Those affluent Cornish villages are places of pilgrimage these days for their Rick Stein endorsed chi-chi seafood outlets. Gourmets come in their droves to Allonby too, but for less formal, more affordable fare. There was a huge queue outside one building which I took to be a pub, a gig or a cinema, but which turned out to be an ice cream parlour. Not just any ice cream parlour but one of global repute. Twentyman’s is world-famous, I now know, having done some research during which I found out that one customer drove his besotted, pregnant wife from London to Allonby and back in one round trip to get a fix of Twin Cornet or Nougat Wafer.
I ended my day in the fishing town of Maryport and found it transformed since my last visit on a rainlashed day in the nineties. Then I had sat in a gloomy pub watching people lose their umbrellas into the sea, eating a giant filled Yorkshire pudding from which I later got a humdinger of a stomach bug. This bank holiday was altogether nicer, and it wasn’t just the Mediterranean weather either. There was a definite hint of the Cumbrian Riviera; a yellow jet ski roared around in the dock, a young lad in a Carlisle United top piloted his shrimp boat with a wave at a girl on the harbour rail. The day and the town seemed spring-cleaned and freshly painted. The marina was crowded with nuzzling pleasure craft with names like Dolfyn and Lady Friendship, on whose deck lolled a lazy dog and two ladies in caps taking a break from swabbing for a G&T. From the harbour wall, watching the little boats knock and bob, and the cottages gleaming, you could have been in somewhere much more soft and southerly – Devon or Dorset, Portofino even at a pinch. I could live like this, I thought. I might even get one of those caps.
The musician Billy Bragg once told me that when he moved from London to the Dorset coast, his friends wondered how he’d get on living in the country. To which he always replied, ‘I don’t live in the country, I live by the sea … it’s different.’ He’s right. Living in that strange, debatable margin between the human hinterland and the otherness out there, on the cusp of the long argument between the land and the sea, has its own peculiar quality. I can claim some small knowledge of this as I lived in a seaside town for two years. Well, I say it was a seaside town. As all of Lancashire knows, being beside the seaside in Southport can involve a full scale expedition to the far horizon with your bucket and spade and a couple of overnight camps.
Whereas brash Blackpool’s sea buffets the prom on a windy day and soaks your chips with sea water if you’re unlucky, its posher cousin Southport often doesn’t let the old salty dog within a hundred yards of it. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, ‘In all my experience of Southport, I have not yet seen the sea.’ But that didn’t stop it being the holiday resort or day out of choice for the self-made men and their wives of this part of the north. In my childhood, when Blackpool was too far for a bank holiday ride, or you simply couldn’t face its daunting full-on hedonism, there was always lovely Southport, with its rolling dunes and its pitch and putt, the rococo iron canopies of Lord Street and its wide tree-lined boulevards. These, it’s said, were the model for Napoleon III’s reconstruction of Paris, after he briefly lived in Southport.
Like Napoleon, I lived here briefly too; a student in the early 1980s and I loved it, mostly. Yes, we lived in what now seems comic penury, clothed from Oxfam, boiling up bones for soup, ‘fiddling the leccy’ (till the landlord caught on) and breaking the ice on the inside of the windows on January mornings. But somehow there was always money for ice cream, hot dogs, the latest releases on Postcard Records of Scotland, beer and curry.
My first ever proper curry on a proper night out was here in Southport. The oddly named Oriental Grill on Lord Street was the venue, I went with a girl called Carole and I had a pathia, picked pretty much at random from a menu full of tempting mysteries and still a favourite to this day. Returning after several decades, I didn’t expect a blue plaque, but I was disappointed to see that the Oriental Grill has gone, replaced by what seems to be the overflow storage room of an electrical shop. I hope, as they wheel in the tumble dryers and plasma tellies, they feel a little of the frisson I had back then taking my first footling steps into the adult world; a teenager with a girl, a flat and a chequebook just ripe for overdrawing from.
I’ve come back, for the first time since I moved out all those years ago, to spend a bank holiday here, and a crucial part of my mission is to visit one of Britain’s oddest and most wonderful tourist attractions. I’ll get on to that. For me, though, freighted with memories, things start to get Proustian round about … well, round about the roundabout – the Scarisbrick Roundabout at the bottom of Eastbank Street.
