its annual showcases for the benefit of respectable Britain, the party conferences, have migrated elsewhere, mainly inland. The Labour Party stopped going there in 2002, after the guacamole tendency had seen off the mushy peas tendency. The Tories, less fastidious, took a few years to follow suit.

  The council spent many years trying to revamp the place as Britain’s Las Vegas with its own supercasino. But a panel of great-and-gooders decided instead to send the project to Manchester, which was a bit like diverting regional aid to Park Lane. And when Gordon Brown, leader of Labour’s no-fun-at-all tendency, became prime minister, he strangled the entire idea.

  I am inclined to see Blackpool more as Lancashire’s version of what New York is to the rest of the US: not the capital, and certainly not typical, but an exaggerated version of the whole. Lancashire is damp, dirty, funny, saucy. Blackpool is all that but a bit more so. It would be impossible to imagine it on the icy-fingered coast of Yorkshire. Mind you, if Blackpool were really New York, it would not have built its replica Eiffel Tower half-size; it would have been supersize. And were it really Las Vegas, it would have built not just the tower, but thrown in the Pyramids and the Taj Mahal for good measure.

  Blackpool’s trams have been upgraded: they no longer clank but take off with a Mancunian whoosh, which somewhat defeats the nostalgic object of having them. Other than that, the place maunders on. It is not appalling or loathsome, just a bit sad.

  Nowhere is sadder than the Number 10 Bar at the Imperial Hotel, where the names of prime ministers are etched into the mirrors, and the walls are full of old political cuttings and cartoons. This used to be the late-night gathering place at conference time. Oh, I have seen Blackpool full of vulgar, common primitives all right, but most of them were in here, members of
whichever party was in town, gossiping, shouting, laughing, drinking, boasting, lying, puking and trying to get laid. The barman said he had heard the conferences might come back once they had installed air conditioning in the Winter Gardens. I wasn’t convinced.

  Now the action belongs mainly to the stag and hen parties that have become Blackpool’s most reliable source of both business and aggravation. Their gossip has more relation to reality than the politicians’ version, but otherwise the pattern of late-night behaviour is much the same. On this occasion, however, the trouble was fiddling and small.

  Blackpool was not empty: the guest houses were all displaying ‘No Vacancies’ signs. But the illuminations were lit and it was half-term, so there were more kids around than usual. Ken Dodd, just shy of his eighty-fifth birthday, was at the Grand Theatre, his fifty-fourth year of performing in Blackpool. It was also the weekend of the sixty-third Annual Sequence Dance Festival at the Winter Gardens. If I was quick, the programme suggested, I might make it in time for the final of the British Amateur Modern Sequence final: cash prizes for the first six, ‘judging based on all-round efficiency in the Newchurch Waltz, Arcadia Foxtrot, Tango Callatina and New York Quickstep’; or the All Ladies Classical Sequence (the Regis Waltz, Saunter Shiraz and Waverley Two Step).

  Despite the sudden popularity of dancing on TV, this was a subculture of which I knew nothing. Saunter Shiraz sounded like an Australian red; the others could be past winners of the Greyhound Derby. The box office being closed, I tried to blag and plead my way past the security men. It availed me nothing. Dressed for Blackpool in sweater and denim, I was passed by women dressed as though the Tory conference really had come home and it was the night of the prime minister’s cocktail party.

  Humiliated, I slunk away and wandered off to Funny Girls, the drag cabaret that has taken over the old art-deco Odeon. The dress code here was more relaxed; I would have passed muster in a cocktail frock myself. The DJ Zoe, aka Adrian, who has been here man, boy, woman and girl, was dressed in tarty pink and told some filthy jokes, one of which, involving a cheese toastie, sticks in my mind but is not going to make it into this book. The ensemble concluded with a splendid rendition of ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’. All the stags, hens and some who might have been a bit of both had a splendidly raucous time and I concluded, only mildly pissed on the Saunter Shiraz or whatever, that the old town still had some life in it yet. Not sure what J.B., Alan Clark or Damien might have made of it all.

  My adventures in New Lancashire were less uproarious. Next morning I drove to Crosby Beach, scene of Another Place, Antony Gormley’s much-acclaimed installation of a hundred cast-iron moulds of his own naked body staring out to sea. It is said to represent the pain of emigration, though, for a successful artist, they might be staring towards Ireland or the Isle of Man and a more benign tax regime.

  According to Sefton Council, their presence generates tourism (though only the hamburger and ice cream vans could possibly benefit) and ‘extensive coverage of South Sefton in both the press and broadcast media’. A couple of feeble signs on the promenade warned people not to walk more than fifty metres from shore. This was separate from the eleven other thou-shalt-nots (not quite beating the record set the other side of the Mersey, see Chapter 15).

  Yet the statues go out way, way further than that. So does the tide. And what’s the point of any artwork if it can’t be examined? The morning was dry, the sea calm, the tide out, the sand firm, the instruction ludicrous. So I strolled through the echelons of imitation naked Gormleys, stylised genitalia and all.

  The most interesting bit was the way the barnacles and other marine life, invisible on the statues nearest shore, grew more and more encrusted as the lines headed out to sea and thus spent more time under water. I grew determined to reach the end of the line. By now I had gone a good quarter of a mile, the tide was on the turn and the sand was just starting to get squishy.

  I was dauntless, having faced the far more dangerous tides of Morecambe Bay, under the guidance of the Queen’s Guide to the Sands, Cedric Robinson MBE, the man the twenty-three Chinese cockle-pickers should have consulted before they were led to their doom in 2004. Nonetheless, the moment I sank up to my shins, just before reaching the furthest representation of barnacled Gormley, I concluded it was time to get the hell out.

