Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project

by Sinclair, Iain

  The Midland was born out of confusion, set down on the site of a redundant harbour to act as a crash barrier at the end of a railway line. The convex side of the hotel, mirroring the sweep of the shore, faced the sea: a vision for every bedroom. A fashionable stopover for those who were part of the newsreel of the time. Rumour dresses the empty set with Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, Winston Churchill, Noël Coward, Oswald Mosley, Coco Chanel. The rattle of cocktail shakers. Heels clicking on terrazzo floors and ankle-straps flashing over the seahorse mosaic by Marion Dorn. Hill was a promiscuous collector who invited the artists of the moment to chip in. He signed up the few he could afford: the two Erics, Gill and Ravilious, as well as the lovely Marion Dorn with her headscarf-turban, her Egyptian eyes.

  Creosote-sleek London bandleaders from the Winter Gardens squabbled over bar bills with tight-lipped Lancashire funny men. Bud Abbott, of Abbott and Costello, was expelled at 4 a.m. for serious ‘misbehaviour’. He crawled from his taxi, two hours later, on his hands and knees, begging for readmittance. He’d seen what the rest of the town, beyond the blessed islet of this hotel, was actually like, the penitential bed-and-breakfast regimes who wouldn’t let him over their sandstoned doorsteps.

  The intention of the Midland, from the first, was to keep the plebs out; working men invading the entrance hall, the show-stopping space with Gill’s relief panel, were instructed to remove their cloth caps. Arthur Towle, Manager of Hotels and Catering Services for the Midland Railway, insisted that trippers coming from the promenade be separated from bona fide guests. ‘We must not confuse them with the class of people who will be using the hotel.’ People like Trevor Howard, who was at Carnforth Station shooting Brief Encounter, or tooling around the Cumbrian backroads in his MG. And Laurence Olivier flashing a rictal grin at the punters, before giving them his turn, end of Empire as dying music hall, in the film version of The Entertainer.

  The Winter Gardens Theatre, by this time (1960), was as posthumous as the Midland. But the hotel, under various management packages, struggled on. Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise checked in – two twin-bedded rooms – at £6 a night, in June 1969. The beached concrete liner rocked with the waves. The water table was so near the surface that at high tide, or after heavy rain, Hill’s flagship building would lift and sway, tugging at anchor, floating on the tide.

  Pink paths. Grey scree of man-made jetty. Massing cloud curtain. The reality of Morecambe contradicts the Midland’s decorative art, Gill’s map of north-west England painted on the wall of the Children’s Room. His cavorting sea nymphs recall an era of luscious railway posters with rippling bathing belles, capped and toned, on diving boards above the Mediterranean glitter of a freshly installed lido.

  Staying in this heritage terminal, once of the railway, now of the road, I felt like an unrequired extra in Double Sin, one of the Agatha Christie Poirot episodes they shot here. Television is our method of validating the past, through archive or costume drama. The Midland was somewhere to drive away from, the town of Morecambe was too scabby to pass the audition: they relocated the action to picturesque Kirby Lonsdale. But, weirdly, in the quest for warped authenticity, set designers recreated Eric Ravilious’s erased mural. The only accessible version of this obliterated artwork was banished to a mock-up of the hotel’s circular café (the space allocated for well-behaved proles) in the London Weekend studios at Twickenham. As an official war artist with the rank of Honorary Captain in the Royal Marines, and intending to sketch a rescue mission, Ravilious flew out from a base in Iceland on 2 September 1942. The plane never returned. Even before the hotel opened, Gill noticed how badly the Ravilious mural had cracked and how much it required patching. He wrote to his friend: ‘It seems a frightful shame to even talk of whitewashing it out, but can you possibly leave it as it is?’ Northern damp seeped through the wall, paint peeled, obscuring this prophetic vision of a deserted grand-project lido, a sky of miniature parachutes, angelic invaders floating from the clouds.

  Urban Splash, the regeneration quango who backed Will Alsop’s Chips development in Manchester, promoted the restored Midland Hotel like a lost Ravilious. There are photographs in the local history archive of pedestrians gazing at CGI posters exhibited on the high fence protecting the site of the future hotel. White curves, blue sky: a Hockney postcard. Morecambe as Los Angeles. Palm tree, empty highway. And, by implication, naked people sharing showers in every room.

