by Mark Steel
The Puritans who stayed behind became more rebellious. In the year before the Civil War began, the House of Lords ordered that landowners around Boston should evict people who were living on land that had been regarded as common. The people living there rioted for three days.
The Sheriff of Lincoln, Sir Edward Heron, tried to suppress this rebellion, but the commoners drove his people away, and filled in the dykes that had been built to enclose the land. When two of the rioters were arrested, a crowd of a thousand people besieged Lord Heron’s office and threatened to demolish it, at which point the prisoners were released. It was reported that Lord Heron had to flee ‘while the mob followed along the street throwing stones and dirt at him’. Local juries refused to convict anyone on trial for the riot, and the people were allowed to carry on living on the common land.
In 1642, when King Charles I declared war on Parliament, Boston was one of the most enthusiastic towns in the country for resisting him.
One of the most important battles took place when some Royalists came over from Holland to help the King, but troops from Boston seized them in Skegness and took them prisoner. The King went berserk and ordered Lord Heron to recapture them, but when he got to Boston he was arrested as well, and sent to the Tower of London. At this point the King made it ‘illegal to aid Boston’. In some ways the people to feel most sorry for here are the Dutch Royalists, who arrived in England and saw two things – jail and Skegness.
Boston’s history leaves a magnificent irony at the heart of the town. Here is a place struggling to settle an immigrant population, yet it gave its name to a city that was created by the planet’s most famous wave of immigration, and that is a hundred times better-known than the original place.
There are other contradictions in a town that seems to alternate between global importance and Isthmian League obscurity every three hundred years or so. Few people outside the area visit it, maybe because it’s stuck out on the east coast, so it’s not on the way to anywhere. This has left Boston with a distinct feel, an endearing grubbiness, so the river is a proper river, with a filthy, muddy bank littered with broken rowing boats, and not a single square pink-gated riverside apartment. The town feels as if it has a past, and not just because there’s a framed photo of a local mill owner in the Wetherspoon’s. And everyone there adores the Stump. Because it’s theirs, and only theirs.
There may be one more irony yet to play itself out in Boston. The early settlers made their homes by selecting patches of land marginally higher than everywhere else, so they would just avoid being ruined with every flood. Left to nature, the whole area would be marsh, but the incoming sea was drained by dykes, then kept out by windmills, then sluice gates and now vast pumps. But the water engineers who showed me round the pumping station acknowledged that rising sea levels will mean that in around a hundred years, ‘We’ll have to take a decision as to whether it’s worth saving Boston.’
And when that happens, all of Lincolnshire will be wanting to come to the place, because while every other town is under fifty feet of water, in Boston they’ll be able to cling to the top of the Stump, shouting down, ‘Not laughing at us now, Spalding, are you? Shall we flick you down a packet of Richmond fags?’
Surrey
The first problem with Surrey is that no one knows what or where it’s meant to be. Whereas Sussex, for example, is the bit between London and the sea, Surrey’s a bit here and sort of towards there, the bits south of London that don’t fit anywhere else, as if its real name should be Miscellaneous. Then it could include other chunks of the country that don’t fit anywhere, like a bit sticking out of Leicester and the odd island off Northumberland. There’s no sense of a connection between, say, Epsom and Farnham. It’s just a pile of places that don’t know each other. It’s unlikely that any crowd has ever shouted, ‘Surrey ’til I die, Surrey ’til I die, super Surrey super Surrey Surrey ’til I die.’
Even the cricket team plays at The Oval, by Vauxhall Bridge in central London, so that it would be just as accurate to call the team Denmark.
And the county stands for smug suburban comfort. Reggie Perrin lived in Surrey. The area known as the ‘Stockbroker Belt’ is in Surrey. It’s not just wealthy, it’s appallingly safe: if you hear police sirens wailing, they’ve probably been called out to deal with an incident in which someone cheated at bridge.
