Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  And the corset factory was right too. These were no ordinary corsets: Spirella made the new version with flexible stays that replaced the old, occasionally stabbing, featherbones, which had themselves replaced whalebone. Spirella corsets were custom-made, with teams of corsetières going to clients’ houses for private fittings. And the boss, William Wallace Kinkaid, was an only-the-best-is-good-enough-for-the-workers paternalist who fitted perfectly into the Letchworth ethos. He even built a ballroom at the top of the factory. I keep thinking of those corseted corsetières at the factory hop under the chandelier and the domed roof-light. But those were the man-short 1920s and as Joyce Grenfell sang:

  So gay the band,

  So giddy the sight,

  Full evening dress is a must,

  But the zest goes out of a beautiful waltz

  When you dance it bust to bust.

  Also in the 1920s came the second garden city, Welwyn. It is more Albert Speerish than Letchworth, with wide vistas down a boulevard fit for a marching army. The view is lengthy rather than compelling. But the principles are the same as those at Letchworth: you can live in the centre of town in an agreeable mock-Georgian with a walk to work and a view of John Lewis, which is a rather garden city-ish kind of shop. Welwyn’s signature factory was Shredded Wheat, a starker, more imposing building than Spirella, though just as distinctive, with its thirty silos. And ‘the Wheat’ was loved in its own way, not least for the malty brewery-ish smell it emitted.

  But garden cities were a dream that faltered, and the second war finished them off. When the Attlee government wanted houses, it wanted them quick and cheap: cheerful was an optional extra. The first postwar new town was Stevenage, previously a dozy little burg with a pretty high street. The government imposed compulsory purchase orders on thousands of acres to construct a new town seven miles and several light years from both Letchworth and Welwyn. ‘Stevenage will in a short time become world-famous,’ boasted Lewis Silkin, the planning minister, in 1946. ‘People from all over the world will come to Stevenage to see how we, here in this country, are building for the new way of life.’

  The reality is better depicted by the fact that it became known as Silkingrad. But it proved to be a more durable template for the future of Hertfordshire than its predecessors. Similar projects came along in Hatfield and Hemel Hempstead. All of them were influenced by the principles established by Howard. However, they were funded by HM Treasury not philanthropy: corners were there to be cut. Still, the writer Gary Younge, who grew up in Stevenage in the 1970s and 1980s as a member of two tiny minorities – black and bookish – wrote a not unaffectionate memoir of the town for the magazine Granta. The schools were good, if undervalued, he said, the amenities ‘great’.

  The town, though, had a striking lack of self-respect: ‘No one could ever really place it on a map, not even another person from Stevenage.’ Younge felt the town deteriorated when Margaret Thatcher allowed everyone to buy their council houses. The people got richer, and more middle class, as rising prices across the South-East drove buyers into places like Stevenage, once considered beyond the pale. But Younge thought the actual community grew poorer – and rougher. When he told some kids in Luton he was from Stevenage, ‘they sucked in hard as though I’d told them I’d grown up in the South Bronx’.

  Lately Stevenage FC have climbed up the divisions, giving the town an identity at last. The council has been more proactive than most in supporting the arts, and the Gordon Craig Theatre looked lively, if not intellectually over-ambitious. However, there is one striking, overwhelming fact about the centre of Stevenage. It is hideous, repulsive, ugly beyond all belief. It is like the parade ring before the final of the competition to find the World’s Vilest Building. The shopping centre, ‘Britain’s first purpose-built traffic-free shopping zone’, opened in 1959, and the only decorative features are the anti-climb spikes. Not surprisingly, it appears to be falling to bits.

  The garden cities have weathered more gently. The women of Britain discarded their corsets en masse in the 1960s and Spirella could not escape. Hertfordshire’s other great interwar landmark, the art-deco Ovaltine factory at Kings Langley, by the main line to Euston, has also closed. But architecturally both stories have happy endings. Spirella has been lovingly restored to provide a centre for small firms; the ballroom is available for weddings and parties. Ovaltine has been turned into flats behind the preserved façade. The Wheat closed in 2008: the fashion for eating cereals less nutritious than their cardboard box has not abated, but the American owners moved production to Bath, leaving behind peeling paint, sad silos and a wistful Welwyn. An attempt to turn it into a Tesco has so far been rebuffed.

