Mark Steel’s In Town. Mark Steel
Kernow by Bernard Deacon, in 1847 the quarrymen went on demonstrations carrying the red flag, but with a pasty stuck on the end of each flagpole. (Perhaps their anthem went ‘The workers’ flag is highly priced, with onions, beef and carrots diced.’)
The pasty is a symbol of Cornish pride, to the extent that the Cornish rugby team still begins each game by booting a symbolic inflated pasty through the posts.
But recently the town has become divided over a modern issue. In 2009 the government offered money for a new terminal for the Scilly ferry. Some people said it would destroy the town, especially the harbour, so they set up a group called ‘Friends of Penzance Harbour’. In opposition, those in favour of the new terminal set up ‘True Friends of Penzance Harbour’. Presumably the first lot were tempted to retaliate with ‘Passionate Lovers of the Harbour Who Plan to MARRY the Harbour’, to which the other lot would come back with ‘Mistresses of the Harbour Who the Harbour Turns to for Comfort and Dirty Filthy Sex Between the Boats Because You Can’t Give it What it NEEDS’.
Each group had demonstrations and Facebook pages and protest songs on YouTube, and wrote millions of furious letters, and there were hundreds of websites, and then the local MP proposed a compromise called Option PZ that was hated by both groups. If you think this is all an exaggeration, here’s an extract from a letter written to the local paper by a councillor who supported the new terminal: ‘The claim that the vast majority have opposed option A reminds me of those extraordinary claims by Soviet and Nazi propagandists. It is a colossal untruth, in the tradition of Dr Joseph Goebbels.’
Exactly. Goebbels always began his speeches: ‘Jews and Communists are plotting to prevent the building of terminals so that Aryans are left stranded, unable to dock.’ Equally measured from the other side was this: ‘John the Baptist, you will remember, foretold the coming of Christ. He spoke fearlessly against the politically powerful of the time and lost his head in the process. Some things in life must be spoken against and resisted. The council’s tawdry decision to desecrate the harbour wall is one of them.’
It seems that someone in that council must have been cackling, ‘Bring me the head of the designer of the Friends of Penzance Harbour Facebook page.’ Council meetings here must be fantastic. In most areas they just go, ‘With regard to the proposed bus shelter, a document is to be submitted,’ but in Penzance it’s, ‘I suppose next you’ll be invading Poland,’ and ‘It’s people like me who saw Christ was coming.’
As an outsider you have to wonder whether this is the best use of everyone’s campaigning resources, and if they put that energy into other issues, they might at least get themselves a dentist.
But maybe it’s right that this gloriously overblown internal row should be about an issue that seems minor to anyone outside. This is a town in which the High Street chain stores like Boots and Clinton Cards are punctuated by a shop that sells juggling sticks and playing cards, and in which there’s a building, between a pub and a second-hand bookshop, that for no apparent reason is designed like an Egyptian palace, and by the sea is an oval art-deco outdoor swimming pool that had a cannon built into one side to fire at German ships during the war.
So Penzance is the ideal place to do something off-centre, like setting up a pagan snooker club or a nudist butterfly-collecting society. It’s as if you can do whatever you fancy, because the authorities will say, ‘They can’t do that. Oh, bloody hell, I’m not going all the way down there, let them do what they bloody well want.’
New Towns: Basingstoke, Crawley, Milton Keynes
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