I went to Dorking one Saturday afternoon, and in the centre of the shopping area, where you would normally expect the Christian group and a bloke sent by the job centre to sell balloons, there was a poetry stall, a performance by the Dorking Folk Club, a belly dancer, a gardening club and a Rachmaninov stall, staffed by the local Rachmaninov Society. If you wanted to stage a massive celebrity moment in Dorking you wouldn’t get Britney Spears or George Clooney to wave at the crowd in the main square, you’d book the panel from Gardeners’ Question Time. People would push feverishly forward for a glimpse, throwing gladioli and screaming with hysteria until they all hyperventilated and the St John Ambulance people had to put everyone’s heads between their knees.
There’s a skateboarding shop in the High Street, and even that’s called ‘The Boardroom’. There’s a road called West Street that consists of one antique shop after another, and they’re not the sort of places where you barter for a second-hand chest of drawers that might be handy for keeping your parking fines in one place. They’re full of old globes and strange curvy upholstered things that turn out to be something like a chaise longue specially built by Prince Albert for his mistress who was a midget.
I found a quote from a Louis J. Jennings, who wrote of Dorking in 1877: ‘Who could stand the weary strain of the small and narrow tone and depressing social atmosphere of such a spot? A man who came to live in Dorking would perish miserably of utter boredom and dry rot. The town is at all seasons one of the dullest in England, and for young people it must be intolerable. There is scarcely anybody of their own age to associate with, no amusements, just the narrow influences that always grow in small gossipy places. Life is altogether stagnant.’
Which seems a little harsh for a place that within 125 years would have its own Rachmaninov stall. The centre of Dorking presents itself as proudly Victorian, so even the branch of Millets is in a curvaceous, elegant building, as you can still make out if you look above the display of hiking boots. After a couple of hours there you find yourself thinking, ‘It’s actually delightful. The posh, endearingly tactile women in the upmarket charity shops, the delicate cafés, the cosy ambience, the abundance of community projects – it’s all thoroughly pleasant. For Christ’s sake, let’s go before it drives us nuts.’
South and a bit west is Cranleigh, which boasts that it’s the biggest village in England. It’s such a village that the spotless shops with their small square dainty windows look as if they’re freshly painted every morning, and all of them have immaculate names such as ‘Mr Seeley the opticians’ written above the door in a font that looks as if it’s been inscribed by Samuel Pepys. The main road feels as if it should be in a TV programme made for toddlers in 1965. The exquisitely presented butchers ought to be owned by a chortling man called Mr Brisket, and the quaint camera shop be run by Mr Aperture the photographer.
There’s a pub called the Richard Onslow, with a board outside that would normally tell you that this Monday it was showing Fulham v Blackburn, but in Cranleigh it says, ‘Every Monday is networking night. Free canapés, build your business contacts 6.00 to 7.30.’
There are several noticeboards in the village, to accommodate all the activities: there are announcements about choir practice, bridge evenings, a ‘shabby chic clothes sale’ which is Surrey-patois for jumble sale, a poster telling you ‘Please park better’ and an advert for an ‘occult comedian’ appearing at the village hall.
It must seem unfair that Surrey is labelled as dull, when Cranleigh Arts Centre puts on a series of Indian dancing classes. Surely that’s the peak of community spirit, when someone can rush into a hall and splutter, ‘Sorry I�
��m late everyone, darned sales conference overran and I missed my usual 5.48 from Waterloo,’ and then step in line to place their hands together and move their head from side to side as if they’re peering out from behind a tree.
And Surrey provides the visitor with dozens of specially crafted settings, rivers and herons and ambassadors’ houses reflecting off sleepy ripples, with patches of trimmed grass by the bank that make you want to search for a chequered tablecloth so you can lay it down and have a picnic while laughing at the antics of a shaggy dog.
Walton-on-Thames has all this, and is where E.M. Forster lived, and some of Three Men in a Boat is set there, and it also has a claim to have been the location of the cricket match in the eighteenth century during which a ball went between the two stumps without dislodging the bail, so the rules were changed and the middle stump was invented. And none of this is surprising. When you first arrive you think, ‘I wonder if this is the location of the cricket match where a ball went between the two stumps, resulting in a change of the rules. Ah, it is.’