  Letchworth also seems a bit forgotten by time, which is curious in a place with fast trains to King’s Cross. It has retained something of its original atmosphere, produced by that strand of society that would now be stereotyped as sandalled-muesli-eating-beardie. The best-known shop is David’s Books and Music, unimaginable in Stevenage. Nearby, the Arena Tavern, still one of only a handful of pubs, had a sign saying ‘Welcome to all good-hearted people’.

  The chief executive of the Letchworth Heritage Foundation, who, appropriately, was another John Lewis, gave me a tour, showing me the gloriously eccentric Cloisters, which began life as an open-air school and is next door to St Christopher’s, which still thrives as a first-names-for-everyone-even-the-head kind of school with a vegetarian menu. He also showed me Britain’s first roundabout. I took a shine to Letchworth, starting to imagine myself joining the am-dram and the reading groups and the wine clubs; I could take up bridge again; a little light wife-swapping perhaps. With its safe, easy streets, it feels a terrific place to be over sixty or under thirteen, less so to be a teenager.

  Public-enterprise Stevenage has been violently tugged between the Attlee and Thatcher conceptions of Britain, and the Treasury grabbed its money back. Letchworth was a product of high-minded property speculation. Buying vast acres of Hertfordshire farmland more than a century ago has produced a bonanza akin to striking oil. The Foundation is still the town’s largest landowner but exists for the town’s benefit. If Letchworth needs something it has a chance of getting it, which is a good place to be in the 2010s.

  ‘HERTFORDSHIRE,’ said the sign, ‘COUNTY OF OPPORTUNITY’. What a pathetic, vapid slogan.

  But then, what do you say about this county? Even Famous Potatoes wouldn’t work. It’s not famous for anything. There was a variant of skittles called Hertfordshire Roly-Poly but it seems to have vanished without trace. The county is said to have an unusually large number of village greens, often triangular. And there is something called Hertfordshire puddingstone, which looks like a lump of concrete but isn’t: it’s a mixture of rough stones held together with natural cement. ‘HERTFORDSHIRE: HOME OF THE PUDDINGSTONE’. Well, it would take a brave council to opt for that.

  If there was a Hertfordshire accent, it must have died with the actor Bernard Miles (born in Middlesex). That fine writer Richard Mabey, manfully trying to sum up for The Illustrated Counties of England, had to confess he had belatedly discovered that the woods which had meant so much in his childhood were actually in Buckinghamshire. He summed up the county rather sadly: ‘It is hardly firm enough to grow roots in. Herts is more a kind of temporary mooring.’

  Which was sort of Gary Younge’s point. It is a place young couples choose to commute from when they don’t have a better idea. Hertfordshire screamed out to have garden cities and new towns because it had the most open and available land close to London and was the last place anyone was likely to mind or notice. HERTFORDSHIRE: COUNTY OF OPPORTUNISM. For more than a century it has played the hinterland role previously fulfilled by Middlesex until that became no land and all hinter.

  With the infinite perversity that attended the 1974 reforms, Hertfordshire, where hardly anyone cared, was left completely alone. It has so little identity largely because it has no focal point: the east-west communications are terrible. The Romans built the Icknie
ld Way across the top and the moderns built the M25 along the bottom, but to drive cross-county in between involves all kinds of strange jiggling. By rail, it’s impossible. Boxmoor knows bugger all of Bishops Stortford.

  Though Hertfordshire has no personality, it is of good character. Indeed, if it were a person, one would recommend sending it off for assertiveness training. The small brick-built towns are pleasant, good value, safe. When my nephew and his family moved from London to Berkhamsted, the police knocked on the door to say they were conducting a house-to-house search: ‘We are investigating an egg being thrown at a car,’ an officer intoned solemnly.

  The countryside is inclined to disguise itself in its neighbours’ clothes: chalky soils and big skies in the east; woods and clay and Chilterny bits in the west, with various subtle gradations in between. Has anyone even told Hertfordshire it’s a county? ‘TOWIE extra smashes skull in mystery Thai accident,’ said the headline in the Hertfordshire Mercury. Not ‘Stanstead Abbots man smashes skull’, as you would expect. TOWIE is tabloid-speak for the TV programme The Only Way Is Essex, about another county entirely. Is that all Hertfordshire is? An extra in the dramatic life of the big, blowsy, boisterous county next door?

