by Tim Moore
Though this question hardly demanded an answer, after a third repetition I felt constrained to provide one: I agreed that it was. At once his face lit up. ‘That’s it – that’s exactly it!’ He turned to the pub at large and raised his voice.
‘English fellow here says … what was it again?’
My buttocks consumed my underwear; something close to silence fell across the Wyndham. I frowned into the remains of my pint, and thought there would never be a better time to set fire to my hair. Then I looked up, met a dozen unsteady gazes and said, ‘Well, Barclaycard – it’s funny. Barclaycard?’
I could see the bare-knuckle boxer looking at me as if I’d said something else, something to do with his private parts. Then Pig-Pen threw out an arm and barked, and whatever passed for normal service in this madhouse was resumed. As soon as it was polite to do so, in fact a little before that, I tipped back the last half-inch of my pint, knotted my scarf and stood up. My companion abruptly extracted himself from a prolonged sigh of private amusement and jabbed a discreet elbow into my thigh. I bent down to him and he addressed me in a new way: whispered, brisk, direct. ‘Listen, if you need any diazepam, I can do you strips of two migs or five.’
The Castle’s reception was empty but for two sacks of potato peelings. I bid them goodnight and retired to my room, where a mood of troubled restlessness promptly asserted itself. It was not dispersed in the half-hour I spent with my face pressed to the window, watching pairs of men stumble home in misty drizzle, spilling chips and pissing up against the tax office. A town down on its uppers and up on its downers, off its face in a rolling civic wake. Suddenly I was gripped with a need to discover something uplifting about Merthyr Tydfil, and after twenty expensive minutes of squinty faffing with my telephone’s rarely employed internet function, I succeeded in the most literal manner imaginable. Back in 1992, a Merthyr GP trialling a proposed angina treatment upon local male volunteers informed the drug company of a conspicuous and unexpected side effect. Thus did Merthyr Tydfil endow the world with a medication that has since brought smiles to sixty million faces – and not just because of the comic possibilities apparently inherent in purchasing it on a Barclaycard.
Chapter Sixteen
THE TAFF VALLEY fog lifted just past Merthyr’s last roundabout, and I glanced in the mirror at a town left to stew in its own foggy juices. As the sun burst through and gilded the treeless, brown-bracken hillsides, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d now seen the very worst my nation had to throw at me, that there were no fresher hells to experience, that from here on things could only get better. Right on cue, the gruesome, flatulent anthem of Britain’s cultural nadir – think spotted, pink and Noel’s House Party if you must, though be warned that you’ll bitterly regret doing so – gave way to a profound, post-apocalyptic silence. I jiggled the MP3 player to no effect, and cranked up the volume to max. This lent an exceptionally portentous quality to the words that now boomed forth from somewhere deep within Craig’s very soul:
‘Yoko?’
‘John?’
Reacquaintance with the St Winifred’s School Choir had washed over me, but there was no avoiding these words and their significance. I’d gone round the horn: back to the start of my 358 audio excursions to hell and back. My musical journey, at least, was at an end. I joyfully yanked the player out of the fag-lighter socket and flung it into the nest of oiled chip paper and bridie shavings that brimmed the door pocket. With its hijacked frequency thus liberated, the radio burst into deafening life: ‘ENJOY ROSS-ON-WYE’S FINEST INDIAN CUISINE – IN ATTRACTIVE AND CONTEMPORARY SURROUNDINGS!’
Suspicions that my quest might have bottomed out began to harden in Barry Island. The south Welsh seaside town had earnt a pin on my map as the resort whose damp and tedious misery had compelled Billy Butlin to invent holiday camps, but it had always seemed no worse than faded and genially naff in Gavin and Stacey, and on a bright and breezy February morning Barry Island looked rather better than that. The seafront amusement arcades and cafés were protected by a pretty wrought-iron Victorian canopy, and the cars I parked between were both polished Rovers, each home to a snug elderly couple sharing a tartan thermos. Slipping on my sunglasses for the first time in many months, I walked down on to the beach: a deserted eternity of smooth gold, looking out at a sparkling sea and the shadowy superstructures of Lundy and Cornwall. I’m fairly certain the tourist board won’t thank me for revealing that Fred West’s ashes are scattered on Barry Island’s sands.
