Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  This myth of the town as an East Midlands version of a South Sea island full of unfeasibly stunning women where all the men have perished at sea, might be part of a thread, in which somehow Nottingham has combined being pivotal to Britain’s industry, from the days of the earliest mills, with being possibly the most romantic city in the country. Thus the tale of a gallant outlaw robbing the rich to pay the poor is based there, and one of the main streets is called Maid Marian Way.

  One of the greatest romantics of the industrial age, Lord Byron, Europe’s first pin-up boy, spent much of his youth at Newstead Abbey, near the town centre, of which he became lord. It’s probable that he learned his passion for valuing the fascinating and beautiful over the functional there, from his mother. Because when the family was almost bankrupted, she had to compile an account of expenses, and one entry reads: ‘Garden labourers £156. One gamekeeper £39. One servant £30. One bear £20.’

  Wouldn’t that have been a wonderful moment, when that was handed to the accountant, and after studying it several times he tried to say calmly, ‘Is there a reason why the bear is entirely necessary?’ Maybe she saw it the way destitute pensioners sometimes think of cigarettes, and said, ‘I couldn’t give up the bear, it’s the only pleasure I get.’

  There’s a romance to the history of Nottingham’s radical movement as well. In 1799 the chaplain of the Loyal Nottingham Volunteer Infantry mentioned, ‘I have lived 17 years in the town of Nottingham, and in that time there have been 17 riots.’ The politician Charles James Fox said the town contained an ‘uncontrollable spirit of riot’.

  In 1811 Nottingham stocking-makers who were put out of work following the introduction of new machinery formed the Luddite movement, eventually pledging to destroy the machines that were destroying their crafts.

  And there’s the account of the incident in 1812, when a businessman in London lost all his money on a bad share deal, so he did what anyone would do in those circumstances, and shot dead the Prime Minister, one Spencer Perceval. Where Nottingham plays a part is in its reaction: according to E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, ‘The town crier ran through the streets of Nottingham leaving joy and glee wherever he went, shouting “The Prime Minister is dead. Hurrah hurrah.”’ It’s a shame there wasn’t twenty-four-hour rolling news back then, as a clip of an expert in the studio saying glumly, ‘This is a tragedy that will unite the whole nation in deep mourning, respect and grief,’ followed by the presenter going over to Adrian in Nottingham, where the crier was shouting, ‘The Prime Minister is dead. Hurrah hurrah,’ would have been shown every Christmas for a thousand years.

  The city’s sentiment must have been partly due to the destitution inflicted upon thousands of craftsmen by the new industries, and the Draconian punishments imposed on anyone who complained. But this was the time when the country was becoming ruled by the functional, when the new rules of economics meant that mills and factories must be packed with workforces operating machinery at all times, when eating was to be undertaken while operating the machine, when children were units to operate machines and whistling was punishable with a fine, presumably because it made the whistler human, rather than a thing that operated a machine.

  Figures such as William Blake and Byron, through to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, despised this process, and sought to promote imagination and beauty as a protest against a world in which everything needed an economic reason for the right to exist. And Nottingham seems to have been in the middle of both the artistic and the political wings of this protest.

  Byron is buried in Hucknall, a village eight miles from the centre of town. Despite his mother’s slight extravagance on deadly carnivores, he seems to have learned to identify with the poor during his time in Nottingham. He used his seat in the House of Lords to make a speech about the vast operation by the state to defeat the Luddite movement, and in 1816 he wrote his ‘Song for the Luddites’, quite an act of bravado for an international pin-up, the equivalent now of Justin Bieber recording a song called ‘In Support of Bob Crow and Transport Strikes, and Industrial Action by Other Key Workers Including Gravediggers’.

  If Byron was influenced by the radicalism of Nottingham, the town in turn seems to have followed his inspiration. In 1831 there was a national campaign that would lead to the Reform Act of 1832, which went some way towards giving most men the vote. One of the most strident opponents of this reform was the fourth Duke of Newcastle, who owned Nottingham Castle. So in pouring rain a mob set fire to it and burned it to the ground.