  The new Midland uses design as a screening device: are you qualified to appreciate where you are? Are you on set? Or passing through, a one-night investor? ‘No woman had anything to do with this,’ Anna said of the en suite bathroom, which allowed no space for toiletries and featured a foldaway lavatory, inches from the bed. The cupboards were artworks with complicated pull-down racks. Narrow balconies offered the immensity of the bay as a challenge. Reminding us of how unreadable this shoreline is: sandbanks and rip tides, the argument between national park and dirty industry, recreation and paranoia. A fated landscape where storms wash away bridges, splitting communities, and where one bright summer day a taxi driver with a lethal armoury would go on the rampage, killing twelve people, including his twin brother, his solicitor, fellow cabbies, before taking his own life. The authorities ordered a lockdown at the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, where Derrick Bird had worked, before being dismissed for theft. Members of the plant’s private security force joined the unsuccessful pursuit of the man in the car, as he roamed the backroads, culling random pedestrians. Giving a darker stain to Eric Gill’s playful chart.

  Diners in the Midland, basking in the privilege of that view, are hermetically sealed, separated from the town and the semi-derelict room above a defunct pub in a backstreet, where a dozen Chinese cockle pickers were lodged, before being put in a van and taken, up the coast, to Askam-in-Furness. After the drowning of twenty-three workers, in the original Morecambe horror, minders with competing triad allegiances battled for territory. Many of the cockle pickers were brought, on a daily basis, up the motorway from Liverpool. Where they slept on mattresses laid on the floor of a boarded-up house in a condemned terrace waiting for a promised development package. The wretched illegals, invisibles who kept the supermarkets supplied, were creatures of the road. Like the underfunded academics, the highway-devouring lecturers, Chinese economic migrants shuttled around a devil’s triangle: Manchester’s Chinatown restaurants to Liverpool to Morecambe. Always in sealed vans or met at the bus station and taken to the latest miserable flophouse. The Taiwanese journalist Hsiao-Hung Pai, who investigated this world in Chinese Whispers, records the words of a Tienjin woman, a cockle picker, arriving in Morecambe. ‘I’ve always wanted to be near the sea. So I came here. But a third of my money goes to the boss. And the sea isn’t as blue as I’d imagined.’

  Discovering that most of the kitchen staff, waiters and chambermaids, in the high days of the Midland, the era epitomized by a photograph of Lord and Lady Docker descending the staircase in the supreme complacency of their evening wear, came from Liverpool, I knew that a return to the City of Culture was inevitable. I had an arrangement to walk through Toxteth with John Davies, the long-distance vicar, the man who tramped down the M62 from Hull to Liverpool. The one whose blog I followed when we rode the freedom bus over the Pennines.

  We had met, once before, in Cheltenham. John invited me to take part in the Greenbelt Festival, which happened over an August weekend on the racecourse, and which involved a cast of many thousands camping in tents, feeding from numerous stalls, and primed to enjoy themselves whatever the weather. Having been too long in this town, at boarding school, I tended to keep well away, as from a relatively open prison, experienced, endured, even enjoyed, but done with, finished: another self, not eliminated, but buried without regret in an unmarked grave. I’d never been part of a large-scale festival, so I took up the offer of a room in a Thistle Hotel near a major roundabout, alongside the GCHQ listening station, a secure and sinister new town of huts, bunkers, masts, and apartments for career spook
s. Banal off-road architecture surrounds the doughnut of the inner circle, the hooped structure where global intelligence is gathered. The unmediated babble of the world is processed in a space where you would expect to find a retail park. GCHQ is Gloucestershire’s biggest employer. National belt-tightening doesn’t begin to lick the sugar from this doughnut. It is awarded, each year, the bulk of the £2.4 billion set aside for Britain’s intelligence agencies. On the day when we celebrated the news that we had won the 2012 Olympics, Cheltenham received, by way of an NSA interception, a message from Afghanistan: ‘Tomorrow is zero hour.’ The next morning, as commuters struggled to work in London, the bombs went off in the Underground. On the day after that, GCHQ completed the translation.

