by Tim Moore
Rhyl’s fall from grace was swift and dramatic. Between 1979 and 1988, the number of visitor nights fell by over a quarter, and then by another third in the seven years that followed. Of the eighteen separate seafront properties that offered tourist accommodation in the 1977 season, just three were still doing so by 2000. And so Rhyl skulked away into the shadowy overlap that exists between the melancholy of a faded seaside resort and the heavier shit of hardcore urban degeneration. Attracted by the ample availability of cheap accommodation, jobless drifters gravitated towards the town. By the mid 1980s, the tabloids had dubbed it the ‘Costa del Dole’, and today a quarter of Rhyl’s 26,000 population lives in long-term b. & b. accommodation. The West End ward – which takes in the seafront – rates as the most deprived area in Wales, and the town as a whole is burdened with the highest unemployment rate in Britain: 48.9 per cent of the adult population is classified as economically inactive. A third of all Denbighshire crimes are committed in Rhyl. The Scousers-and-smack reputation seems to date back to 1996, when local police discovered that most of Rhyl’s heroin addicts were being supplied by a fourteen-year-old boy from Liverpool. (He kept his stash in those plastic capsules out of Kinder Eggs, and was driven around in a big car by two heavies: the whole operation seems like some Young Apprentice for class-A drug dealers.)
Back on West Parade even the seagulls sounded mournful. Rhyl’s Victorian visitors had gazed up at the town’s snowed-on Snowdonian backdrop with hearty relish, but today the mountains looked less of an inspiration than a reproach, there to emphasise the frail impermanence of the dying town laid out at their feet, in fact the futility of all human endeavour. Everything kept going wrong for Rhyl, yet still they kept trying to put it right. To atone for the misguided demolition of their pier and that splendid theatre, Rhyl’s authorities had erected some faux Victorian booths with roof finials and Gothic arches, housing the tourist office and the snack bars and coin-slot attractions of a ‘children’s village’. But it all looked so half-baked and shoddy: sagging fibreglass, stained concrete and business-park brickwork, a bad copy of a fake, like Main Street USA in Disneyland recommissioned by Leonid Brezhnev. His input would certainly explain the starkly incompatible 250-foot glory-to-the-people observation tower that speared into the cold, dead sky.
Further up, the seafront pleasure gardens that had been one of Rhyl’s many pride and joys were now a skatepark, an abstract landscape of ramps and half-pipes. While appreciating the value of such a facility in a town where needle-sharing is only a bored afternoon away, I couldn’t understand why it had to be put here. Rhyl is hardly short of vacant land, yet the town had opted to hand over its showpiece public space – the promenade’s focal point, backdrop to a million sepia postcards – to hooded teenage miserablists.
I peered over the sea wall and beheld Rhyl’s fabled miles of golden sand, shrunk by high tide to a muddy ribbon of shingle. By this stage it hardly seemed to matter: I fancied that even in high season, the British bucket-and-spade holiday demanded a degree of goose-pimpled hardiness that today’s centrally heated, double-glazed native namby-pambies no longer possessed. Lay out a towel on just one Mediterranean beach, and there’s no going back to windbreaks.
Hence the Sun Centre, Rhyl’s attempt to ‘bring the seaside inside’, opened to great hurrahs in 1980. Permanent summer! Tropical storm effects! Europe’s first indoor surfing pool! But even from the outside I could sense the excitement hadn’t been sustained. A massive plastic barn, weathered and anonymous, the Sun Centre looked less like a climate-controlled aquatic paradise than the sort of place where you might find yourself losing an argument with customer services about a faulty leaf blower.
I knew it wouldn’t be open again for two months, but I was keen to see what had inspired contributors at reviewcentre. com to rate the place as the worst tourist attraction in all of Wales. Happily, it shared a lobby with the New Pavilion Theatre, which was preparing for a matinée performance of Noddy in Toyland (forthcoming highlights: Roger Dee Sings the Johnny Cash Story and Go West – the 25th Anniversary Tour). I walked in and pressed my face up to the Sun Centre’s locked glass doors, catching a thin waft of chlorine, mouldy towels and last season’s chip fat. Drained and stained, the irregular-shaped pools seemed sad and creepy; the primary-hued plastic employed for everything from water slides to snack huts had dulled and roughened like an old toothbrush. The whole Chernobyl fairground look.