  Thousands stood in the rain cheering, apparently, but while it’s always tricky to know what to do next after a spectacular stunt, the Nottingham campaign for reform went down an unusual route. The next day the rioters went to the house of Dr John Storer, another strong opponent of reform, and according to A History of Nottingham, ‘After an acrimonious exchange they stole his carrots.’

  Can there ever have been another movement that’s travelled, in one day, from a strategy of burning down a castle to one of nicking a local doctor’s carrots? Was there a feeling that the local establishment might say, ‘All right, we give in. We could put up with our castle being reduced to ash, but please, please don’t start swiping our root vegetables’?

  Nottingham doesn’t look much like a pinnacle of romance and rebellion. Today the centre consists of a one-way system that swirls round the castle, to the extent that even members of the UK Independence Party must grunt, ‘I wish the French had invaded us and demolished that bloody castle, it’s impossible to get round.’ The main reference to Byron in this area appears to be Byron House, which looks like the sort of building in which at least two floors are dedicated to the offices of insurance companies.

  The Holiday Inn dominates one half of the centre, though there is a giant sculpture, created by Anish Kapoor, called Sky Mirror, that’s tucked up a one-way street by the theatre; there are no signposts for either, as if a deal was struck, with the mayor saying, ‘All right, we’ll have a theatre and some of this here “art”, but only as long as no bugger can find them.’

  But the quest for romance has seeped through. Can it be coincidence that one of the most romantic sports stories of all time took place in Nottingham, when the charismatic phenomenon that was Brian Clough took over the ailing local football team and within six years they’d won the European Cup twice? Or that people in shops call you ‘duck’? Or that one of the moments often revered (though it’s not really my thing) as a great landmark in the history of romance was when Nottingham’s Torvill and Dean kissed at the end of their day out ice-skating? Or that one of the town’s main tourist attractions appears to be the opportunity of staring at the beauty of the four-fifths of the population that isn’t male? So fuck Paris, book a honeymoon in Nottingham. Ride through the tunnel of love in a rowing boat under Trent Bridge, hold hands as you stroll through the turn-stiles into Forest’s home match against Cardiff, and make love to the gentle purr of the traffic that after several circuits of the one-way system has given up and is heading in the wrong direction up the Alfreton Road.

  Coventry

  The most endearing sense of identity in a town is often when it becomes doggedly irrational. Salford, for example, is obviously part of Manchester: it’s where Manchester United play, and its station is one stop from Deansgate, which is in the centre of Manchester – but it’s a separate city, so it has to tell itself it isn’t sodding Manchester. The official council website describes its geographical position as simply as possible: ‘Salford is a city that can be found just two hundred miles north of London.’ So if you’re looking for it, that’s the easiest way to find it. With regard to its distance from other major cities, if they were explaining to someone who’d never heard of Salford where it is they’d say it’s also two hundred miles south of Edinburgh and 5,800 miles west of Tokyo, and quite a trek from Melbourne, and if you pointed out that it was surrounded by Manchester they’d go, ‘Are we? I’d never really noticed.’

  Coventry does
n’t have Salford’s excuse, but it does have a series of touchingly contradictory reasons for being proud. Its people can claim, and this is especially true of anyone who was between fifteen and twenty-one in 1979, ownership of the Specials, which would be a glorious cry of civic pride, except that in effect they’re saying, ‘You know when they sang “This town – is coming like a ghost town”? That’s here they were talking about. How about that?’

  The Coventry Council website has a section that proudly announces the top one hundred prominent people of Coventry. So it says ‘Billie Whitelaw – actress’, and ‘Frank Whittle – engineer’, and so on, which seems reasonable. Then I noticed ‘Number 21 – Cat bin woman’. This is the woman who was filmed on CCTV putting a cat in a wheelie bin, which certainly made her prominent for a while, though it didn’t quite make her a national treasure like Judi Dench or Henry Cooper. But she was from Coventry, so that’s the main thing.

