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Another story is that he turned up outside a car dealers in Digbeth, and it’s said that in 1976 he was sold for £12,700 to a Scottish company called Spook Erections, which put him in the markets it ran around the country. A recent article in the Birmingham Post informed its readers that the statue ‘has been found lying in a car park in Penrith’.
Unlike those of Lord Lucan, you’d think these sightings would be easy to verify, what with him being twenty feet tall and incapable of moving, and I can’t imagine Penrith is the sort of town where a King Kong can be dumped in a car park without being spotted, the way you might just get away with it in New York. Or maybe he’ll continue to create these wispy visions, and there’ll be unconfirmed reports of him living in Bolivia disguised as Godzilla, being employed by the CIA to intimidate anti-government forces in Angola, or being melted down by the Mafia after a row about gambling debts.
Another unifying fact about the city is the one about it enjoying more miles of canal than Venice, although this seems to miss the point, as you might as well boast that there’s more paint in a warehouse in Luton than there is on the Sistine Chapel. The important fact is that it’s quality rather than quantity that attracts tourists when it comes to a canal system. The Birmingham Tourist Board seems to think otherwise, and must assume that visitors to Venice find the place disappointing because there’s only one canal visible from St Mark’s Square, and might say, ‘I hear there are a whopping four round the back of the Stetchford gasworks passing under the M5 interchange where the junkies leave their needles. We’ll go there next year.’
Birmingham’s canals are another sign of its influence at the start of the industrial age. They were the earliest in Britain, created to transport iron from the Black Country to the centres of engineering. Now, for all the canal miles that gives the city, not everyone is confident of their value as a tourist attraction. For example, when a friend arranged a canal boat weekend in Worcestershire, she was told by the agency that made the booking, ‘We don’t recommend you take the boat into Birmingham. You just don’t know WHAT might happen.’
As fearful overreactions go, I’d say that beats those people in the 1980s who would give the advice ‘Don’t drive through Brixton,’ as if the place had fallen to bandits and warlords who’d ambush random families heading for a day trip to Brighton. How dangerous can crossing the nautical border into Birmingham really be? Are these waterways notorious for pirates? Do hooded, eye-patched gangs of youths jump on board and demand at the point of a sword that you hand over your tea, coffee and potted plants? You can see how getting away from danger would be a problem, with a shout of ‘Step on it!’ and then a gentle ‘puff puff puff puff splosh’ as the barge crept towards its maximum permitted speed of four miles an hour. Maybe the whole system is like Apocalypse Now, with barges moodily rolling towards their destination while the captain sits on board wistfully chewing grass and keeping watch in case of ambush from the rebels of Tipton.
But Birmingham’s canals give it a myth of being an English Venice, which has become a part of its identity. It also has its university, its Test match cricket ground, Cannon Hill Park and its football clubs, all unique, and all possible to cross without the use of a flyover or underpass, though this probably infuriates the planners who designed the city’s layout in the 1960s, who must watch Aston Villa and think, ‘That player could nip up the wing much quicker if we’d been allowed to put a bypass on the halfway line, to cut out the bottleneck in midfield.’
And Birmingham has its accent, which people are so rude about you could probably arrest them for hate crimes. But more important than what outsiders think of it is the fact that the place has its own accent. Unlike Glasgow, which has an accent not all that different from other cities in southern Scotland, or London, whose accent stretches to Southend and Luton, Birmingham’s is its own. In this world of stultifying sameness where it’s so hard to be genuinely original and unique, Birmingham has a one-off.
So the city defends its dialect with pride, and if it should ever be in danger of getting diluted it ought to be preserved, the way Welsh is, by insisting that all children in the city are taught in Brummie and that the road signs should be in both English and Brummie.
On top of this, Birmingham can claim to be the place where the Balti curry was invented. There are areas such as Sparkbrook that are lined with Indian and Pakistani cafés, with plastic tablecloths and lopsided portraits on the wall that may be of the owner’s father or could be the President of the Punjab.
Birmingham’s image probably isn’t helped by its confused status as Britain’s second city. Whereas that title was accepted across most of Britain until recently, in a poll in 2011, 48 per cent said Manchester was the second city, and 40 per cent said Birmingham. This only matters because of expectations, otherwise people in Oswestry would be gutted every time a new survey emerges that says it’s missed out on second-city rank yet again, despite the new windows in the post office.