Six of us lived in a rambling old Victorian pile here on Nolan Street. When I stroll down there, to the end of the cul de sac by the garage wall where number 60 stands, my stomach begins to knot and I find myself goosepimpling and prickling with a curious mixture of affection and horror. Memories come crowding in like ghosts: good, bad, weird, intimate, funny; a splurge of buried, now resurrected feelings from when I was a different person. Number 60’s up for sale. By posing as a prospective buyer, I could go in, go up the stairs to where Sue would smoke dope and make dresses, to the attic room where I danced with Parminder the Indian post-grad to Wham’s ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’, to the big communal room where we ate greasy, unidentifiable broth and smoked roll-ups in our moth-eaten charity shop jumpers and cords and watched on a tiny snowy black and white TV, Hurricane Higgins beat Dennis Taylor and Tommy Cooper die on stage at Live from Her Majesty’s.
There’s a gleaming car dealerships at the roundabout now, and a McDonald’s which I guess we’d have blown some of our grant on when we couldn’t face more soup, or another portion of spag bol with packet beanfeast. Our old local The Shakespeare was never particularly throbbing or vital even on Sunday, ‘entertainment night’, when a drum and organ duo calling themselves Roy Rocket and Mr Personality would play bored and desultory sets to a half empty function room. Now it isn’t even that lively; boarded and shuttered with no trace of the last-orders arguments about anarcho-syndicalism and Echo and the Bunnymen that once raged here over eked out halves of cider.
We drank on Eastbank Street too, and shopped and signed on in the long holiday. There was a great, poky little indie record shop, now a tanning salon of course, where I picked up some much loved vinyl artefacts: the 12 inch EP of Into Battle with the Art Of Noise, The Residents’ The Third Reich ‘N’ Roll album, ‘Blue Boy’ by Orange Juice on 7 inch. The street is a short, busy thoroughfare connecting the pasty shops and forlorn boozers of the town’s dull hinterland with the sudden affluence and glamour of Lord Street. This is what delighted Napoleon; lovely Lord Street with its hanging baskets, fancy ironwork, comfortable in its boulevardier elegance over rival Blackpool’s windy, vinegary Golden Mile.
Before Nolan Street, I lived briefly in a flat on the seafront. It stood across the road from the old Southport Theatre where I saw many bands including Focus, Elvis Costello and, by accident, the Nolan Sisters. Now it is a Ramada Hotel. Gratifyingly though my old flat is still there. Clearly, English Heritage have shown no interest as yet as it is as tired looking and grubbily whitewashed as it ever was. For old times’ sake, I take lunch at the legendary Sandgrounder café, happy rendezvous of many childhood day trips and a source of much sustenance back in my student day, especially out of season when they didn’t mind you huddling for an hour or two by the gurgling Gaggia machine with slim volumes of poetry. In my memory, Southport in the eighties was invariably chill or foggy, wind fanning the sand over the dunes and whipping along the front. But maybe that was just all The Smiths records we were listening to. I never remember scorchers like this bank holiday, with its parade of Ray-Bans and reddening forearms.
I stretch back on a plastic chair in the warm sun outside the Sandgrounder and order a latte and a hot dog, flush and worldly in a way I never was back then. I’m served by a very smart, articulate young Italian man. I can’t say the same for the kid opposite me who sits sullenly grunting and throwing caps at the floor, causing a constant crac
king like a small scale gunfire exchange and thus annoying some small dogs nearby, and me. His T-shirt reads ‘Is it me you’re looking for?’ and I think, yes, but only in order to hunt you down and kill you. Slogans on clothes rarely conjure the gaiety or mirth intended, I think. Like a tie featuring the ‘Mona Lisa’ or a pair of plastic breasts, they are what ‘characters’ have instead of a personality.