  There may be a sense of defiance flowing through Coventry, because it was bombed more thoroughly than almost any other British city during the war. But there’s a joke they tell there, which is sometimes told in other cities but which applies more solidly to Coventry, that the Luftwaffe tried to destroy the place, but the city council did a much more professional job.

  Because, given the opportunity to rebuild the town almost entirely from scratch, they opted to hollow out the entire city centre and insert a ring road that’s mostly flyovers, so it’s impossible to walk anywhere without feeling encased in concrete, and so complicated it’s even more impossible to escape from if you’re driving round it, as if it’s a motoring version of a religious cult, and it’s possible there are motorists stuck on it while their families cry, ‘We were worried when he joined it five years ago, and now we have no contact with him and don’t know if he’ll ever ever leave.’

  If you disbelieve me, I refer you to a website set up by the Coventry police called ‘How to Drive Round the Coventry Ring Road’, featuring ‘PC Adam Irwin’s top ring road tips’. This is a serious film, in which PC Irwin drives round the ring road, giving advice such as, ‘When coming up to exit at junction 6 check nearside mirror, nearside indicator, move into lane one cancelling nearside indicator looking for traffic coming up nearside slip road, indicate again to move out, nearside shoulder check, move onto slip road and indicate right for next roundabout.’

  As long as you do that, you’ll be fine. If you think you can’t remember it all, why not take your laptop with you and check PC Irwin’s film as you’re driving, for extra safety.

  There can hardly be a town of Coventry’s size that’s more submerged under a maze of flyovers, retail parks and the inevitable shopping malls, yet underneath it fizzes with a unique Coventricity. It was the town that began the process of twinning, when it tied the knot with Stalingrad after the war, identifying with the Russian city as somewhere Hitler had reduced to rubble. People there love to tell you that much of the car chase in The Italian Job was filmed in Coventry’s sewers.

  And it’s the home of one of the most celebrated tales of history, the place where Lady Godiva rode naked through the city centre, most impressively without the aid of a police website telling her how to get across junction 12 without colliding with a stagecoach from Kenilworth.

  Lady Godiva was the brother of a Saxon Lord called Theoric who lost all his land when William the Conqueror invaded. She was married to one of William’s people, and complained to him about the amount of tax demanded of the city. Then, 150 years later, some monks wrote an account of how her husband agreed to cancel the tax as long as she rode naked through the streets on a horse.

  The monks’ version enters the realm of the story told by a bloke in a pub who rocks backwards and forwards when it adds that ‘No one saw her ride,’ apparently due to a miracle. But what definitely did happen is that in 1839 the procession was revived for the local fair, when a local lady was chosen and thousands came to watch. In 1842, according to a local account, ‘Godiva wore a body stocking, but caused such a sensation that fights broke out amongst those trying to get a better view.’

  The mayor and the Church tried to ban the spectacle, the bishop writing: ‘I cannot believe this custom takes place in a civilised country, that every third year a common prostitute is hired at Birmingham, to be paraded through the streets, followed by a mob of the lowest rabble in Coventry.’

  To which I imagine the people of Coventry said, ‘Birmingham? You cheeky fucking bishop.’

  A compromise was reached, that the procession could continue, but with Godiva clothed. The result was that in 1845 ‘Godiva was dressed in a tunic of white satin, a girdle of some kind, scarves thrown over her shoulder, sleeves, a mantle, an ostrich-feather plumed head-dress, and as she entered St Mary’s Hall she said, “Why, bless you man, I have never worn so many clothes in my life.”’

  By then the city was on the way to becoming a magnificent, bustling, vibrant heart of transport, after the Rudge company began making penny-farthing bicycles in the 1880s. How proud Mr Rudge would have been if he’d imagined that from this humble beginning, within a few decades his trade would have grown to an industry so important the Germans would take the trouble to destroy the entire city.

