In 1759, Samuel Johnson wrote to Boswell, 'Chester pleases me more than any town I ever saw.' Up until this year, I'd have had to disagree. Chester had bad memories for me. It took a delightful day in this beautiful old town to exorcise them.
Firstly, there was the afternoon my dad took us on a rowing boat on the River Dee. My mum, never a seasoned mariner, had some kind of panic attack and stood up in the boat screaming. She thought we were going to capsize and, even at six years old, I knew that standing up in the boat screaming was a great way to make this happen. We made for the bank as fast as my dad's oarsmanship would allow before we were all consigned to a watery grave.
More traumatic yet was the St Jude's Altar Boys outing of 1970. The trip, long planned and savoured, was a visit to Chester Zoo, and for weeks before I had imagined the delights of eating massive ice creams in the rank tang of the lion house. Family members had given me advance pocket money and I reckon I had a couple of quid at least on arrival at the zoo. It was a lot of money in those days – you could buy an ocelot and a 99 and still have change from sixpence. Within seconds, though, I'd contrived to lose the lot and spent the rest of the day manfully fighting back tears and licking other people's ice creams. Given that it was an altar boys' day out, it was a particularly cruel blow. My faith in a merciful and benevolent God took its first battering there by the penguin pool.
So I went back to Chester for the first time in decades in a cloud of apprehension. It almost instantly dispersed. Chester is beautiful. True, she's like one of those girls who know just how lovely they are; there's the faint aura of self-satisfaction about her. But hanging around her for a day or two really does lift the spirit. She seems to have become the first-choice destination for the young and pulchritudinous in general. Maybe since the advent of Hollyoaks, the sexy soap set among the town's gorgeous twenty-somethings, all the ugly people have been forced out to live somewhere else. Wrexham perhaps.
Chester and Wrexham hate each other, you see. Primarily it's because of football but there's class and nationhood simmering nastily in there as well. Stereotypically, Chester is English and bourgeois, Wrexham/Wrecsam is Welsh and working class. The towns are just ten miles apart.
A Wrexham fan called Paul Baker once told Four Four Two magazine: 'I'd rather Chester didn't exist at all. I despise the club and a city which is full of people who are full of themselves.' In what might be the most tragic and misplaced show of pride ever, he continued, 'Cestrians are stuck up their own arses. We wear sensible clothes, they wear pink shirts and have gel in their hair. We go out on the steam. They just want to have a drink or two and chat up the ladies. That's why a lot of Wrexham girls go out in Chester – they like to be treated well and they know we're just pisscans.' Wrexham girls are pretty smart then, I reckon. I know where I'd rather spend my Friday night.
The two office girls eating their sandwiches in the chilly sun on a bench by the newly excavated amphitheatre used to live in Wrexham. They tell me this with a slight shudder. Our conversation had been prompted by the sight of my notebook. 'Are you an archaeologist?' they asked genially. Knowing full well I was never going to pull off any kind of ersatz Harrison Ford routine, I came clean. They were very helpful on the subject of the amphitheatre. 'It's half excavated and it could hold seven thousand people. It was the biggest arena in Britain, sort of like the Wembley or the Millennium Stadium of its time. We had a talk on it at college.'
There's a lot more on the amphitheatre at the adjoining tourist information centre. An American in a cattle feed baseball cap asks about the excavation and is pointed in the direction of the film show upstairs. 'It was the Dodgers stadium of Roman Britain!' I interject cheerily. This prompts Jenny, who I think was working there – she had a name tag but may have just been a freelance interjector like myself – to share some more facts about Chester. I write them down in my pretend archaeologist's notebook.
Chester's town hall clock has three faces but none on the Welsh side because it's said that Chester won't give Wrexham the time of day. According to an archaic law, a Chester resident can still shoot a Welshman found within Chester's city walls after dark. Chester is the only city in Britain to still be ringed by a complete wall. The circuit is two miles and according to everyone is the best way to see Chester. Henry James did it in 1872 and later remarked, 'Starting at any point on the walls, an hour's easy stroll will bring you back to your station. I have quite lost my heart to this charming creation.'
Convinced by Henry James and having bought a little leaflet on Jenny's advice, I decide to start my circuit at the Eastgate, busy pedestrianised heart of a busy town. There's a tiny green sandwich kiosk – what was once surely the smallest barber's in Britain – and by scooting up the steps you suddenly emerge high above the bustle of the street.