  The underlying theme of the festival was Christian. My problem, when confronted by an expectant audience, sitting on the grass, was being carried away by the tent-show-revivalist aspect. My pitch was too spiritual. I kept banging on about the pilgrimage, the quest, the journey of the soul. The believers were much more down to earth, socially concerned, having a good time as part of the crowd, processing between stand-up comedians, bands, films, workshops, lectures. The one venue offering beer was blasphemously signboarded as: The Jesus Arms. I went on after a talk entitled ‘Bill Gates, Bono and You’.

  John Davies, who appeared with me, spoke of the sense of awe he experienced, standing on a hillside above the M62, ‘watching the traffic steadily flowing across the high Pennines like a metallic ribbon glittering in the sunshine’. There was, he acknowledged, a dimension of wonder in the ritualistic process of motorway driving, post-Ballardian sensory enhancement, deep reverie. He spoke of the Gospels as a kind of divinely inspired Highway Code. He found my attitude towards this liminal territory, as expressed in London Orbital, more critical than his own: he was undergoing, in his foot-foundered exhaustion, an epiphany. The road was a metaphor, the prompt for an unwritten sermon. ‘Above Asda, only sky.’

  The hiking urban vicar, a compact man, close-cropped, thin-spectacled, smiling, met me on the steps of the Anglican Cathedral. He wore a worker-priest’s uniform of black shirt and dark anorak, but he had writer’s hands. In his rucksack he carried a copy of Mr Tapscott, a self-published poem by the late Bill Griffiths. An inspiration to both of us. Griffiths, with his gift for synthesis, righteous indignation, textual archaeology, was the perfect guide to the condemned terraces of Toxteth, those wide Welsh streets and decommissioned Presbyterian chapels. Bill shaped his poem around the dubious conviction of two men, Ray Gilbert and John Kamara, for the killing of a betting-shop manager in March 1981. The spark for the Toxteth riots. ‘The bulging world-of-state is a crisis.’ The spaces in my dialogue with John Davies, on our tour through layers of Liverpool history, parks, houses and handsome flats once owned by Adrian Henri or Roger McGough, are filled with the growling resonance of Bill’s unheard voice. Patterns of language, so generously set before those who need them, are an absolute: they cohere, they are not extinguished. To fix or interpret sections of the ring-bound poem moved us along, from named address to park, to café. ‘One hemisphere of the marvellous,’ Bill wrote: of the streets through which we were trudging. My own copy of the poem, I notice on returning home, has a Griffiths drawing of the Liver bird, hand-coloured, with splashes of green waves.

  Walking alongside John Davies is a journey through absence, neighbourhood enterprises on Rialto Corner laid over the burnt-out traces of the original riots. ‘A vast area of working-class terraces reduced from a living, active community to a tinned-up wilderness by one signature sweep of John Prescott’s hand,’ Davies said. In Princes Road the red-brick chapel has been made into a secure island by a fence that carries the testimonials of the expelled parishioners. I was interested to note that the ubiquitous painted crocodile of the Olympic Park, that symbol of devouring economic imperatives, has waddled into Liverpool 8. NO MORE DEMOLITION, NO MORE BULL. DREAM ON FOR REGENERATION. Cartoon-graffiti terraces have smiling faces in the windows, where the surviving streets have chipboard. No blue plaque on the house where Ringo Starr grew up. When a Beatles tour bus pauses at the end of the road, nobody gets out. In Bethnal Green, similar properties, on tighter streets, now sell for half a million pounds.

  On Lodge Lane we stop for sandwiches in a bright new café called MT BELLY’S. The mugs of tea come free. I’m intrigued by what Bill Griffiths has to say about ‘the attempt to raise a new set of myths, things that were neutral but archetypal’. If we fail to follow the poet’s example, and to hammer out a mythology of our own, we are lost. In Toxteth, we encountered nothing but friendliness, an active interest in our presence, as we wandered the quiet streets and deserted parks. The man in the café, launching a business, fresh paint, overloaded sandwiches, topped-up mugs, hovered over our discussion. I placed my recorder on the table to capture the story of John’s hike from Hull to Liverpool. ‘Bill Griffiths,’ he said, ‘talked about how history and literature have been colonized by certain big names. He works to reclaim it. It’s good to be sitting in Lodge Lane and wondering if Bill perched here himself.’