But something needs to be done about Birmingham’s centre, because the joys and quirks of the city are hidden behind the oppressively unwelcoming concrete algebra puzzle that is its unfathomable heart. It’s like writing a captivating novel but insisting that the cover smells of raw sewage.
The planners do make regular attempts to renovate the Bullring, but with delicate architectural genius they always manage to make it even uglier. It’s as if there’s a committee somewhere that thinks, ‘Just one more flyover and then it will all be sorted,’ so that by now an aerial view of the place makes it look like a Scalextric course after the dog’s sat on it. The latest attempt at renovation entailed the creation of a giant, mesmerising bubbly thing in the absolute centre, that looks as if each day it’s going to get bigger by eating the first twenty people who walk by.
So it should simply be abandoned. The Bullring, the station, the inner circle and the flyovers should be covered in barbed wire and left derelict, like bits of Chernobyl, and the centre should be moved two miles away, in whatever direction the locals prefer. Outsiders will then arrive in a city it’s possible to walk around, and where it’s possible to imagine that a park may be nearby. They’ll look around for the Asian cafés and the exuberance of Jamaican Handsworth, the abundance of canals and the symphony orchestra, and will hear the accent as a lilting melody, a symbol of the pastoral effervescent jolliness, with its strange cordoned-off area on the outskirts, that is Birmingham.
Didcot, Oxford (#ulink_5f22eb8e-389f-5b27-a52f-89da5d16b29e)
Didcot must be the town that’s least visited compared to how often it’s seen in the whole country. It’s in the south of Oxfordshire, and consists of two main roads on either side of a tiny pedestrianised centre, a small railway museum, a fire station, a post office and a fucking great power station with six vast funnels pumping out fuck knows what that can be seen from everywhere, including, I should think, on a clear night, outer space.
If you’re travelling to the Midlands by road or rail, you might casually glance west and note a power station. That will be Didcot. If you’re going to Bristol, you might at some point turn towards the north and see a power station. Didcot. Even when you’re used to this you get caught out, and think, ‘That power station can’t possibly be Didcot,’ but it will be, because it’s on wheels and they must move it to comply with regulations regarding smoke limits in one area.
It may not be coincidence that it’s visible from so much of England, because Didcot was the perfect place for southern England’s main railway junction, en route to everywhere, in the middle of everything. Many towns grew up around a railway, but in Didcot the railway was the town, created to serve Brunel’s vision of a network from east to west. You’ll probably now be wondering how you can read much more about the impact of the railway on Didcot, in which case you may be drawn to a book I bought called The Railway Comes to Didcot. But unfortunately the opening line goes: ‘In no way is this book a history of the railway in Didcot.’ I couldn’t help feeling slightly cheated by this. It’s possible that another of the author’s books may contain some information in that area, but I was slightly put off by its title: The Long Years of Obscurity: A History of Didcot, Volume One – to 1841.
Didcot owes its modern existence to Lord Abingdon, who refused to allow a railway to pass through Abingdon village; Didcot was chosen instead. Now it has around 20,000 people, and a sense that the landscape might not be something to put on a tin of biscuits.
When I asked on Twitter for comments from the town, possibly the two most poignant were, ‘You can always tell on the train to Oxford who’s from Didcot, from their morose demeanour,’ and ‘I seem to remember a character in EastEnders confessing they were from Didcot.’ That is truly disturbing, to be considered a subject of trauma in EastEnders, presumably with dialogue that went:
‘We’ve gotta talk.’
‘What is it, doll?’
‘Look, this ain’t gonna be easy, but I’ll come aht wiv it. I’m from Didcot.’
‘You what? Oh no, that explains your morose demeanour, you slaaaag.’
But the town has developed a stoical sense of pride. Everyone I spoke to there was aware of the Cornerhouse Theatre, which they told me with great satisfaction had been built with money originally scheduled for Reading. And everyone was shocked, shocked, that I wasn’t familiar with William Bradbery, who came from Didcot and was the first person to cultivate watercress.
As well as being defined by, and looked down upon from all angles by, the towers of the power station, Didcot is also defined by, and looked down upon from all angles by, the town ten miles up the road, which is Oxford.