  In the spring of 1937 a writer – a pretty dire one, but that’s not the point – called Owen Hamilton left London for the summer to inflict a book on his publishers. ‘I am joyed to find, despite the trivial troubles that were mine, that all is yet right with the world,’ he announced in his ‘prelude’. ‘I wander along the lanes, welcomed everywhere; accepted by the trees; greeted by the little mill-stream; hailed by the birds and flowers; kissed by the lips of a wind that never kissed me in London’s streets.’

  So where is he? Grasmere? The Scillies? Tuscany? Installed at the small picturesque place of Ware, so Bruges-like with its barge-life, bridges, poplars and swans, but lodged at the Saracen’s Head Hotel On he babbled, did Hamilton: ‘One thinks of some medieval German town of the Meistersingers’ period. What a sketch Vermeer would have made of the old bridge!’

  Where? Ware! Less than twenty-five miles from Charing Cross. Ware was famous in its day as the Watford Junction of the coaching age: first major stop on the road north. There were sixteen coaching inns on the High Street, but the Saracen’s Head is the last one left, and that’s not the original but a 1960s rebuild from the Stevenage school of architecture, which now wrecks the view from the bridge. Vermeer would have vomited.

  But get past that and Ware turns out to have a down-at-heel charm that is partly typical of the older Hertfordshire towns, especially those that have gone a bit out of style, and partly all its own. Several of the former inns, now turned to all kinds of more mundane uses, still have riverside gazebos built for the customers. And the river itself, the Lea (‘the wanton Lea that oft doth lose his way’ – Spenser) or Lee, retains a place in the hearts of the few Londoners old enough to have snogged before the war, when the riverbank was the venue of choice.

  Peter Wilbourn, growing up in Ware in the third quarter of the last century, had trouble finding such hiding places. ‘If I met a girl in Baldock Street, then by the time I got to my grandparents’ house up the hill, they would know who she was, where we’d walked and how much time I spent with her.’ He also found it hard to get a drink: his father ran a pub, so all the other landlords knew exactly how old he was.

  ‘Do you think it might be like that for a kid in Ware these days?’

  ‘Nah,’ he said instantly. And then he thought. ‘Actually, probably yes.’

  Ware has only sluggish trains to London, making property about 10 per cent cheaper than in nearby hurry-rush Hertford, and the community less transient. Not only is it not a dormitory town, it does not have its most famous artefact: the Great Bed of Ware. At least, not normally. But by happy chance, it was paying a year-long visit home – to the museum in the High Street – for the first time since it was removed to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London eighty years earlier.

  I had heard of the Great Bed of Ware but, to be honest, had no idea what it was. For all I knew, it might be a geographical feature lightly disguised as an item of household furniture, like the Great Artesian Basin or the Bog of Allen. It turned out to a bed: a four-poster, lovingly carved, dating back to the late sixteenth century, which was used by a succession of Ware coaching inns as a selling point, being somewhat warmer than the banks of the Lea for a twosome and not out of the question for an orgy. Both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson gave it a mention, in what one takes to be examples of the mucky topical jokes now confined to panto.

  Allegedly it’s ten feet long and eleven feet wide, and has variously played host to six butchers and their wives, and whole platoons of soldiers. I am not convinced: it does not look that much bigger than the beds provided in up-market American motel rooms. The V&A, boringly, no longer permit the bed to be used for any of its proper purposes. And if the museum ever does decide to unleash this potentially lucrative revenue stream, the bed might be hard put to bear the weight of two modern middle-aged Americans.

  Wilbourn worked for the National Association of Master Bakers, whose appropriately small-scale offices happened to be in Ware, in the south-east corner of the county, through the years when the trade withered almost to vanishing point under the onslaught of Big Bread.