Just up the promenade I found myself outside Barry Island Pleasure Park, whose unsparing shonkiness had seen it singled out for online opprobrium. Through the padlocked gates I spotted what must surely be the only pound shop resident in such an establishment, yet the overall ambience seemed cheerfully, deliberately ridiculous: silver Assyrian cavalrymen stood guard over the handful of tarpaulin-shrouded rides, and the log flume’s mossy frontage was crowned with a colossal fibreglass goose. As a comic shambles I had to conclude that it fell comfortably the right side of the with/at laughter divide.
I followed my towering shadow back to Craig and glanced around at the sunlit sand, the bleeping, empty arcades, the peeling enormity of the interwar bunker labelled, PUBLIC CONVENIENCES, LAVATORIES & CLOAKROOMS. There were shades of Leysdown-on-Sea, echoes of Great Yarmouth, the frailest suggestion of Skegness. But not even a tiny pinch of Rhyl. I’d already scraped the bottom of the seaside bucket.
And so my slow but unstoppable rise continued, onwards and upwards. I proceeded at leisurely pace through countryside that wasn’t Lincolnshire, past villages that weren’t New Holland or Forth, into and out of towns that didn’t smell or croak for mercy. The sagging pastry satchel I ate for lunch was ferociously dull but no Scotch pie; the Balti-burger dispatched that evening proved many dry-retches shy of a parmo. The Midlands’ most poorly rated greyhound racing stadium failed to serve up the topless vomiting reported by more than one reviewer, delivering instead a night of chilly excitement, crowned by a win on 7/2 shot Vatican Seamus. This financed nine-elevenths of a celebratory pint of cider at a purportedly horrendous pub in the shadow of Spaghetti Junction, where everyone – almost everyone – proved a model of restrained good cheer. I then made away for a night’s sleep that was no better or worse than might reasonably be expected at a motel alongside a busy Birmingham roundabout, run by young men in bare feet. Silverfish frolicked in the shower tray and I found a bra under the bedside table, but as an overnight experience it ranked at least seventeen times less dreadful than the Gresham Hotel in Nottingham, and cost a quid less. I seemed to have developed an immunity to ramshackle tedium, and couldn’t decide whether that was heartening or deeply worrisome. On one hand I now lived at beatific peace with my nation, warts and all, but on the other I’d become institutionalised to discomfort and unloveliness, a man who didn’t appreciate or in fact deserve clean sheets or salad or power steering.
The next morning even Coventry let me down. Coventry – the granddaddy of God-awful city-centre redevelopments, the default response volunteered by the residents of Middlesbrough, Hull, Hartlepool and Many Many More, asked to name somewhere more terrible than the terrible place they called home. I could hardly fault the town for effort. I arrived to find Coventry sulking in thick fog, and my downtown multi-storey was so fulsomely streaked with mossy slime it might have just been raised from the seabed. Mist coiled forth from bleak pedestrian underpasses, and breakfast came in the form of an advertised question: Is THIS the best jumbo sausage roll in Coventry? (Answer: I really hope not.) Every thoroughfare was a windswept retail plaza, and every flanking structure resembled a North Korean technical college. All the familiar half-arsed makeovers were on show: a weathered Perspex canopy here, a scattering of timeshare terrazzo tiles there. In short, a dutiful ticking of the usual boxes, along with a couple of new ones: I wandered into one of the many pound shops and found it staffed by people in pyjamas and dressing gowns.
But it wasn’t just that I’d seen it all before, and then some. A
t the head of an especially dispiriting vista, I chanced upon a plaque that detailed the achievements of Sir Donald Gibson, Coventry’s city architect in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The first pedestrian precinct, the first rooftop parking … My reflex chortle soon died away, because of course Coventry’s redevelopment wasn’t the product of self-indulgent, wankily bowtied architectural whimsy, but a stark necessity enforced by the catastrophic destruction of 14 November 1940. And though Gibson and his team made some enormous mistakes, as pioneers they could hardly be blamed for them. In 1950, Britain’s urban planners knew no better. By 1970 they certainly did, yet somehow it didn’t stop them.
The fog began to lift as I drove away from Coventry, replaced by drizzle that in the light of ongoing technical issues restricted my view of Rugby to a pair of small arcs at the base of Craig’s windscreen. Just past the BRITAIN IN BLOOM signs, there it was, at least a 15-degree wedge of its lower quarters: the Rugby Cement Works, a dust-shrouded collation of silos and vertiginous sheds, taller than Coventry cathedral. The plant had made number five on the Demolition list by virtue of its arrestingly residential situation, emerging from a nest of trim little terraced homes like some monstrous, grimy cuckoo. I pulled over and got out, waiting for a surge of outraged empathy that never came. Instead I saw Middlesbrough in its brass-from-muck heyday, Hartlepool getting filthy rich, Methil striking pay dirt. After passing through so many post-industrial downtown wastelands, it was a genuine, chest-swelling thrill to stand dwarfed beneath an old-time industrial behemoth that wasn’t just alive but noisily, belchingly thriving. Sorry, residents of Lawford Road.
