Читать книгу Mark Steel’s In Town - Mark Steel, Mark Steel - Страница 8

The proof that every town retains a soul, no matter how concrete, corporate, shopping-malled, retail-parked and Tescoed it becomes, is in Basingstoke. Because Basingstoke is a new town, plonked somewhere in the south, though no one seems exactly sure where to say it is, even if they live there. It’s renowned as the classic modern commuter town, strangled by regional headquarters for insurance companies and hundreds and hundreds of roundabouts, some of which you can only drive round and then straight on, so you wonder whether the roads were laid by a gang of workmen with an obsessive compulsive disorder, who if they go more than an hour without building a roundabout start rocking backward and forward and making deep groaning noises.

Amongst the organisations who’ve established their head offices there are the AA, which might be because it’s the place they’re most often called out to, where their mechanics arrive at the broken-down vehicle and say, ‘Ah, I see what’s happened. You’ve got so frustrated with the roundabouts you’ve abandoned the car and set fire to it.’

The centre of Basingstoke is the Festival Shopping Mall. As you leave the train station, it seems there’s nowhere to go except be poured through the Festival Mall’s automatic doors, into a city of New Look, H&M and Monsoon units in which you try to keep moving forward in the belief that eventually you must come out into open Basingstoke. After a while it occurs to you that perhaps this is open Basingstoke, and that when you finally reach the other side you’ll pass one last W.H. Smith and emerge into countryside and past a sign that says ‘Thank you for visiting Basingstoke’.

Its image isn’t helped by the fact that on Wikipedia, under ‘Cultural Impact’, it says: ‘An episode of Top Gear was filmed there in 2008.’

So I was surprised to find a book called Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture. I thought, ‘Maybe there’s some stuff I’ve missed, like Jimi Hendrix started there, singing, “There’s got to be some way outta here, but every roundabout takes me to another fucking one”.’ Or Jackson Pollock’s most famous painting was called If You can Make Your Way Through Basingstoke’s One-Way System, Joining these Red Dots Should be a Piece of Piss.

The book starts off on a positive note, telling us: ‘Basingstoke is one of the most derided towns in England. Its reputation is as an over-developed eyesore of numbing dullness. Its very name lends itself to mockery. Basingjoke, Boringstoke and the ironic Amazingstoke are used by its own residents, not always with affection.’

But if you look into the town’s past it becomes clear that this isn’t just a new town built by numbers to fill up a bit of Hampshire. Because, far from being solely a modern butt of jokes, the place has been loathed for centuries. The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, went there in 1759 and wrote afterwards, ‘The inhabitants are like wild beasts, slow of heart and dull of understanding.’

‘But surely,’ you must be thinking, ‘it was more exciting in 1669.’ Well, the Grand Duke of Tuscany went there that year, and his valet wrote an account of the visit: ‘His Highness, arriving betimes at Basingstoke, set out to explore it on foot, but it seemed so wretched it hardly repaid the effort of walking a few paces.’

‘All right,’ you’ll say, ‘but what about 1882?’ Which is a fair point, except that in 1882 an article about Basingstoke in The Times said: ‘About midway between London and Salisbury is a benighted little town inhabited chiefly by a race of barbarians.’

This is hugely encouraging for the town, because it means it has a past, a human touch beyond the everlasting Festival Centre and office blocks with eerily silent reception areas. To be insulted with such venom it must have been up to something interesting.

Basingstoke used to be a market town, and its current residents seem aware of this. They refer to a huge and seemingly pointless wall that sits in the centre as ‘the Great Wall of Basingstoke’, and the popular local website ‘It’s Basingstoke not Boringstoke’ describes it as a ‘great mass of concrete poured over the remains of the old market town’.

Also, as Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture points out, the town was the home of Thomas Burberry, a Victorian draper who established the line of clothes that bear his name, and who apparently invented the raincoat. It could be argued that Charles Mackintosh’s coat, which came earlier, was the first raincoat, but Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture points out: ‘But these sticky smelly easily punctured garments were a crude concept compared to Burberry’s silky gabardine.’ I’ve no idea who is right here, but it’s joyful to see the town so stroppy over the issue, like when a quiet old aunty unexpectedly gets angry about an incident on a bus in 1957.

