Mark Steel - Mark Steel’s In Town

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

The right of Mark Steel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

IN TOWN. Copyright © Mark Steel 2011.

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Source ISBN: 9780007412426

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007412433

Version: 2015-01-21

This book is dedicated to all the people

who’ve lived in history, in towns or other places,

without whom it would not have been possible.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Penzance

New Towns: Basingstoke, Crawley, Milton Keynes

Birmingham

Didcot, Oxford

Wilmslow

Wigan

Horwich

London

Outer London

Hereford

Norwich

Boston

Surrey

Merthyr Tydfil

Edinburgh

Orkney

Dumfries

Andersonstown

Colchester

Exeter

Portland

Motorways

Yorkshire

Nottingham

Coventry

Walsall

Lewes

Gateshead

Kent

Bristol

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

What’s the point in going anywhere if the place you go to is the same as the one you left? Who’d bother going on a holiday that was advertised as: ‘Visit the magic of the Seychelles, it’s IDENTICAL to your own house.’

Imagine if in Tunisia, instead of the background of the call to prayers, the mosques played Magic FM. Or if Paris didn’t have that slightly exotic drainy smell, because EU regulations had compelled the place to be cleaned with Jif.

Once, in the New York subway, a huge woman barged into me and yelled, ‘Hey, out my way asshole!’ And it was marvellous, because that’s what’s supposed to happen in New York. It was as exciting as when I was nineteen and went to Amsterdam and bought a lump of dope off a man in a woolly hat but it turned out to be mud.

After taking the trouble to go to the Lake District you want it to smell of cow pats, and at Blackpool you want everything to look as if it should be in a Carry On film.

Having toured Britain plenty of times, usually to talk to an audience for the evening, I find these local quirks compelling. For example, on the way to Skipton, in North Yorkshire, I noticed a road sign to a town called Keighley. Later, during the show, I asked the audience, ‘Is Keighley your rival town?’ And the room went chillingly quiet, until one woman called out with understated menace, ‘Keighley – is a sink of evil.’

There was something delightful about this, because it was an expression of specifically Skipton malevolence.

Similarly, I went to Merthyr Tydfil, a blighted town at the top of the Rhondda Valley that’s been shut down bit by bit. After the show the manager of the theatre told me, ‘People often come in and ask what time a performance is starting, so I’ll tell them, “It starts at seven-thirty,” and they’ll say, “Oh, that’s a pity. I won’t be able to come to that, as I’ll be drunk by then.”’

And somehow there was a warmth to hearing that, because it was a story of distinctly Merthyr despair.

Before appearing in Stockton-on-Tees, in the North-East, I was sent a message on Twitter by a local resident that said: ‘This town is where Joseph Walker invented the safety match in 1834. Before that, when we wanted to set fire to upturned stolen cars we had to rub two sticks together.’

And before my visit to Cambridge, someone sent me a message about the town saying, ‘This place is Hogwarts for wankers.’ It was a cosy thought, because it could only apply to Cambridge, and ought to be the slogan on the masthead of the local paper.

The elements of a town that make it unique are what make it worth visiting. But also, any expression of local interest or eccentricity is becoming a yell of defiance.

Because the aim of society now seems to be to make every city centre so depressingly identical that if our town planners were put in charge of Athens, they’d knock down the Parthenon and replace it with a shopping mall called ‘The Acropolis Centre’, with an announcement that there was much excitement, as the new centre would have a River Island and a Nando’s.

You could be dropped blindfolded into a city centre you’d never been to before, and guess correctly that there’d be a Clinton Cards just there, then a Vodafone, Carphone Warehouse, Boots, Specsavers and Next just there, with the anti-vivisection stall there, and on a Saturday you’d hear a ‘pheep’ and know the Peruvians were about to start on the pan pipes just there, and within the hour they’d have pheeped their way through ‘Mull of Kintyre’ and ‘I Just Called to Say I Love You’ and ‘Ob-la-di Ob-la-fucking-da’, as I believe it’s now officially called.

With equal confidence you could predict that just out of town there’d be a concrete expanse containing a giant Tesco, PC World, Majestic Wine Warehouse, Comet, Dreams, and an unfathomable junction with traffic lights facing in all directions that makes no difference anyway, as every turning forces you into the car park at Iceland and there seems to be no way of escaping except by reversing through the checkout at Carpet Right.