To start with, in 1836 the Great Western Railway applied to build a branch line from Didcot to Oxford, but the colleges were the main landowners, and they refused to allow the new route. The reason was that they didn’t want the grubby people of Didcot to be able to lower the tone of Oxford by merrily travelling to it on the train. Eventually in 1843 the colleges allowed the new line, but on the condition that no one below the status of an MA was allowed to travel on it. Now, when I first read this, I was certain that I must have misread or misunderstood the sentence, so to save you going back over this paragraph, eventually in 1843 the colleges allowed the new line, but on the condition that no one below the status of an MA was allowed to travel on it.
Not only that, but the university authorities were given free passes to travel along the line at any time, to check that no one was trying to catch a ride who wasn’t sufficiently mastered up. So there were actually people looking through the carriages, maybe even wandering down the train calling, ‘Can I see your Masters, please? Masters and doctorates, please. Thank you, Professor. Thank you, sir, that’s fine. Ah, I’m sorry, sir, media studies isn’t valid on a Friday, you’ll have to get off at the next stop.’
If it hasn’t already received one, I’d like to nominate this for the all-time snobbery award. When discussing their proposal the university authorities must have said, ‘It is quite possible that not being able to speak Latin is contagious, in which case for our finest minds to be in the proximity of these Didcottian dunces could be calamitous to our nation’s intellect.’
Hopefully the local youngsters found ways round this rule, by flashing a 2:1 in geography at the barrier, then running off before the inspector could check it. Or maybe they forged a BA in philosophy, and then rather than squirming as the inspector asked them for a précis on Cartesian dualism, they panicked and locked themselves in the toilet.
But it would be a mistake to think of Oxford as a monolithic body of pomposity, because the town is divided between the university hierarchy and a normal population. This has given rise to a tension that goes back to the early days of the colleges in the thirteenth century, and that erupted spectacularly in 1355, when two students complained to an innkeeper about the quality of his beer. According to one account, they ‘took a quart of wine and threw the said wine in the face of the taverner, and then with the said quart pot beat the taverner’. The students then fetched bows and arrows, but these were confiscated by local bailiffs, so more students turned up and attacked the town magistrates. A complaint by residents was made the next morning, so the students, being young and full of mischief, set fire to the town. At the end of the day’s fighting sixty students and thirty-three people from the town were dead. By this time I presume the landlord had cleaned his barrels and freshened up his beer.
You might imagine some sort of sanction would have been applied to the students who started this jape, such as a couple of marks knocked off their business studies final paper for every blacksmith they murdered, or something. But the government blamed the people of the town for the incident. So each year the mayor, bailiffs and sixty burgesses of the town had to attend a mass, and pay a silver penny to the university for each dead student. This penance carried on until 1825, when there was probably only the Daily Mail left screaming that if criminals can get away with a 490-year sentence, it’s no wonder the streets aren’t safe.
Today the rift between university and town ought to be less pronounced than in the days when students were almost exclusively from the nobility, but this is complicated by the fact that in Oxford the students are Oxford students. Some of them, though a smaller percentage even than fifty years ago, may be from working-class backgrounds, but all of them are imbued with a sense of superiority. As you head through the centre of town past the courtyards, the gothic buildings, the boys in black gowns, the quaint bridge that seems designed to tempt you to jump off it into the Thames at two in the morning, the perfect lawns, the entrances behind thick spiky chains, you feel as if you’re at a gig with only a white wristband, but you need a purple one to get past the ropes and the security staff to where people like you aren’t allowed.
Even so, the town is seductive, with pubs covered in ivy that make you feel as if you should sit at an oak table with a jug of ale being wise, and gentle paths by the river where you have to delicately brush away dangling lengths of weeping willow to walk along them. It’s hard to reconcile yourself to the fact that this is the same Thames that charges through London all full of rage. It seems as if the river must go there to work all day, then commute back home to Oxford and relax by gently rippling past muddy banks on which there ought to be an old man showing his grandson how to whittle.
So it must seem peculiar to live there if you’re part of the population that has no business with the university. Because Oxford’s college’s aren’t to one side of town, like most work-places that dominate an area, by the docks or on an industrial estate. They’re stood, grandly, peering at you from all angles, reminding you that beyond the gables and the statues are your masters and future masters, and probably a function at which someone’s carrying a tray of tiny sausages to honour a benefactor from the Wellcome Trust.
This is a world that certainly isn’t dominated by the soulless and the corporate, with no room for individuality. Here they saunter across quadrangles between spires and gargoyles, every delicately designed corner of every building intricately unique.