Poor Rhyl. They’d drained the civic coffers building this place, only to see its attractions swiftly matched, then trumped, by every other suburban leisure centre in Britain. Beyond the odd mouthful of Elastoplast, most of the online gripes focused on the Sun Centre’s failure to improve or update, to offer jaded regulars something more, something different for their £7.95. Today, Europe’s first indoor surfing pool isn’t even the best in Wales.
I tramped across the gum-blotted carpet tiles and pushed my way out into the wind. Opposite stood a pair of large Victorian hotels in the mock-Tudor style: one was for sale, the other long-since burnt-out. ‘Rhyl just needs to stop pretending it’s a tourist town,’ said one local commentator. ‘There’s nothing for tourists here, so why keep hoping they’ll come back?’ Walking back towards Craig, I wondered what choice the place had. Perhaps in America, or somewhere else more ruthlessly commercial, the local authorities would have bowed to market forces, accepted their town had outlived its usefulness and abandoned it. I fired Craig up, stuck the heater on max and puttered off towards Rhyl’s caravan belt. ‘The best thing about Rhyl is the A548 out of it,’ wrote one local, introducing a new spin on an old joke. ‘The worst thing is that this takes you straight to Prestatyn.’
Craig built up a decent head of steam as darkness fell and we reeled our way back north-west on England’s motorway network. I drove much too fast to Castleford, which offered no room at any of its shittier inns, and even faster to Doncaster, which did.
Doncaster ranked fifteenth on the Location list, and was my wife’s personal nomination – courtesy of many bleak and hypothermic evenings spent changing trains there en route to York University, whose memory even twenty years on brings out her thousand-yard stare. An Ozzy-resistant roundabout network and the MP3 player’s decision to engage ‘repeat’ mode during Kevin Rowland’s cover version of ‘The Greatest Love of All’ meant I arrived in central Doncaster ready to hate everything about the place, but it just didn’t happen. My downtown hotel had been damned in the harshest terms by reviews that ranked it worse than 597 Yorkshire rivals, and better than only eight, but had naturally just emerged from a comprehensive makeover. So too, as I discovered during a brisk walk through Doncaster’s silent night, had the railway station, restored to the airy, bright, monochrome grandeur of its 1938 refit – the very year that the Doncaster-built Mallard set a record it still holds as the fastest steam locomotive on earth. I found it hard to imagine such an inspiringly historic building playing host to the worst nights of my wife’s life, though she may be pleased to hear that the forebearance displayed during her many ordeals is commemorated by a discreet plaque near the platform 3 waiting room.
Doncaster’s shopping malls seemed no worse than averagely bland and ill-considered, and its streets displayed no signs of rampant civic despair beyond a few too many Cash Converters and the odd 99p-all-night booze promotion. And the flag-stoned market square was a proper delight, congregated with venerable coaching inns and the fancy old façades of Doncaster’s corn and wool exchanges. I’d forgotten that places like this ever survived in British town centres, and felt something akin to relief when I walked round the back and saw St George’s Minster, a jewel of Victorian Gothic and the town’s loveliest edifice, cowering in the middle of a gyratory system.
What’s bright yellow and contains 1,872 calories? That’s right: deep-fried Scotsman’s liver on a bed of Quavers. But lagging just one calorie behind is Chinese lemon chicken, a dish that had been on my to-eat list as the unhealthiest available on British high streets, and which fate now chose
to offer up in a menu affixed to a restaurant window directly opposite my hotel.
‘Is sweet, yeh?’ said the terrifically enthusiastic waitress when I placed my order. ‘You like sweet?’
‘I absolutely love it,’ I lied, for my place on the Chinese takeaway taste spectrum lies at the distant other extreme: sour-and-sourer.
‘Oh, I tell husband in kitchen! He make special for you, extra sweet!’
The restaurant was the usual study in red, gold and heavily lacquered imperial black. On my table a plastic sprig of pink blossom sat in a vase full of coloured glass gravel; it was promptly joined by a basket of prawn crackers and a pint of lager – not my last of the evening, if the waitress’s terrible parting words lived up to their tongue-varnishing promise. I didn’t quite have the place to myself. A few tables back a young executive was trying to impress two female colleagues – and doing an excellent job of it, if one assumed they were interviewing him for a position as South Yorkshire’s most insufferable arse. At one point I heard him say, ‘Let me offer you ladies a king prawn – I’m in chill-out project-handover mode.’ At no point did I hear his companions say anything that wasn’t a request for more wine.