And sorry Northampton, for the bland curiosity that was all I could muster an hour or so later, confronted by the monolithic twin arses of hell its citizens know as Greyfriars bus station. Surveying this withering structure from the roundabout laid out before it, I was obliged to conclude that with Gateshead’s Trinity Square now laboriously smashed off the map, here stood a genuine contender for the title of Britain’s Most Loathsome Urban Edifice Outside Cumbernauld. Crowning the whole city centre with its dismal bulk, it looked less like an integrated transport hub than something hastily thrown up to cap a nuclear reactor in meltdown, or imprison Godzilla. I saw all this, yet all I could think was: Yeah, well, at least it’s not a sodding car park. Though I’ve just discovered that large bits of it actually are.
Under a dimming, pink sky I steered Craig south into a gathering rush hour and a town that took shape in the now-traditional manner: an outlying belt of Harvesters and Premier Inns, then the Lidls and Tile Depots, the Polish grocers and the pound shops, all strung together between roundabouts of generous diameter. Culminating at the Brunel, cover star of the anti-celebration of rotary traffic-management that is Roundabouts of Great Britain, the tarmac jewel in the concrete crown of our nation’s most famously insipid town-centre development. A sunken gyratory plaza girdled with cereal boxes the colour of Shredded Wheat and All Bran, viewed through the dun splatter of Craig’s windscreen. It was my first circuit of the Brunel, but not his. Craig was back to where he once belonged. How now, brown Slough.
I did a couple of laps, inching across the log-jam to the inside lane. Down in the Brunel’s sunken hub, that damp-slabbed plaza, a steady stream of heads-down, homebound David Brents scurried into the mouth of a wind-tunnel underpass. Here it was, the epicentre of England’s grey unpleasant land, a what-not-to-do agglomeration of everything that made post-war British towns so very rubbish. The pathological deference to the motor car, and the parallel casting down of the pedestrian into a forlorn and sinister netherworld. That insatiable passion for pre-stressed concrete, showcased most overbearingly in the Brunel bus station, a cubist Connect 4 set whose grubby lozenges filled much of the world before me. And the default tendency to offset these massive wrongs with ever more massive superstores: the Pentagon-sized Tesco rearing up behind the bus station once ranked as the biggest in Europe, but now, just five years later, it wasn’t even the biggest in Berkshire.
All the same, I felt a twinge of melancholy as I flicked the indicators on and exited the Brunel through the exhaust-fog and brake lights. Not for the first time, I knew I was surveying a townscape that would soon be swept away. Many of the public buildings around were already being prepared for demolition, and most are now no more. When you read this, the sunken plaza will have been filled in, and the monolithic bus station replaced with a metal-roofed wave of a structure, a rather silly and unconvincing affair that in the architects’ sketches recalls a pair of Bacofoil flares hanging out to dry on a windy day. I think we can be certain that this will become a dated embarrassment even more quickly than its predecessor, but at least when that time comes it will be a lot less bother to knock down. ‘Change and decay in all around I see,’ I sang, sending off Slough with a snatch of the Cup Final hymn. ‘O something, something else, abide with me.’ Then it was away down the M4, east towards London, reeling in an increasingly familiar environment.
In my career as an accidental adventurer I have conquered Mount Kilimanjaro, traversed the ferociously bleak Icelandic interior on a bicycle, and pushed an inert donkey all the way across Spain. All these hard-won triumphs were eclipsed when I piloted Craig down the flyover ramp to Chiswick roundabout, and at Ozzy’s behest took the first f-f-fookin exit, knowing that the third would have swiftly delivered me into the warm and welcoming bosom of my family home. I could almost smell the love, taste the goosedown, feel the steak Béarnaise and salad. Instead, just four minutes and one postal district later, I wanly cranked up the handbrake in the deserted car park of a hotel that had a strong statistical claim to be the very worst in Britain.