A chancellor of Oxford University would be facing controversy, I would imagine, if he suggested that the colleges should be relocated in a huge education park and become part of chains called First for Firsts and Masters-rite.
Yet there is a town behind these buildings that functions normally. Over the river and past the station are the nail salons and pound shops, the Westgate shopping centre with its Vision Express and Nando’s. It does have a retail park, and a nearby depleted car factory, and a football team that slid out of the League but came back again, and postmen and a Big Yellow Storage Company.
Occasionally the two worlds collide. Walking across the bridge to the normal part of town, I met a professor. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, in a controlled slur that suggested he’d had practice at trying not to seem drunk. ‘Can I talk to you for a moment?’ He had a tight cravat and a short sheepskin coat, and asked again, ‘Could I, just for a moment?’
I said, ‘Are you homeless?’ and tried to give him some change.
‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘No, I’m certainly not homeless. I’m a veterinary surgeon and a professor, and I’m very sorry.’
‘Why are you sorry?’ I asked him. ‘Did you sew up the wrong end of a rabbit?’
‘Oh, I’ve done that many times,’ he said. I wondered if I’d landed in an Eastern European novel, and the day would end with me whipping a dwarf.
‘Are you sorry because you’re meant to be with your wife, and you’re late because you’ve got drunk?’ I asked.
‘My dear dear darling wife has come to expect that of me, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘No, I’m sorry because I have to be at a college function and I’m not sure where it is. I don’t suppose you know where it is, do you?’
I tried to get a clue as to how I could help, but it was always unlikely that I’d be better informed than him about the whereabouts of a function in a college in his city to which he’d been invited.
We carried on in this surreal fashion for about ten minutes, then he put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Well, it’s been lovely talking to you. The main reason I wanted to talk to you is that I was a bit lonely, I’m afraid.’
As he walked off, I concluded two things. Firstly, if I ever have a sick pet I should look him up, as he’d probably be a lot of fun, and even if he was a little shaky with a scalpel, he’d appreciate the company. And secondly, while glorious spires, immaculate lawns and vast gothic wooden doors are inherently more beautiful than smoky putrid power-station cooling towers, I think I prefer Didcot.
Wilmslow (#ulink_425bdc84-dde5-5e16-b7ec-da66dc80115d)
Wilmslow, in Cheshire, is ridiculous. It’s known as ‘the Knightsbridge of the North’, but if Harrods tried to set up a branch there it would be refused planning permission as it would lower the tone of the area. When I first arrived to survey the place for one of the radio shows, I was slightly sceptical of its reputation as a haven for the prime of new money – its population couldn’t just be soap stars, ex-criminals and Premier League footballers; there aren’t enough of them to fill a whole town.
To start with I went to Alderley Edge, where the cream of the area’s over-privileged twattery is said to live, and popped into the post office for a stamp. In the window, just as you might see in any post office, were dozens of little cards, which would normally advertise ‘Pram for sale’ or ‘Carpenter – no job too small’. But in this window the first card I saw said, ‘Ring me if you need a butler.’
And that seems to be Wilmslow’s essence. As you enter the main street there’s a vast Aston Martin showroom, which boasts that it sells more cars than any other branch in Britain, including the one in Mayfair. I went inside, and it was hard to adjust, because none of the normal car-buying etiquette applies. If you circle the DBS 6.0 Volante model, throwing it the half-interested semi-scowl you’re supposed to adopt when sizing up a car for sale, kicking the tyres and scornfully looking under the bonnet as if to say, ‘You’ll be lucky if anyone takes this off your hands,’ and ask disparagingly, ‘How much you asking, mate?’, you’ll get the reply, ‘One hundred and ninety-one thousand, five hundred pounds sir.’
The salesmen are so ‘high class’ they don’t even bullshit you. ‘They call this a four-seater, but I don’t know what size of person would fit in those back seats,’ one told me, adding, ‘But one feature we do offer with these models is the option of customising the upholstery to match the colour of your hat.’
With not a hint of disdain, or that he was thinking ‘Don’t waste my time, serf, you couldn’t afford the fucking wing mirror,’ he demonstrated how the speakers have sensors that automatically move when you get in, adjusting themselves to the direction and height of your ears. Then he perkily told me that one of his customers keeps his car in the garage, sits in it each evening listening to classical music, and never takes it anywhere.