But the shinier the surface of a place, the more certain there’ll be an oily, grubby underneath. Thus, in the 1970s Walton-on-Thames provided enough teenage boredom not only to cultivate a punk scene, but to produce Jimmy Pursey and Sham 69, the most hard-core, rawest, punkiest punk of all, which had some of the most paid-up, zipped-up punks of all saying, ‘Oo no, that’s a bit too punk.’
Similarly, if more tunefully than ‘Borstal Breakout’, Woking, Surrey, created Paul Weller. And the copy of the Surrey Advertiser I bought on the day I visited Dorking contained a list of the fifteen most-read stories on its website, of which fourteen concerned violent crimes and the other one was ‘Vandals Leave Guildhall Clock Chiming out of Time’. Surrey appears to contain a grumbling element that protests not despite the cosiness, but because of it. To put this another way, if Jimmy Pursey had been told, ‘There’s no need to be anti-social. If you’re bored, why not join a gardening club or help out with a Rachmaninov stall?’ it probably wouldn’t have made much difference.
Adding to the sinister undercurrent rumbling beneath the shabby-chic clothes stalls is the advert that comes on every few minutes on the county’s radio station, Jackie FM, which says, ‘107.8 – sponsored by Surrey Aquatics and Reptiles.’ Presumably they’ve done their research and this has some effect, so that as a chief accountant’s wife drives to the shops to pick up a Tudor commode she hears it and thinks, ‘Oh yes, I could do with a lizard.’
In H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds a wounded Martian with a heat-ray lands in the Thames and warms up the whole river before escaping in a boat to Walton Bridge, where he was lucky not to have found himself captured by Surrey Aquatics and Reptiles.
Wells must have chosen his venue for a reason, and it may be he’d noticed that the flawless suburban landscapes and jolly communal activities hid a grubbier, but more fascinating edge to the vicinity.
It’s got a history, this edge. In 1830 starving agricultural labourers rioted in Dorking until they were dispersed by cavalry, who could have directed them to the gardening club if they’d used their imagination. In Victorian times a town-wide game of football was played each year in which the object was to get the ball into the most unpleasant place in the town, such as the slaughterhouse offal heap in West Street, then brawl to get it out.
But most spectacular was the role of Walton-on-Thames during the English Civil War. As questions arose concerning the nature of monarchy, democracy and property, the religious reformer Gerrard Winstanley formed a group called the Diggers, who planned to set up a commune with the aim of sharing the land and its produce equally. They chose Walton-on-Thames as its location, partly because the town’s population had overwhelmingly supported Parliament against the King.
The Diggers dressed as soldiers, as they had been in Cromwell’s army, and marched into St Mary’s parish church in Walton, announcing that in their society the Sabbath, tithes, ministers, magistrates and the Bible were all abolished. Then they moved onto common land on St George’s Hill and set up their new world. They insisted that the land belonged to everyone rather than to the landowners, so a general was sent to disperse them, but the Diggers upset him by refusing to remove their hats because ‘He is not superior but a fellow creature.’ Anyone who’s studied conflicts will be aware that if they couldn’t reach agreement on the hat issue, there wasn’t likely to be much progress on the matter of them taking over the land.
The movement sparked off similar communes, which were seen as a threat by Cromwell, so troops were sent and the Diggers’ commune was demolished. But they’re often seen as the first communists, and Winstanley is remembered in plays and songs and sometimes in exam questions.
The Diggers weren’t just making a lifestyle choice: they saw their protest as an attempt to redefine how we see land and property, and to create a new world in which society produced goods collectively and owned them jointly, with all the rules of that society made in common as well. Winstanley’s pamphlets about these issues still seem poignant and radical, and Walton-on-Thames remembers his contribution with a statue you are directed to by a blurred map you can get from the town hall. I drove up the road as directed, and past the spot where it looked as if it should be, and stood with the map at all angles and experienced that sensation you have when you can’t find something on a map of feeling utterly stupid and saying, ‘Or is this road that road and that road this path and we passed it and we’re now in the river?’