  The main weapon of Big Bread was the Chorleywood Bread Process, developed in and named after the town in the south-west corner of the county, thirty-five miles from Ware. The CBP was created in 1961 and, according to the food writer and campaigner Felicity Lawrence, ‘dispensed with all the time and expensive energy required by traditional methods’

  Air and water were mixed into the dough, plus a double quantity of yeast to make it rise, chemical oxidants to get the gas in and hardened fat to stop it collapsing. And a lot of salt. The result tasted worse than neat Shredded Wheat but was long-lasting, cheap to buy and profitable to make, especially when backed up with winsome retro adverts of the sort that made Hovis and Mother’s Pride sound wholesome and homely.

  The number of artisan bakers is now slowly growing, but they have a tiny slice (as it were) of the market, compared to the big factories and the supermarkets’ in-store bakeries – derided by purists as ‘tanning salons’ – where the bread generally arrives literally half-baked.

  Fifty years on from Chorleywood’s main claim to fame or infamy, it was named in 2011 as the least-deprived and most desirable area in Britain. In keeping with Hertfordshire’s chameleon habits, it is more like the plutocratic towns of South Bucks than the rest of the county. You can even buy real bread, though it is baked in Chalfont St Giles, not Chorleywood, a point made to me very firmly by the store manager, who understood the significance of the question.

  Chorleywood does not even care much for its other claim to fame. ‘So is this really Britain’s most desirable place to live?’ I asked someone in the café where I stopped for a bite.

  ‘It was,’ he said. ‘Then as soon as all that stuff appeared in the paper saying so, the burglars descended en masse.’

  January 2013

  Berkhamsted also has burglaries, as well as eggings; my nephew found out the hard way. In 2013 the National Association of Master Bakers rebranded itself as the Craft Bakers’ Association. The president, Christopher Freeman, called the old name ‘sadly outdated’. He might have added that it led to schoolboy sniggering.

  24. The silence of the trams

  NOTTINGHAMSHIRE

  Some counties don’t have to work too hard to find a symbol. Across Nottinghamshire, he’s everywhere. There is Robin Hood Street, Robin Hood Close, Robin Hood Way, Robin Hood Chase. There are two Robin Hood Avenues, three Terraces and three Roads.

  There are Robin Hood farms; pubs, hotels and guest houses; a theatre, an industrial estate, a primary school, a railway line, a travel company, a garage, a boxing club, a fish bar, a tyre company, a firm of party organisers and another of private detectives, which is a nice touch. Nottinghamshire’s Harley-Davidson dealers are called Robin
Hood. And then there are the Friar Tuck restaurants and Maid Marian Way. Little John is a pub, a riding school and a fishing lake and above all the deep-throated bell on top of the city Council House on Old Market Square (universally known as Slab Square).

  Robin Hood and King Arthur are England’s only quasi-historical figures to have broken out of the vault that holds Jack o’ Lantern and Gog and Magog, and made it to Hollywood. However, there is a problem for Robin’s home county. It is easy enough for a coach firm or chippie to seek a little reflected glory: no threatening letters need be expected from solicitors representing the Hood family.

  But there is a problem of provenance. Some tinpot little airport had the idea of calling itself Robin Hood. It serves Doncaster and Sheffield, in Yorkshire. And, although the association of Robin with Sherwood Forest and Nottinghamshire is a strong one, the county has found the connection difficult to monetise.

  There may be a Robin Hood Theatre (just outside Newark – small but enterprising) but it can’t match Stratford by endlessly performing the master’s plays, or indeed performing them at all. No active pensioner can show you round Robin Hood’s birthplace: we have no idea when, where or if he was born. Indeed, everything anyone thinks they know is almost certainly wrong. If he was extant in the reign of Richard the Lionheart, as most stories suggest, then – according to Emrys Bryson’s Portrait of Nottingham – he can’t have used a longbow (not invented); can’t have consorted with a friar (none around); and can’t have thwarted the Sheriff of Nottingham (there wasn’t one).

  There is a Robin Hood statue, symbolically sited outside the walls of Nottingham Castle, rather than inside: he is being remembered as an outlaw not a nobleman. The statue did not come until the 1950s, more than 700 years after his presumed death, and it is a decidedly odd one: Robin has thighs like Sherwood oaks but is wearing a very silly hat indeed.