Mostly the High Street is full of beauty salons, dozens of the things, as if the residents leave a beauty salon, walk fifty yards and go, ‘Oh my God, my nails haven’t been done for nearly a minute, they’ll be corroding,’ and dive into another beauty salon.
Each of these emporia needs a unique way to market itself. One, called ‘Esthetique’, has a subheading on its sign that says ‘Beauty – wellbeing – science’. So presumably as they’re manicuring your toenails they’ll tell you that according to quantum mechanics the varnish they’re using has no fixed resting place in the universe. Another has a board outside that says ‘3D eyelashes’. I can see why that would be useful, as it’s so irritating when bits of your body are only in 2D. Those normal eyelashes, you go to brush them and your hand passes straight through them, the awkward two-dimensional buggers. What a delight it must be to have eyelashes that seem like solid objects, rather than looking as if they’ve been projected by film onto your eyelids, though presumably when you’ve had the 3D eyelash treatment you have to hand out special glasses to everyone around you, or the effect doesn’t work.
There’s an endearing old tailor’s shop on the stretch of road to Alderley Edge, full of tape measures and dummies wearing semi-sewn suits, and crisp folded shirts packed on mahogany shelves. In the window was a purple smoking jacket, seductively eccentric. Once you’d put it on, whoever you were, you would surely start flowing with witticisms about the nature of women and reciting captivating anecdotes about your trip to Bermuda with King George VI. ‘I’m just, er, out of interest, asking, er, about the cost of that purple jacket, please,’ I enquired of the immaculately grey, slightly theatrical tailor.
‘Ah, indeed, the purple jacket,’ he purred. ‘That is stitched with such exquisite precision by my dear friend who goes by the name “Dashing Tweeds”. Do you know him?’
‘Not really,’ I said.
‘If you peruse the lining you catch a sense of the inner strength of the cloth, and up close you can feel it almost breathes with pleasure. It will never lose its shape, that item, sir.’
‘Roughly, er, roughly how much?’ I asked, as if the price was just an incidental piece of red tape I had to clarify to satisfy the bureaucrats in my office.
‘That particular item is priced at £1,800,’ he said. ‘Plus VAT.’
‘Hmm,’ I said, as if I was barely interested, and if anything that was disappointingly on the low side, but he must have been able to read in my eyes that every bit of me was going, ‘FOR A FUCKING JACKET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’
But mostly Wilmslow’s money is about property. Football stars such as Wayne Rooney, Peter Crouch, Rio Ferdinand, Cristiano Ronaldo and David Beckham have all bought land there, along with Andrew Flintoff and an assortment of Coronation Street actors. And invariably, once the deal is settled, the first thing the happy buyers do with the new house is to knock it down. Then they’re free to build a modern structure in its place that doesn’t have the embarrassment of being second-hand.
So along the roads that surround Wilmslow are lines of skips and teams of builders catering to this demand. Trades such as interior designer flourish in this environment, more than they probably would in Moss Side, so the place abounds with the likes of Dawn Ward, who designed the Rooneys’ pad. Her proudest creation, she revealed, was a glass floor in a hallway, which enables anyone standing on it to see the snooker table in the room below. I bet one day we’ll all have them, and will look back on the days when if we wanted to know the score of the snooker match downstairs we had to walk down the stairs, with the same incredulous pity we feel now when we learn of villages in Uganda where they still have to fetch water from a well ten miles away.
Every one of these properties boasts a ‘media room’, as if anyone needs a special separate room for when they’re reading a paper or watching the darts. They’ve clearly got so many rooms their owners have to invent purposes for them, which all the others will then want. So there are probably arguments, with Mrs Rooney going, ‘It’s not fair, how come the Flintoffs have got their own particle collider? I want one.’
But it would be hard to beat the estate agent’s leaflet I saw, from ‘Property Confidential’, that oozed pride as it announced the sale of a ‘luxury bungalow’ for £1.75 million. The property included, it said, a swimming pool and sauna, and added, ‘This luxury bungalow also boasts an additional feature – a second floor.’
Occasionally some of the older locals initiate a spot of official grumbling about their area being converted into a Cheshire Dubai, but they don’t seem to have the will to carry it through. For example, some residents complained that Cristiano Ronaldo’s house was ‘offensive and insensitive’, and began the process of demanding a local referendum to change the area’s planning rules. But the plan was scrapped because a referendum was considered too expensive, probably because they’d insist on a solid-gold ballot box.