Eventually I noticed a tiny structure, the size of a fire hydrant. I brushed aside some stinging nettles, and there was a lump of concrete on which was depicted a spade and some parsnips. Because that’s how he should be remembered, as someone who, whatever his opinions, always turned out a lovely parsnip.
I tried to get to St George’s Hill, but it’s now a gated estate, and big gates as well, made of forbidding iron which suggests that if you rattled them a series of searchlights would come on and Al Pacino would appear on the roof with a sub-machine gun.
In 1999 some fans of the Diggers commemorated the original group’s 350th anniversary by camping on the heath as near as they could to the original site. But their attempts to recreate the events of 1649 were made all the more authentic when a resident from the gated estate emerged from a black four-wheel-drive vehicle, punched a camper and then reversed at high speed towards a group of people by the entrance to the site.
So Surrey isn’t at all one-sided and twee, it’s still locked in a conflict that’s lasted 350 years. If Gerrard Winstanley was to come back today he’d realise straight away that a great deal has changed, and that if he wanted to grow parsnips on St George’s Hill now he’d need a division of fucking great tanks or he’d never get on there in the first place.
Merthyr Tydfil
Oh dear Lord, Merthyr Tydfil. There was one building I knew about in this South Wales town before I went there, which was the Wyndham Arms. I’d seen it on Sky One’s Britain’s Roughest Pubs, in which a group of men in their seventies were shown arguing about which of them ran off from a fight against a gang from Dowlais in 1959. ‘I’ve never bottled a fight in my fucking life!’ bellowed one of the pensioners, and to prove his point he did some press-ups in the middle of the floor. So to visit Merthyr without seeing the Wyndham Arms would be like going to Stonehenge but not bothering to see the stones.
Merthyr is about twenty-five miles from Cardiff, but the journey by rail takes two hours, as the train creeps through the valleys, stopping for unexplained periods, groaning as if it’s mumbling, ‘Oh bollocks, me back’s gone again,’ and defying the terrain like a truck built out of stolen lawnmower parts used by escapees from a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp as it clanks through the jungle.
But the journey does offer a comprehensive view of things that have been shut down. Pits, factories, shops, concrete huts that must have served some purpose before their metal door became a sheet of brown rust and the windows were ritually slaughtered. It’s a shock when you see a stream, as
it feels it ought to have barbed wire alongside and boards nailed over it.
The train eventually approaches Merthyr, and heads towards a Tesco that looks uncomfortably gigantic even by Tesco standards, as if it’s got that disease that makes people unable to stop growing so they end up eight feet tall and used in adverts for The Guinness Book of Records. It appears at one point as if the train’s descending into the Tesco, and that you’re arriving at a version of Disneyland, where low-paid immigrants skip in line all day dressed as Tesco carrier bags, and students subsidise their education by dressing as tins of custard powder and waving at children while singing, ‘We’re three for the price of two because each penny counts for you.’
To start with I went to the library, where I’d been promised a selection of books for research on the town. But when I arrived, at around eleven in the morning, the woman I was supposed to meet was dealing with a lad of about twenty with a wispy semi-moustache who was shouting loudly into his mobile while walking in a circle. ‘I’m – fucking – no – hang on – I – I haven’t got his fridge, I told him I hadn’t got his fucking fridge – who said I had his fridge?’ he slurred between sups from a dark-blue tin, then collapsed onto the counter.
‘No mobiles in here, love,’ said the librarian, but she might as well have read out the clues from that day’s New York Times crossword. So she gently grabbed his mobile and he shook slightly, then said, ‘That’s my you got took give me back I haven’t got his fridge.’
‘Sorry love, you’re not allowed to talk on your mobile in the library,’ she told him. Suddenly he looked slightly regretful, said, ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t know I was in the fucking library,’ and left. If Merthyr was a film it would have to be congratulated for establishing a style and characters right away, so you know what you’re getting right from the beginning.