  A lifeguard buzzed round the beach in a 4×4 as the tide came in. Other people were out there, long after me. At least I think they were. It was a bit hard to tell from the promenade which ones were and were not Gormleys. One could imagine this ending in tears one day. That would get ‘South Sefton’ publicity all right.

  The benchmark for old Lancashire is always the never-ending ITV soap opera Coronation Street, set in a fictional street in the fictional town of Weatherfield, always presumed to be Salford, very close to the Granada Studios, where the programme has been filmed since it began on 9 December 1960, before most of its current audience was born.

  I suppose I was searching for some simulacrum of Coronation Street, somewhere in Lancashire – anywhere – bearing a resemblance to the way it was that December day when Ena Sharples, sans hairnet for once, marched into Florrie Lindley’s corner shop and demanded, ‘Are them fancies today’s? I’ll take half a dozen and no e-clairs.’

  It certainly does not exist in Coronation Street itself. In its brilliantly written early days it was, in Charles Nevin’s phrase, ‘more sitcom than soap’; or, as Mike Harding put it, ‘driven by character not plot’. It mutated, like the county itself. In 2002 a new production team decided, after years of rape, abductions, religious cults and transsexualism, to stop competing with rival soaps and reintroduce ‘gentle storylines and humour’. For the upshot of that, I again have to quote that infallible source Wikipedia:

  In 2002, one of Coronation Street’s best-known storylines began, which culminated in 2003. Gail Platt married Richard Hillman (Brian Capron), a financial advisor, who would go on to leave Duggie Ferguson to die, murder his ex-wife Patricia, attempt to murder his mother-in-law, Audrey Roberts, murder Maxine Peacock and attempt to murder Emily Bishop. After confessing to the murder of Maxine and his ex-wife, Hillman attempted to kill Gail, her children Sarah and David, and her granddaughter Bethany, by driving them into a canal. The storyline received wide press attention, and viewing figures peaked at 19.4 million, with Hillman dubbed a ‘serial killer’ by the media.

  If the street really were in Salford, it would almost certainly have been demolished in the clearances of the 1960s and its inhabitants dispersed among the tower blocks. Is Ena’s world still there anywhere? We can rule out the ring of mostly lower-division footballing mill towns north of Manchester, all the names redolent of hot Bovril, pools coupons, and the 5 p.m. radio reading of the results: Bolton, Oldham, Bury, Rochdale … all of them transformed by de-industrialisation, commuterisation, embourgeoisement and immigration.

  Even Accrington can be ruled out. Though the football clock was wound back to 1960, religious extremism now appears to be centred on the madrasas in a manner entirely alien to Jeanette Winterson’s chapel-crazed (and in any case cruelly and lucratively fictionalised) mother. And Blackburn, even though it remains the global capital of the rolling R. ‘Park the car thurrr!’ I heard a man yelling into his mobile outside a betting shop. ‘I’ll pick you up thurr!’ His face was black; his voice was purest Blackburn.

  What about Rawtenstall? The very word typifies old Lancashire. It still has Fitzpatrick’s, Britain’s only surviving temperance bar, which appropriately (and not, one would guess, coincidentally) stands next to the imposing Methodist chapel. A fascinating place with a strange, not unpleasant, smell which could have come from any of the dozens of herbal remedies, Fitzpatrick’s was once a chain to rival UCP. This one still stands, though it has become just a touch self-referential and postmodern ironic – it now bills itself as ‘Mr Fitzpatrick’s’. I can recommend the blood tonic, actually flavoured with rose hips and, I discovered after taking a bottle home, a good accompaniment to gin.
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  This may be a cruel trick on its teetotal inventor, Malachi Fitzpatrick, but it is hard to imagine that anyone left in Rawtenstall would care. Cheshire being too expensive, this has become prime commuter territory for Manchester media types. And the cafés have ciabatta on the menu and pot-pourri in the lavs. The Mancunian commuter belt is the best example, maybe the only example, anywhere in provincial England of somewhere that forms a counterweight to the madness of the South-East.

  I kept asking knowledgeable Lancastrians where hadn’t changed. Clitheroe, someone suggested. The name was promising enough. But take away the stone and the accents, and it could pass as Devon. Chipping, said someone. It turned out to be a village full of Mercedes. Downham was mentioned. In the Ribble Valley: a lovely spot, within sight of Pendle. It was here, just below Worsaw Hill, that I found (I think) the barn used in the 1961 film Whistle Down the Wind, that delicious black-and-white evocation of a 1950s northern childhood in which a group of children (led by Hayley Mills) mistake an escaped gunman (Alan Bates) for Jesus. The proposition now seems absurd. Of course, all the children would know about an escaped gunman. The question is whether they would have heard of Jesus.

  Another source suggested the grim old mill town of Nelson. Unchanged? In some respects, yes. In the autumn of 2012, it still had terraced houses available for £17,000. Otherwise, Nelson has changed like no other small town in the country: Pakistanis constitute a majority of the town council. However, the jobs to which they originally migrated disappeared almost at once, leaving most bereft on the margins of society, their wives largely housebound, their children effectively segregated.

  The town has one obvious success story. In a yellow-brick building next to the traditional indoor market – the Admiral’s – now stands the Nelson Bazaar, ‘the largest Asian market in Lancashire’: opened in 2011 with about fifty stalls – far outstripping its neighbour – it sells hijabs and jilbabs; silks and cottons; bangles and earrings; saris in colours of a most un-Pennine exoticism.