Nowhere in Wilmslow seems immune to the pervading local ostentatiousness. The Barnado’s charity shop on Alderley Edge High Street is full of Gucci shoes and Armani coats that don’t have prices on them, and you have to ring the bell to be allowed in, as the stuff’s so valuable.
The chip shop has a notice on the menu saying, ‘We often get celebrities in our chip shop. We would be grateful if you would respect their right to eat their meal in privacy.’
It wouldn’t be surprising to find a ‘Grand’ shop, for throw-away household items like ironing-board covers and dishcloths, where everything costs only a grand.
Even crime has its Wilmslow aspect. The Wilmslow Express reported: ‘A mum of two turned have-a-go hero and hit a burglar for six with a cricket bat. The bat was used in the Ashes series by the England squad, and her husband bought it in a charity auction.’ In Wilmslow you can’t attack burglars with any old bat, it’s got to be one worth thousands of pounds for its historical significance. She was probably wandering round the house going, ‘What shall I attack him with? I couldn’t whack him with that tatty old broom, what on earth would he think?’
The Live Cheshire magazine that lies on tables in the cocktail bars and beauty salons has headlines such as ‘Why Mustique is a Must’, and ‘Justin Timberlake and Madonna Swear by it, and Now it’s Come to Cheshire. It’s Hyberbaric Oxygen Technology Skin Treatment’.
While the footballers and soap stars are the most prominent characters fuelling this bizarre fountain of new money, there’s a sub-layer of financiers and bankers; and that, you’d think, must be that: the place is no more than a monument to the triumph of bonuses over talent, a creation of pure Thatcherism.
Except that the Wilmslow spirit goes back further than that, and its fondness for the 1980s goes back to around 1850. This was when Manchester became the heart of the most dynamic phase of the Industrial Revolution, the centre of the world’s cotton and clothing industries, the biggest urban setting on the planet. But it was also squalid, the waste of its citizens slopping merrily down the streets, the smoke creating constant darkness. And the managers and owners of the factories didn’t want to live amidst the gunge they were helping to create. They needed somewhere far enough away that they couldn’t smell the place, but near enough that they could get to work every day. The perfect spot was Wilmslow.
Its Alderley Edge wing was virtually created for that reason. It was barely inhabited at the time, but the railway company did a deal with the Trafford family (of Old Trafford fame), who were the main landowners of the area. Anyone who bought a certain amount of land there would be provided with a lifetime first-class season ticket. Within a few years the first railway commuter town had been created.
But it wasn’t just respite from the soot and sewage of Manchester that the Wilmslow residents were seeking: they wanted a separate world from the people they employed. They saw themselves as members of a new class that had made money without having to inherit it. While they may not have wanted to adopt all the manners of the aristocracy, they did want to create a cultural gap between themselves and the hordes they employed, who they saw as inferior. For example, in the 1850s Henry Gibbs wrote in Autobiography of a Manchester Cotton Manufacturer about a fire that burned down the factory he ran: ‘The women were, of course, the first to escape. But why did they not walk out quietly, with calmness and dignity? There was really no need for them to make such a helter-skelter exit, with their rolling eyes, hair loose and arms unnecessarily used in the act of dragging each other from the place of destruction. “Shame,” I cried, for the noise they were making, to which they took no heed.’
Because you certainly wouldn’t get his class of person behaving in such an uncouth manner; they’d calmly burn to death, without rolling their eyes.
Throughout Wilmslow, houses were built to cater for such people, and while they didn’t have media rooms, they had billiard rooms and servants’ quarters and a million rules of etiquette created to distance their owners from the riff-raff. According to Manchester Made Them, by Katharine Chorley, who was brought up in one such Alderley Edge house: ‘The downstairs lavatory, for instance, was sacrosanct to the men of the family and their guests, the upstairs reserved with equal exclusiveness to the females. Woe betide me if I was ever caught slinking into the downstairs one to save time. Conversely, the good breeding and social knowledge of any male guest who was suspected of having used the upstairs toilet while dressing for dinner was immediately called into question.’