So there’s clearly a pride in the town’s past. One of Basingstoke’s heroes, who seems to be known by the under-thirties as well as the older residents, is John Arlott the cricket commentator. Arlott was extraordinary, partly because he spoke in a series of six- or seven-word sections followed by a short pause, as if everything he said was a poem, and all in a gentle, lyrical Basingstoke lilt, with an underlying purr, as if while he was speaking he was pushing a slightly broken old lawnmower.

He’d quietly take the piss out of the other commentators. After one of them told listeners that across the ground he could see the sun setting in the west, when Arlott came on he said slowly, ‘You can rest assured that if the sun starts to set in the east I’ll be the first to let you know.’

Arlott was a committed anti-racist, and was instrumental in inviting Basil D’Oliveira, a ‘Cape Coloured’ cricketer who was barred from playing professionally in his native South Africa, to play in England. Arlott called his autobiography Basingstoke Boy, and his portrait is on every brochure or website that publicises the town.

There’s one time in Basingstoke’s history when I wish he’d been there, because the town now scorned as a symbol of suburban sleepiness was once known as irredeemably violent. One report described how ‘In Basingstoke election days are occasions for joyous rioting. And even cricket matches are tediously prone to ending in violent disorder.’

You can almost hear Arlott saying, ‘And there goes Fat Jimmy coming round the wicket – with a Stanley knife – while a crowd on the boundary – chant, “Who are yer, who are yer” – and one wonders if they don’t know who their adversaries are – why it is they’re kicking them with considerable vigour – in an area not distant from the testicles.’

This history, and the way it’s seeped into the culture of the modern town, suggests that the old Basingstoke hasn’t been entirely destroyed by the new, despite the impact of the 1944 Greater London Plan, which aimed to stop London becoming any bigger by building a series of new towns and expanding others, such as Basingstoke.

Houses were built for 40,000 people to move there, which must have seemed disruptive if you were already there, but might have created less tension had hundreds of people not been moved out of their homes to make way for new estates and roundabouts. Dozens of tradesmen were evicted so their workshops could be demolished and replaced by a new shopping centre. One man who felt aggrieved was Alfie Cole, who ran a stables on the Basing Road. In 1966 he drove a pony and trap to Downing Street to hand in a petition to the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and as Alfie put it, ‘dumping lorryloads of topsoil at strategic parts of the town during the morning rush hour’ as he went.

Alfie seems almost as revered in the town as John Arlott, and when I mentioned him in a show at the theatre there was almost complete recognition. The majority of people who live in Basingstoke now must have come there as a result of the expansion after the sixties, yet it appears that most of today’s residents identify with the town as a whole, including its figures from before they were there, and approve of the campaigns to prevent the changes that enabled them to come.

Even in a town the citizens themselves refer to as Boringstoke, they want to feel that its traditions and quirks belong to them. It’s their boring town. For example, there’s a blue statue in Wote Street of a mother with a child, that everyone calls ‘Wote Street Willy’. Even a travel website describes it by saying: ‘At 7 tonnes it’s the largest phallic statue in Britain.’

Almost the whole of Basingstoke seems aware that the Forum office block in the town is the tallest building on a line between London and New York, which is indeed impressive, although nearly all of that line goes over the Atlantic Ocean, on which there aren’t many skyscrapers to offer much competition.

The wall, the roundabouts and the jokey image are what make the people of Basingstoke half-proud, rather than the joys of how easy it is to commute to London, or the variety of identical chain stores that have been attracted to the Festival Shopping Mall.

Similarly, Crawley in Sussex, about halfway between London and Brighton, was designated a new town in the 1946 New Towns Act, and built to house 50,000 people. Crawley is mostly a suburb of Gatwick Airport, and it has a feel of earthiness, as if while there are the smug people who moved from London to Brighton, and who boast of how the sea air is marvellous for the kids, Crawley is made up of people who thought of doing that, but got halfway and said, ‘Fuck it, I’m knackered, let’s stay here.’