The café attracts a varied clientele; Southport in miniature. Two bearded adult males arrive on chopper bikes – hipsters one imagines – and wonder aloud whether to have the peri peri chicken. At another table is an elderly couple in M&S casuals. She talks loudly (‘tek care, luv’) into a mobile phone she cradles gently like a bomb or a piece of fine crystal, just like my mum does. He smiles thoughtfully at his copy of Private Eye. A proud indulgent Scouse dad buys his charming little girl a big fluffy lion from a nearby gift shop. Liverpudlians have long had an affinity with Southport; it’s always been their seaside ‘day out’ of choice. This can make for a nice upbeat vibe in the summer, though less so when the Orange lodges parade through the town on the anniversary of Battle of the Boyne. These bodies have a strong presence in Liverpool, institutions grounded in a fearful nineteenth-century English response to the influx of the city’s large Irish Catholic population. The Liverpool lodges come to Southport to do their parading, a tradition which has always divided opinion in the town.
I’m back in my old haunt to generally soak up the mood of a balmy bank holiday but, as said, also for a very specific reason. Over the last decade or so, it’s been nice to see the quirkier British tourist attraction going from object of derision to guilty pleasure to genuinely loved, thanks in no small part to a lovely book called Bollocks to Alton Towers by Robin Halstead, Jason Hazeley and Alex and Joel Morris, the team behind the wonderful Framley Examiner website. In this age of sterile mass entertainment, the soporific blandness of the multiplex and the chain pub, we’ve begun to cherish our proper one-offs. I’m thinking of places like Blackgang Chine, the queer, quirky theme park on the Isle of Wight; the quaint strangeness of the Branxton Cement Menagerie, just off the A697 near Coldstream and built by a local handyman to amuse his son; or the gripping and upsetting, family-run Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker, six underground floors of chilling Cold War fun under dreary Middlesex farmland. But one of the very finest and oddest of such attractions is tucked away in a back street in residential Southport and, dripping in sweat and squinting at Google Maps, I was pounding the hot pavements of the old town in search of it.
I’ve walked so often down these streets. Head down against the drizzle, I’d bustle over this railway bridge in my long overcoat courtesy of Sue Ryder. Today, though, Southport is sweltering and so am I and I’m looking for something else, something that only arrived soon after I left town, unemployed and adrift in the north, with my Smiths records in a cardboard box. ‘Please, please, please, let me get what I want,’ I thought then and I think now, except then it was a job and a life, and now it is the British Lawnmower Museum.
Long after common sense has told me to give up, with those words of the Lovin’ Spoonful about being ‘half dead’ on ‘sidewalks hotter than a match-head’, I’m circling and backtracking, sweat pooling down my spine when suddenly I see it. At the top of a street where I actually used to live with a trio of girls from West Yorkshire, in this ‘seaside town that they forgot to bomb’, as Moz once sang reputedly of Southport. (Actually they didn’t forget; the Germans bombed what locals called the ‘Blind Babies Home’ in 1941.)
The Lawnmower Museum is the baby of Brian Radam, a two times UK Lawnmower racing champion and devotee of British engineering who opened the museum as an upstairs adjunct to dad Stanley’s discount gardening store on Shakespeare Street. You still go in via the shop, which on a day like today has that deliciously cool, richly smelly interior of all hardware shops. Even if you regard all DIY as a form of blacklegging that deprives skilled tradesman of work (this is my excuse anyway), there is something about a hardware store, its potent brew of odours, its rows of mysterious, knobbly, gleaming, coiled, brassy, rubbery artefacts, that cannot fail to hypnotise, to make you feel (wrongly) that even you could fit a tap, or put up an architrave.
In fact, like the shops in M R James and Robert Aickman stories, the shop is ramshackle and delightfully odd in a way that borders on the sinister, but in a good way. I am approached by a youngish, biggish lad, mildly dishevelled, wearing a pair of frayed boot cut jeans and muddy black boots beneath an outsized purple blazer, white shirt and skew-wiff black tie. The effect is part golf club barman who got dressed in the dark on a farm, part Stone Roses roadie.
He tells me that, yes, the museum will be open for a while yet and I am welcome to take the tour. Firstly though, for research purposes, I pick up a souvenir DVD for £10, though if you don’t want to stretch to this kind of outlay, there is a terrifically unfunny YouTube segment you can watch culled from Australian TV, where some bloody ocker smirks along in the ‘Strewth, look at the quirky poms!’ fashion. My young guide apologises for the refurbishment work and ‘the exposed wood in places’ and points out a few stray (and presumably historic) lawnmowers that have had to be placed downstairs. Radio 2 plays loudly. He takes my two quid entrance money and smiles, ‘And now if you’d like to go upstairs into the museum, I’ll begin the audio tour.’ By the time I get to the top of the flight, that tour is crackling into life.