The Manchester nouveaux riches settling in the area were described by the older landed Wilmslow types as ‘Cottontots’. They devised a system for introducing women newly arrived in the area into the right circles. According to Manchester Made Them, ‘A wife or daughter with nothing to do was an emblem of success, like a large house or garden.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Katharine Chorley writes: ‘A socialist was unthinkable in Alderley Edge company, and had he got there he would have been treated with a mixture of distrust, contempt and fear.’ At the very least a socialist would run into even more difficulties than normal, as the master of the house grunted angrily, ‘Sir, I fear your proposition to diminish the gap between rich and poor should have been made prior to the serving of dessert, as advocacy of the overthrow of capitalism after the meat course is strictly forbidden.’
Dessert might have presented another quandary for socialists. Chorley wrote of the manager of a Manchester bank, ‘When he and his wife gave dinner parties, they presented dessert on a solid gold plate.’
A special girls’ school was established to teach the female offspring of this tribe how to eat off gold plates, and be a proper lady. One regular lesson was on how to keep your back straight in a ladylike fashion, so, ‘After midday dinner, we had to lie flat on our backs on the floor for ten minutes, to straighten our spines so we could hold ourselves well, while the mistress in charge read to us from the Daily Telegraph.’
I’d like to see Davina McCall make that fitness DVD. ‘Now, keep that spine as straight as you can and take deep breaths in time to the letters page, and … “Sir: When one regards the hordes of feral youth that blight our city centres” – AND STRETCH – “one is forced to conclude” – KEEP THAT BACK STRAIGHT – “that the time has surely arrived” – DEEP BREATHS NOW – “when we must return” – KEEPING THAT TUMMY TIGHT – “to the virtues of corporal punishment” – AND RELAX.’
In their way, like much of Victorian Britain, the settlers of Wilmslow were establishing tradition. And none of it is different in essence from the craving for 3D eyelashes and sports car upholstery to match your hat.
But a glance beyond the shopfronts suggests that can’t be all there is to Wilmslow. In the inevitable pedestrianised precinct, outside Costa Coffee stands a man selling the Big Issue, and he seems to be there every day. Maybe people walk past him whispering to themselves, ‘Isn’t it dreadful? That poor man has hasn’t even got a second home.’
Or perhaps he’s an art installation. But there’s a side of Wilmslow that he represents, like the Colshaw estate, owned by the council before it was sold off and chunks of it boarded up, where one attempt to clean it up involved removing 104 dumped cars, discarded by joyriders. Or maybe the council misunderstood, and they were all Aston Martins that they assumed had been dumped as they hadn’t moved for years, but actually they all had labourers sitting in them listening to Shostakovich.
Many people in Wilmslow worked at AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals, where three hundred were laid off in 2008, or at Worthington Nicholls air-conditioning plant, which laid off one hundred. It’s unlikely that they all had a butler to hand them their coats as they left work for the last time and say, ‘Your P45, sir.’ The local postmen picketed the sorting office during a strike, in which fifty of the fifty-four staff supported the action.
The young of the area can display classic small-town frustration. Frisko Dan is a local rapper who led a local march in 2010, in support of a ‘Robin Hood tax’ to reduce inequality. Another hip-hop crew managed to rhyme ‘living in Cheshire’ with ‘feel the pressure’.
The average weekly wage in Wilmslow in 2007, according to a report from the Office of National Statistics, was £772, compared to the poorest area of the North-West, the Manchester district of Gorton, where the average was £403. That would seem to confirm the image of Wilmslow as an exclusive enclave for the elite. But you could also interpret those figures as suggesting that the gap between rich and poor areas is much less than might be imagined. Because while the average company director makes fifteen times as much as the average of his employees, investment bankers and the real rich can make more in bonuses in a single year than the people who clean their office earn in a lifetime. So you might expect the difference between Wilmslow’s average and that of a poor borough of Manchester to be much wider.
This should be even more likely when you think that that average must include Wayne Rooney and friends. If you took a few dozen comically rich superstars out of the statistics the gap would be smaller still. Every rich area has its working-class quarter, just as every poor town has a rich bit. The divide between rich and poor is much less a conflict between areas than one within areas.