And it keeps growing, the employment opportunities it offers always attracting newcomers. But the areas within the town retain their quaint names that could easily fool people. There’s Pease Pottage and Three Bridges, whose residents must think, ‘It’s lovely round here, quiet and peaceful. The only noise you ever get is from a major international airport.’

At one point during a show in Crawley I suggested that they must get used to timing conversations to fit in the moments between long-haul flights to Chicago. They all looked utterly bemused, as if to say, ‘Is there an airport? Near here? Are you sure? We’ve never noticed it.’ But it turned out I was the one misinformed, because the flightpaths are organised so that no planes fly over the town.

The airport is simply a huge workplace that dominates Crawley, making it like a giant modern pit village. And that makes it cohesive, for example with a Labour Party that’s as established as that in any old industrial town, although it’s only had fifty years to go through the cycle of being formed with enthusiasm, getting a Member of Parliament elected and then collapsing in a cloud of disillusionment.

The airport should make people across Crawley feel a sense of camaraderie. For example, its presence means that no buildings in the town are allowed to be more than four storeys high. The Hawth Theatre boasts that it’s the tallest structure in town, so if al Qaeda choose to attack Crawley, it’s the theatre they’ll go for.

And maybe the fact that so many people are connected to one workplace has enabled a local football team to become implanted as part of the culture, in a way that’s taken place in few British towns since the 1920s, by which time the bases of most football clubs had become cemented. Crawley Town FC was helped along the way by the wealth of a character of the sort who, to stay legal, newspapers refer to as ‘colourful’, and who was suspended from football for corruption at his previous club in Boston. To get a sense of life at Crawley Town, here’s a report by a visiting fan of their match with Bath City: ‘Their manager, a rather large Steve Evans, spent the whole match pacing up and down the touchline, shouting abuse at the Bath players, the referee and everything else that holds existence on the planet. At half time an announcement was made that went, “There’s an old man that lives behind the stadium and has made a complaint. He says there’s too much noise and we need to quieten down. So let’s make the bastard even more annoyed and make some noise.”’

Now, the theory that all towns, however corporatised, retain an underlying soul, is stretched to the limit in Milton Keynes. There can be few places that try so hard to live up to their image. The first sign that something’s not healthy comes as you drift through the Buckinghamshire countryside towards the town, and pass the first roundabout, which has a grid number. So a sign will tell you this is H4 or V5 roundabout, as if you’re a Lilliputian moving through a giant game of Battleships.

What’s more disconcerting is that, apart from these grid numbers, the roundabouts all look identical. The view in every direction from each of them is of a highway with trees perfectly spaced on each side, and a giant rectangular warehouse behind the trees, so you’ve no idea if you’ve been past this bit already or not.

You’re entrapped in this grid with no way of working out what direction you’re going; although I haven’t tested this, I expect the town planners have fixed it so compasses don’t work here, they just spin violently the way they’re supposed to do if you’re in the Bermuda Triangle.

The most sinister warehouse belongs to River Island. It stretches the whole length of one grid section, a shiny oblong block with no apparent entrances, no bobbles or chimneys or bits sticking out, just a perfect smooth geometrical structure that’s far too big for River bloody Island. If all the clothes in all the world’s River Island stores were put in a pile, they would barely fill one corner of this complex, and if it emerges one day that it’s full of long corridors and solid steel doors that open only after a biometric sensor scans your iris and a sugary automated voice with an American accent says, ‘Identity confirmed – you may proceed to the excavation section,’ and where an army of ex-Death Row inmates are building a tunnel to China in preparation for an invasion, I shan’t be entirely surprised.

With no churches or pubs or graffiti or bridges or landmarks to plot your position you find yourself not only lost, as you can be in any town, but unsure where you are in relation to the rest of the world, as if you were in a rowing boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The grid numbers only make it more confusing, as you pull over and try to calculate that if you’ve just passed H5, and the one before that was V6, then H7 must be to the right, which, as H9 cancels out V3 over 5 divided by x, the angle of the line H2–V8 must be equal to the sum of V1 squared.