My yellow peril arrived during a monologue on the interpersonal shortcomings of Carl in the finance department over at Derby HQ. ‘You lucky!’ said the waitress, laying down a steaming plate and a bowl neatly filled with a little sphere of boiled rice. ‘I go in kitchen and husband has coat on, want to go home!’ My face did its best to register curious concern through a mist of challenging odours. ‘Today, whole day, we have seven customer – you eight! Yesterday five!’
The rise and fall of the high-street Chinese restaurant, as I later established, is directly and curiously connected to the similar parabola traced by another British institution. In 1958, London-based restaurateur John Koon met Billy Butlin, a regular customer at the Chinese takeaway – Britain’s first – that Koon had recently opened on Queensway. As his dabbling with monorails made clear, Billy had a weakness for exotic novelty, and eagerly struck up an agreement with Koon to open a ‘Chinese kitchen’ in every one of his holiday camps (signature dish: chicken chop suey and chips). The popularity of this strange new food was instant and enormous, and when the Butlin’s millions went back home they wanted more of it. Within a decade, Britain was home to over a thousand Chinese restaurants.
After the waitress had gone, I took a steadying draught of Carlsberg, then assessed the task at hand. My plate was a stack of battered meat wedges doused in amber gel: it looked like the result of some ill-fated experiment by the young Colonel Sanders. ‘To my great consternation,’ I imagined him writing in his journal, ‘it appears that Kentucky folk have no taste for roosters boiled in marmalade.’
I speared a wedge with a chopstick and crammed the whole thing into my mouth. Extraordinary sensations were unleashed at once, all of them strange and wrong, as if my palate had been shortcircuited. It was like one of those salt/sugar cereal mishaps we’ve all endured, except without the end bit where you spit Brine Flakes out all over the table then tip the balance down the sink, spluttering imprecations.
Chinese Lemon Chicken has been described in print as ‘the most offensive gastronomic insult to any indigenous culinary tradition’, and it’s a truism that oriental food as served on British high streets bears little relation to the genuine article, heavily corrupted as it has been to suit native tastes. That much was evident in the terrible things being done inside my mouth by the flagrant chief ingredient: lemon curd is a comestible I don’t imagine you’d find on many a Beijing shelf. Nor indeed, I thought during another Carlsberg rinse-out, on many a Doncastrian shelf, not these days. There seemed something stubbornly unreconstructed about this dish, something very 1958: a post-rationing splurge of sugar and spice and all things nice (more sugar). Lemon chicken packs the gut-wobbling punch of three Big Macs and a packet of crisps – 94 per cent of a woman’s recommended daily calorie intake on a single plate, and as much as 112 per cent of a man’s, should he find himself obliged to sluice it down with three pints of lager. But in 1958, post-war and pre-car, too many calories was a good thing.
Anyway, just as Butlin’s found itself superseded by more glamorous, more authentic and less stodgy alternatives, so did Chinese restaurants. They’ve been a declining high-street presence since the 1990s, some rebranded as Thai or Malaysian, many more just throwing in the soy-stained towel: by 2009, fifteen Chinese restaurants or takeaways were closing every week. A recent catering-industry survey identified ‘a reputation for being fatty and laden with additives’ as the key factor. I’ve just looked up a recipe for ‘takeaway style lemon chicken’: amongst the more troubling ingredients is something called ‘chicken powder’.
But after everything the waitress had said to me I knew I would have to clean my plate, even as I watched its contents congeal beneath a wrinkled, iridescent crust, like radioactive rice pudding. The final mouthful was dispatched in the manner of Cool Hand Luke tackling that fiftieth boiled egg. Twelve hours later its legacy was still taking the edge off my appetite, though that might have had something to do with my curious decision to eat jelly babies for lunch.
Prepare yourself for the future – tomorrow will become the future. Thus read the legend inside the uneaten fortune cookie I’d lethargically thumped asunder, and which – in a Mordor – Going Forward kind of way – proved a decent encapsulation of the day.