  Another result of this industry is that Coventry has one of the most compelling museums in Britain, full of majestic motor-bikes, buses and assorted vehicles instead of the usual glass cabinet full of bent coins. And it was also within the trade unions at the car factories that the radical movements connected with the city emerged.

  In the 1990s Coventry’s labour movement developed a wing that was independent of the Labour Party, with several councillors being elected. And the engineering unions were at the centre of the anti-racist movements of the 1970s, of which one result was the Specials.

  All this makes Coventry a delightful series of contradictions. Its most exuberant export was in response to the dourness of its environment, the success of its industry led to the annihilation of the city, and the whole place revolved around building vehicles, but whatever vehicle you’re in you can’t get anywhere except round and round in a bloody great pointless circle.

  Walsall

  Whoever it is that arranges towns has worked hard to make an example of Walsall. Every generation of soulless, grimy uniformity has been poured onto the place: the concrete and tower blocks of the sixties, the ring roads of the seventies, the identikit pedestrianised precincts of the eighties, and the pre-packed retail parks of the nineties, all competing to be the true ugly face of the town.

  It’s also the point at which the M5 and M6 converge, so everywhere seems as if it’s under a motorway. It feels that if you were in someone’s house and asked the way to the toilet they’d say, ‘You take the M5 to junction 19, come off at the third exit and come back on yourself to the kitchen and it’s on the right.’

  The onslaught starts at the point of arrival, as the station is moulded into a gloomy shopping mall which even the official illustrated history of Walsall describes as ‘a soulless structure built amid much protest’. Translated from the rosy-speak of these guides, that means, ‘Please, dear Lord, don’t make me go to this shithole again.’

  The writer Theodore Dalrymple wrote, ‘It’s possible there are uglier towns in the world than Walsall, but if there are I don’t know them. It’s like Ceaușescu’s Romania with fast-food outlets.’

  To be fair, poor Walsall’s plight can’t just be blamed on the modern era. Benjamin Disraeli referred in a novel to one part of Walsall as ‘the ugliest spot in England’, and Dickens described the area as ‘the journey’s end, and it might be the end of everything else, it’s so ruinous and dreary’.

  Every writer seems to have joined in. There’s probably a story by Beatrix Potter that begins, ‘One day Jemima Puddle-Duck wanted to make some delicious apple crumble for the summer fair. But she had no apples and had to walk all the way to the woods in the pouring rain to collect some. “Not to worry,” she smiled, “at least I don’t have to go through fucking Wals
all.”’

  Efforts to change the town’s image haven’t always worked. In 2000 a sculpture of Princess Diana was commissioned to go in the bus station, but before it was unveiled it turned out that the granite made her black. There were headlines like ‘Black Diana Gives Her Majesty Displeasure’, and it was never put up.

  The most ambitious attempt to provide Walsall with some individuality was the decision to build an art gallery in the town centre. The lift has a voice telling you which floor you’re on that belongs to Walsall old boy Noddy Holder, which gives a local flavour as you hear it telling you, ‘SECOND FLOOOOOR!!!’

  But the building itself is as unartistic as it could be, oblong and colourless; you’d imagine it’s where you have to go to apply for a Ukrainian work permit, or a licence to keep dolphins.

  On the other hand, Boy George was brought up in Walsall, although he now denies any link with the town. That’s not complimentary, as it means he’s saying, ‘Yes, I was a heroin addict, I accept that. And sure, I invited a stranger back for sex, handcuffed him to a hook on the wall and beat him with a metal chain. But I did NOT come from Walsall.’

  There is, however, one icon in Walsall that is adored by all local people: a concrete hippo. It is in the central square of the main pedestrianised precinct, and for several years has served as the main meeting point in the town. Of the eight Walsall residents I spoke to before visiting the place, prior to recording an In Town show, every one of them implored me to see the hippo. There’s a Walsall Hippo Statue Appreciation Society on Facebook, with 1,644 members. The council’s cultural officer, who took me on a tour of the town, explained that only after we’d been round the leather museum, the town hall and the art gallery would we finish off with the treat of the hippo.