Milton Keynes is a town that must have been designed by a mathematician, one of those philosophical ones like Pythagoras who saw numbers as the only part of the universe that embody perfection. Even the one building you can see as you pass through the town on the train is a huge cube comprising hundreds of identical glass squares on all sides that looks like part of a puzzle for super-intelligent giants.

Outside the station all is chillingly symmetrical, with even the lamp posts having spherical tops so the pattern isn’t spoilt. I assume there must be bylaws to ensure that this picture is maintained, so that if you’re planning to walk down one side of highway H2, you have to get someone to walk down the other side at the same speed, to stop the place becoming lopsided. As an experiment, somebody should try something like leaving a kettle on the pavement to see whether an official would place one on the other side within minutes, maybe having emerged from a pipe that leads to the control room under River Island.

I took my son around Milton Keynes when he was twelve, and he found it bewildering, which I suppose was a good sign. Two years later I told him I was going back there to do a show and he said, ‘Oh no, you’ll be on stage and someone in the front row will slyly pass you a note that says “Please help us”.’

Defenders of the town point out that it’s a pleasant environment, with open spaces and lakes and a low crime rate and efficient schools and all sorts of activities, but the qualities advanced as positive aspects are all top-down, as if arranged by a happiness committee. They’ve been organised by the people who produce brochures that say: ‘And if ballooning is your preferred leisure activity, then it’s up, up and away with the Milton Keynes Hot Air Ballooning Association. Yes, whether it’s double word scores at the Indoor Scrabble Centre on H3 or artificial shark fishing at the hexagonal lake on the corner of V7 and H5, you’ll find all your desires are catered for here in Milton Keynes.’

Living there must feel as if you’re part of a social experiment, with cameras following you to monitor the effects of issues such as triangular shapes on the heart rate. It was born when a Labour housing minister, Richard Crossman, announced where it would be built in 1966. The chairman of the committee set up to oversee the building of the town told Crossman he wanted a ‘properly planned publicly owned town’, and there was clearly an idealism driving the project. Maybe the dream owed something to the dominant socialist view of the time, that aspired to create order from above, organised by the state, as practised by the Soviet Union. In which case, on top of the gulags and the pact with Hitler, we can blame Stalinism for Milton Keynes as well.

The result is a town that’s too clean and ordered. The state of mind of those most eager to defend the new town is shown in the book Milton Keynes: Image and Reality, which boasts: ‘By the mid-1980s we could aspire to be almost at the same level as Croydon.’

In some ways the place has been a success, like a mini-America, built on immigration and a promise of a stable community on a new frontier. If there’d been a properly funded public-relations department in Washington in the 1800s, they’d have probably made adverts saying ‘Come to America’ in which cowboy children ran across Kentucky holding red balloons.

But like the police officers who run the village in the film Hot Fuzz, who are so determined to keep their domain perfect that they arrange the murder of anyone who transgresses the etiquette of idyllic rural life, you feel the people who arrange Milton Keynes feel uneasy if anyone does anything to threaten the place’s controlled order of perfection.

It’s symbolic that in order to get a Football League team, Milton Keynes bypassed the route of developing a club within the community, and brought one in, the MK Dons, a team that had been Wimbledon in South London until its owners took it as a franchise and planted it in its new home.

What you feel the town needs is grubbiness. It needs a market with kids’ clothes tattily piled on a table next to a man with sideburns selling second-hand CDs by the Average White Band and Supertramp. It needs an area the rest of the town warns you not to go, a kebab shop that’s the subject of rumours about missing puppies and a pub that everyone claims to have been in on the night Mad Jimmy went berserk with a cattle prod.

Where the old socialist planners and modern corporate planners agree is that society, and the towns that make a society, should be organised from above. But in time Milton Keynes will develop a soul from within. There will inevitably be bands and rappers, poets and writers who complain eloquently about the town and so help to give it a human touch. Eventually the football supporters will identify with the team enough to moan incessantly about it, and it will become part of the community.

One day the protest groups, the graffiti artists, the eccentrics and flawed shards of humanity that make a town whole will emerge. They’ll shave corners off the angles and put irregular-shaped objects in the centre, and while the original architects might shudder at the unravelling of their plans, Milton Keynes will become a town at last.