Chapter Fourteen
THE THREE YEARS I spent at Sheffield University bequeathed me such a strong and lasting affection for the town that in the decades since I must have been back there – ooooh, let’s think – once. In the mid 1980s Sheffield was a tragic mess, shell shocked by the sudden and complete collapse of its industrial heritage, from be-all to end-all in ten years flat. I used to walk into lectures across the derelict factories and foundries that filled huge swathes of the urban landscape, even right near the centre. If walls could talk, Sheffield’s were mumbling, ‘Well, that’s great. Now what?’ All except for the massive concrete brow of Park Hill flats, staring me out from the hilltop behind the station, then letting rip with a ragged yell: ‘Fuck off, student TWAT!’
Most university cities have a bit of a town-v-gown situation, and in Sheffield’s, Park Hill doubled as Berlin Wall and killing fields. The estate’s menacing, fortified enormity was complemented by a terrifying reputation for lawless violence. Large and heavy objects – sideboards, domestic appliances, crates full of milk bottles – were heaved off the thirteenth-floor roof so regularly that the council had been obliged to paint a yellow ‘safety line’ on the footpaths beneath, six feet out from the walls. Cab drivers talked in hushed tones of stairwells blocked with drifts of rusty needles and dead dogs. Whenever the local TV news crew was sent in to cover some sordid atrocity, the reporter’s reedy gabblings were all but drowned out by the cameraman gunning their van’s engine. In three years I only twice crossed into the badlands behind Park Hill, once to get a tyre for my Morris Minor van, and once to buy some garden gnomes to decorate an ironic rockery (fuck off, student TWAT!). On both occasions I afforded the glowering fortress of doom a generously wide berth.
So I was laying a few ghosts to rest as Craig eased to a halt in one of Britain’s largest shadows. I cranked up the handbrake, bit off another soft sugared head, then walked out to discover what I’d been missing all those years ago – and what side of the Park Hill fence I now sat on. Because on one hand, it’s the biggest listed building in Europe, awarded Grade II status by English Heritage in 1997. On the other, Park Hill was the only residential structure that the British public hated badly enough to vote onto that Demolition shortlist.
Consult the original planning documentation or hear the testimonies of the first tenants, and you’ll wonder how on earth anyone could even think of tearing down this landmark icon, this giant stride in forward-thinking public housing. But stand in the gale of cold piss that howls beneath those dour concrete cliffs, as I did now, and you’ll be shaking your
head for a very different reason. It’s perhaps appropriate that I saw Park Hill in a netherworld between life and death: bereft of residents, and stripped to the bare skeleton whose influential design and construction earnt it that listing.
Sketched out in the mid 1950s and completed in 1960, Park Hill was acclaimed as the world’s most ambitious inner-city development: an attempt to transplant an entire slum-zone community of 3,500 people into a single enormous building. What could possibly go wrong? Yet impressively, indeed incredibly, the planners did everything right. ‘The problem facing anyone designing a high-density project such as Park Hill,’ they wrote, ‘is to avoid creating a vast inhuman block.’ Problem? Avoid? You can almost hear the incredulous disdain of those who went on to give us Cumbernauld’s Megastructure, the Trinity Square car park and other spirit-crushing memorials to the unknown citizen. But Sheffield’s planning department somehow managed to avoid mistakes that hadn’t even been made yet: it was as if they’d been visited in their dreams by some council-block resident from the future, offering detailed and articulate insights into his plight.
Most fundamentally, they took great pains to preserve the transplanted community, and maintain an environment where its spirit could flourish. Neighbouring families were moved together into blocks named after their old roads. Every flat was spread over two floors, at least a bit like a house. Every front door opened onto a wide landing, at least a bit like a street – broad enough to play games, ride bikes, and famously broad enough for the cheery local milkman to do his rounds in a float (ingenious exploitation of the site’s steep gradients afforded him – and offered the residents – direct and more or less level access from the ground to every floor but the thirteenth). The same careful micro-management endowed continuity upon all the new services and facilities housed in the Park Hill complex. Brand-new school but same classmates and teachers; brand-new pubs but same regulars and landlords; brand-new shops but same butchers and bakers. Bingo at the social club, wide green spaces round the back and a bird’s-eye view of the Flying Scotsman pulling out of the station far below. Then of course there were the obvious lifestyle enhancements: indoor sanitation, fitted kitchens, central heating. Silent footage of early residents – plentifully available on the Yorkshire Film Archive’s splendid website – shows faces a-glow with promised-land rapture, families who still can’t believe their luck. A complementary set of clips depicts the mouldering, sub-Dickensian slumlands that in 1961 they had just vacated.