I’d chanced upon the Gresham Hotel on Hanger Lane many months before, while bottom-trawling TripAdvisor’s reviews of its benighted namesake in Nottingham (the two establishments are in no way connected, beyond their shared homage to the esteemed and venerable Gresham Hotel in Dublin). This other Gresham’s ratings were something else. Of the eighteen previous guests who had provided an opinion, no fewer than sixteen awarded it a single star (the one labelled ‘terrible’). I spent an entire afternoon trying to find a hotel, any hotel, that bettered this ratio. When I failed, the final flag on my map almost planted itself. After all, my tour proper had begun down the other end of Hanger Lane, at Britain’s worst road junction. This symmetry had seemed most satisfying right up to the point, just outside Slough, when I’d punched the Gresham Hotel’s postcode into Ozzy’s flat little face.
I stepped out into the fierce and frozen wind, issued a shuddering sigh and glanced around. The Gresham looked as sorry for itself as I felt. Hard up beside it, sharing a view of the ceaseless, roaring traffic, stood a rival hotel, another extended Edwardian building that was almost identical in every respect but one: not a single free space remained in its own forecourt parking area. Across a side street towered a sleek Ramada Inn, its softly lit reception area thronged with smart executives. The Gresham skulked in the streetlight shadows, forsaken and unloved, the runt of the litter.
I poked the bell and after a moment the huge front door was heaved slowly ajar by a young Asian man, startled to the point of abject terror. I explained that I wanted no more than a room for the night and to feast upon his flesh, then trailed him through the lofty, pungent hallway, and up to a little reception shelf fixed to the side of the breakfast bar. ‘Is £45 please,’ he whispered cravenly. ‘You must pay now.’
I did so and followed him up a huge, bleak staircase, then across loud carpet and even louder floorboards to the door of room 5. The receptionist creaked it open and we were hit by a face-crumpling waft of stale fags. ‘Good God,’ I exclaimed, physically recoiling. ‘Sorry, but can I have a no-smoking room?’
‘All rooms no-smoke.’
‘Well, can I have another room?’
‘Is no other room.’
We had just walked past several numbered doors and everything suggested I was the Gresham’s sole guest. The receptionist tried to smile, then switched the light
on and turned to leave. ‘Hang on – the key?’
‘If you want, is £10.’
‘For the key to my own room?’ He appraised my slack-jawed silence and departed as discreetly as the shrieking floorboards allowed.
‘Checked in, ten minutes later checked out.’
‘I wouldn’t let my dog stay there.’
‘We found a cigarette butt under our bed, and we do not smoke.’ (What rotten luck!)
The Gresham’s TripAdvisor lowlights spooled through my mind as I patrolled my foinal fookin dustinoition. Room 5 was huge, but in the wrong direction: the ceiling a distant shadowy suggestion, the floorspace so meagre that the ends of my single bed touched both walls. Every small step around the modest bedless areas triggered an underfoot cacophony of squeaks and squeals, like a fat man sitting on an accordion. The en-suite shower had been grouted in with old toothpaste and clumps of pastry, and a shelf above the sink was home to many tubs of half-empty skin-and haircare products kindly donated by previous residents. Skeins of hairy fluff clung to the skirting boards and the hem of the bedspread: this would be a socks-on night.
By far the most compelling TripAdvisor review had been compiled by a guest striving to express profound dissatisfaction in a tongue that was not his own. ‘I start to hearing weird sounds coming from the wall,’ he began. ‘It was of course a mouse. One staff came for look and we find two holes. After two mins he return with wood to cover the holes. I didn’t like that.’ The manager arrives with an explanation that fails to appease. ‘He said I was hearing squirols in the garden … hahaha … how is that a squirol if I hear it running from my toilet to my window!!!’ And so his story arrived at its predictable conclusion. ‘I paid fifty pounds and I didn’t spend the night there. It was not fair as I paid for a b. & b. and I didn’t use the Bed or either the Breakfast.’
I sat down on the bed and it made that Family Fortunes noise. Room 5 was self-evidently a dump, but I waited in vain for trepidation and disgust to well up within me. Instead I found myself dwelling upon its attributes. There was a little telly and a beverage station. The water was hot and my word so was the room: a radiator the size of an up-and-over garage door filled one entire wall. My house, my lovely house with its lovely wife and children, lay just up the road, no more than a tearful, frosted stumble away. But something had happened to me over the last few months: I felt at home here. I had taken a crash course in grubby discomfort, and relearnt the lost native skills of taking the rough with the smooth, looking on the bright side, making the best of a bad job. This creaking, dishevelled, tobacco-fired sauna was now my kind of place.