Perhaps an area can seem to be dominated by wealth more than it really is, because a handful of rich people have a disproportionate bearing on the look of a place. The shops will cater for them, because they’re the ones who have the money to spend. A country road on which ten millionaires live is an area swimming in wealth, whereas ten people on the minimum wage wouldn’t fill a single house converted into bedsits. The restaurants, beauty salons and purple-jacket shops tend to the needs of the richer section of the community. So you end up with a place that, in some ways, must be even more frustrating to live in if you’re on a low income. Because on the way to work you have to pass an Aston Martin showroom and a shop selling jackets for £1,800 plus VAT, and even if you’re driven to burglary you’re likely to get walloped with a bat signed by Andrew Flintoff.
Wigan (#ulink_715ae677-1830-5c9b-ab56-61e8d6b3db69)
A few miles from the media rooms and glass floors of Wilmslow is the slight contrast of Wigan, where I sensed that the old couple hunched in the tea bar in the indoor market didn’t trust us. All around were the props and costumes you’d lay out if you wanted to make a film set in 1971, maybe involving a detective trying to get information out of a trader who sold knocked-off kettles. Above each stall was an old green or brown board with the owner’s name painted by hand, in the sort of font used for Olde English Marmalade and by companies who want to convince you the stuff they stew in a vat in an industrial estate in Kent was made by a farmer’s wife with a rolling pin, who says, ‘Right, that’s today’s cherry pies for Marks and Spencer in St Albans sorted, now I’ll just take round the vicar’s gooseberries and I can get on with Mrs Finlay’s plum crumble portions for Budgens in Exeter.’
These signs usually suggest that you’ll be offered a small dish of hand-picked olives stuffed with low-fat organic Tuscan soil at £30 an ounce, or stilton mixed with conkers packed in the sort of fancy box you’d use for a wedding ring. But in Wigan they don’t need to artificially recreate the chic individuality of pre-industrial shopping. These stalls really have been there for a hundred years. If any designers for farmers’ markets were to wander in they’d clap their hands and shriek, ‘Oh, how rustic! It’s so authentic!’
There are countless racks of kids’ dresses, and shirts for four quid, and a record stall with a range from Hot Chocolate to Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Top of the Pops albums. There’s a stall selling sherbet by the ounce and stuck-together pear drops, and a café with rickety chairs that belong in a primary school, that only sells lobby, which is a stew with potatoes that looks as if it’s been made at a camp by scouts.
And there’s a tea bar, that sells tea from a huge green metal pot with the enamel flaking off, in huge white mugs. As we sat slurping in contentment the old couple, wrapped in so many scarves and hats and coats and jumpers that if a madman had gone berserk with a rifle they’d have been perfectly safe as no bullet could penetrate all those layers, glared at us as if we were occupying troops in full uniform. The man nodded in our direction and said with utter disdain, ‘Manchester thespians.’
If I’d gone across and told him I was from even further away than Manchester he’d have said, ‘Surely not Stockport, you pouf.’
Outside this market is the pedestrianised centre of Wigan, indistinguishable from the centre of anywhere else. The building societies, W.H. Smith and anti-vivisection campaigners are all in their designated places, and it’s by a door opposite Clinton Cards that you pass through a magical vortex into the market, a world that hasn’t so much resisted modern corporate life as remained unaware that it exists. Maybe that’s because for a century or more Wigan fitted the notion of what was considered a working-class town better than anywhere, so that when George Orwell wrote his study of working-class life, it was Wigan he went to live in, to see what the proles get up to.
The pier that provides the title of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is a slightly raised step, about two feet long, on one side of the Leeds–Liverpool canal, from where coal was once tipped into the barges. The area alongside the canal used to be packed with one of the greatest concentrations of mills in the country. One of those mills, just behind the pier, became a mill museum, but now that’s shut down as well. You can’t get more working-class than that. Presumably the actors who had to walk round dressed as Victorian loom operators went home one day and said, ‘Bad news I’m afraid. There’s trouble at Mill Experience.’ Now they’ll have to hope that someone invests in a museum about what it used to be like working in the museum.
Opposite the pier is a factory that anywhere else would have been converted into offices or flats or a restaurant, but that turns out still to be a factory. It makes Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls, the pride of Wigan. According to the logo, the mint balls will ‘Keep you all aglow’, and there’s a picture of Uncle Joe looking like your favourite uncle in a top hat, and you think you remember skipping down the street in short trousers with the sixpence you got for polishing Mr Higginbottom’s Austin Rover to buy a pack of mint balls, which were not only the finest sweets but back then were believed to prevent whooping cough.