‘Welcome to the British Lawnmower Museum, the nation’s foremost museum of garden machinery history. Lawnmowers are a very British obsession; we manufacture the best lawnmowers in the world, but sadly we have lost virtually all our British lawnmower companies. Nowadays when people are replacing their old lawnmowers, they purchase a grasscutter without knowing it, and consequently we are losing all our lawns as well …’
Well, there is much to ponder here. Firstly, let us mull what the difference is between a grasscutter and a lawnmower. I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now, even after many an hour (OK, minutes) of assiduous googling. But I did appreciate that the narrator – Brian himself possibly – did not feel the need to slow down the pace of the thrusting narrative by explaining but simply assumed I, surely a lawnmower kind of guy, would know. I liked that. So much of our modern media treats us like bovine simpletons. Here that trend was proudly bucked. The British Lawnmower Museum assumes that you’re serious about gardening technology, not just some vapid dilettante in search of cheap thrills. Good man, Brian.
The other thing to ponder is the really loud ‘phut phut phut’ on the audio tour soundtrack. For a while, I take this to be an illustrative sound effect, a slightly too loud one, yes, but an intentional bit of colour, an early steam lawnmower perhaps. It’s only later when the soundtrack features an actual lawnmower sound effect that I realise that the other constant phutting and rumbling, is, in fact, a massive, distracting glitch on the soundtrack.
Despite this the next hour is, in a very real sense, an education. The lawnmower was invented in 1830 by Edwin Beard Budding. He was working in a textile mill in Stroud, Gloucestershire, when he designed a machine to trim the nap off the cloth used for guardsmen’s uniforms. In a moment of inspiration, he had the revolutionary, not to say obtuse, idea to use it to cut grass.
Now here the thought did occur to me, how had we cut the grass on lawns before? With scissors? Why weren’t the stately homes of England all obscured by chin-high thistles? But let it pass. Everyone thought Budding was nuts anyway and he was forced to test drive his new contraption at night under cover of darkness for fear of mockery. Soon, though, all of Britain was gripped by lawnmower fever and the new invention was the iPhone of its day, a cool must-have accessory for scenesters.
In the twentieth century the top brands of British engineering, marques more associated with sports cars and aircraft, produced their own elegant and desirable models: Rolls-Royce, Royal Enfield, Vincent, Dennis, Hawker Siddeley, Perkins Diesel, British Leyland and more. Packed into a handful of small upstairs rooms (with reinf
orced floors, presumably) is the full story of the lawnmower from vicious looking whirling scythes to the sleek Jags and Rovers of the breed, through to the minimal, plastic, retro-chic Flymos of the 1980s, made by Swedish power tool giants Husqvarna, a name more usually associated with bearded lumberjacks wielding chainsaws in petrified forests. Based on the hovercraft, the Flymo was sold door to door, like encyclopedias or clothes pegs, and was coloured orange as this was the colour preferred by potential female purchasers in a survey.
For the casual visitor though in our shallow, fame-obsessed age, the celebrity lawnmower’s section will be the big draw. Over the years, Brian and his team have put together an impressive collection of gardening equipment of the stars that adds a whole new dimension to the word ‘random’. Dangling from the ceiling, appropriately, is a lawnmower that once belonged to Britain’s most notorious hangman Albert Pierrepoint. Behind a rope stands the ride-on model given to Charles and Diana on their wedding day and now, rather poignantly, an exhibit in a dusty loft in Southport. After that things get really strange.
There are dibbers donated by Vanessa Feltz and Lee Mack, Roger McGough’s clippers, Nicholas Parsons’ old secateurs, the Qualcast Panther once owned by Jean Alexander, Coronation Street’s Hilda Ogden. One can’t be sure just how much irony is at work here, which makes it all the funnier and more eccentric, disturbing even. Certainly I felt a little strange that on the hottest day of the year, while thousands were at the beach or sipping cooling lagers, I was standing in an attic room surrounded by ancient lawnmowers once owned by poets and executioners, staring over the rooftops at the bedroom window of that house I once shared with three girls from Dewsbury.
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