  I’ve always had a feeling about the M62. It’s been a motorway I have travelled a lot, through visiting family and friends in different parts of the north. I’ve enjoyed the journey, by car. I could wonder about things I could see, landmarks, just outside the boundaries of the motorway: churches, civic-looking buildings, heavy industry. These things started to raise questions in my mind. I wanted to walk to get closer to those sites. I’d done a lot of urban walks, it was the urban thing I was interested in.

  I didn’t see the Will Alsop thing as being workable. I was so concerned to look at specific details of each place. I was finding the differences between places, more than the similarities. The Alsop idea doesn’t reflect the cultural reality. The interesting thing is to walk through the new developments and to see how individuals or small groups, small collectives, have started to make their own archives of the places where they live – with little bits of graffiti, or structural adjustments to signage.

  I’d never been to Hull before. I enjoyed Hull. It seemed to be that bit apart from all the other cities on the M62 journey. It has worked at its identity. I was interested to note that the docklands development, the waterside, was built a long time ago. The original development was carried out in the early ’80s. They started in Liverpool in the late ’80s. They thought it out for themselves in Hull, rather than latching on to someone else’s development.

  Sometimes it’s good to get lost, but sometimes it isn’t. I got lost in Leeds, a very dark, seedy corner of Leeds, and couldn’t find my way out. I had maps with me and couldn’t read them because there was no light anywhere. It was a red-light area. The only people I could find were high on drugs. It got a bit scary.

  I don’t know anything about flora and fauna; I’m a city person. I did enjoy walking the Pennines. I spent a day with a farmer. He farmed around the area where the motorway splits in two. I anticipated, wrongly, that he would not have liked it because it was a busy motorway ripping through his land, but in fact all the farmers welcomed the road because it made them accessible.

  I didn’t know Manchester at all. Another element of my walk was seeing ghosts: certainly in Ancoats, where I was with a friend who had lived there for a long time. He didn’t use the word ‘ghost’; he was talking about lives that had been lived in that community. He could still see those people and those places. When he looked at the closed-down pubs, he could picture the people who were once sitting in them.

  I met people on the road. One guy was walking it because he wanted to connect all the Rugby League grounds, which are mainly along the M62. I did get tired. By the time I reached the outskirts of Liverpool, I just wanted to get home. My legs were gone.

  I finished by walking through the arena of my childhood, Crosby Beach. I knocked at my parents’ door and we went together to the beach. It was a real sense of homecoming. I hadn’t planned it that way. It was quite emotional to realize how much home meant to me. I used to
play on Crosby Beach as a kid. And I remember seeing the changes down there, the sandhills going up.

  I like the Gormley figures. I think they’re doing what I’ve done often in the past, which is to stand looking at the view: a wide-open sea. They have a nice, gentle presence, really. There was a lot of resistance at first, with a lot of people lobbying, particularly those who used the water, like powerboat users. The placement of the figures meant they couldn’t use that stretch of water any more. But the figures have grown on people. They have attracted people to the area.

  I finished my three months with a month putting all the words together. I realized that what was important to me, reflecting back, was the writing. The writing was as important as the walk. You construct the world as you go.

  We returned to Morecambe to make the walk across the bay, in quest of other ghosts, the drowned cockle pickers. There were prohibitions everywhere: MORECAMBE BAY COCKLE BED CLOSURES. Notices dated from April 2006. Cockling had been suspended until further notice. You don’t wait for the tide to retreat and then head off, unaccompanied, across those treacherous sands; you sign on with an official guide. I had expected half a dozen excursionists not a Cecil B. DeMille mob, packing the Arnside shoreline, waiting expectantly for their Moses to part the Red Sea. It was an awesome spectacle, that afternoon, hundreds of us, setting off under low cloud, hammered by sudden, special-effects showers. A gnarled prophet called Cedric, cleft stick in hand, trousers rolled, led us on the four-hour hike to Kents Bank. He marshalled his strung-out flock with a whistle. Sandals slung around neck, jeans sodden, I stuck close to our leader as he surged forward at a good clip. The multitude spread out, small children dragged and dawdled, before being hoisted on to the shoulders of their parents. Shaggy dogs wallowed in salt-sticky puddles. We left the land a long way behind. Caterpillar treads of orange Bay Search tractors emerged from a broad rivulet and diminished in the direction of a remote horizon. Amphibious vehicles marked RESCUE alerted us to the unpredictable nature of a place where walkers could very quickly become swimmers.