Below you are buskers, baskers, girls straight from Hollyoaks auditions, smart old ladies with tartan trolleys, businessmen with Marbella tans and black leather briefcases. At the side of you is a really fancy clock. Chester is very proud of this eccentric creation, described by Pevsner as 'a rusticated elliptical arch, on it jolly ironwork carrying a diamond Jubilee Clock, by Douglas, and surprisingly playful'. Surprisingly playful is a nice description. It's surprisingly popular too. Cestrians like to say that it's the second most photographed clock in Britain (after Big Ben, of course) and I can vouch for this. No matter where I positioned myself I ended up encroaching unwelcome into people's photographs. As I write this, there are people in Oslo, Seoul and Des Moines showing off their vacation snaps and saying, 'I have no idea who this bloke with the notebook is.'
Walking northwards along the wall you pass on the left a monolithic modern bell tower; pretty cool in a severe sort of way. On the right, less attractively, are the delivery bays of what I think was Argos. At strategic points along the wall, cute little plaques give relevant information about the sights. Understandably, they didn't bother with this. So it may have been Netto. (But I doubt it in Chester.)
Whatever, let's look left instead at the glorious cathedral grounds of the Deanery Field. In late March, there's snow on the ground under a cloudless blue sky and you suddenly feel a pang of envy for all these busy Cestrians on their lunch hour. A woman goes by with an incredibly tiny dog, roughly the size of a burly hamster. As I stare in disbelief, a Scouse bloke joins me in wonderment. 'How small is that dog? It's doing my head in!' With that he is gone.
Strolling on into a quieter corner, I embarrass a middle-aged American man who's climbing a tree to impress his lady friend. She insists I take his picture. His face is red with discomfort, exertion and pleasure and I didn't blame him one bit. It was just the sort of day for climbing trees in snowy churchyards to impress girls.
I paused for reflection at the King Charles Tower, so named because here Charles I watched as his cavalry were routed at the nearby battle of Rowton Moor. In modern Britain, we're forever fretting about how violent and feral and barbaric our cities have become. So it's always educational to remember just how savage and bloodthirsty the good old days really were. Today Chester gets invaded by nothing worse than a few drunken Wrexham supporters and a phalanx of Japanese tourists armed with high-velocity Minoltas. But a few hundred years back, Chester and its people suffered appallingly as two sections of the British establishment tore it and themselves to bloody pieces. Chester was besieged for two years by Parliamentarians during the English civil war at dreadful cost to the townsfolk. Here's a letter written by one on 23 September 1642:
Good Sir
The latter end of your letter is somewhat comfortable in that you write there are some Dragoons coming into Chester for our relief, but surely they are not come, and now will come too late for we are all plundered and undone; I only desire you to pray for us and let us hear from you; the Lord fit us for these ill times, and worse which I much fear... To hear the pitiful shrieking, weeping and howling of women and children, did more trouble me than any thing else; God grace? I never heard the like.
And here's one from 10 Dec
ember 1645:
Eleven huge granadoes [grenades] like so many tumbling demi-phaetons threaten to set the city, if not the world, on fire. This was a terrible night indeed, our houses like so many split vessels crash their supporters and burst themselves in sunder through the very violence of these descending firebrands... In a word the whole fabric is in a perfect chaos lively set forth in this metamorphosis. The grandmother, mother and three children are struck stark dead and buried in the ruins of this humble edifice, a sepulchre well worth the enemy's remembrance. But for all this they are not satisfied, women and children have not blood enough to quench their fury, and therefore about midnight they shoot seven more in hope of greater execution, one of these last light in an old man's bedchamber, almost dead with age, and send him some few days sooner to his grave then perhaps was given him.
Not Srebrenica or Fallujah. Not Beirut or Darfur. Chester, home of Hollyoaks. A history of firebombs and firing squads and old men shot in their beds in cold blood. Next time the Daily Mail tells you the country's going to hell in a handcart, think. We may actually be moving slowly towards civility.
Built right into the city wall, high above the Shropshire Union Canal, is what must be the best located bookshop in Britain. Stepping inside adds to an already slightly magical air. A bell tinkles, a young bearded owner looks up welcomingly and a browsing girl turns with a smile from shelves groaning with out-of-print ghost stories and Arthuriana, which is what Gildas Books and proprietor Scott Lloyd specialise in. I instantly spot a copy of LTC Rolt's Sleep No More, a fabulous long-out-of-print selection of eerie stories set around canals, railways and deserted industrial locales. I lost my original on a late-night train trying to defend a single woman from a drunken businessman from Coventry – his company were called the General Asphalt Group, in case you fancy boycotting them – and I've been looking for a copy ever since. And here it is, placed there by fate, at the frankly very reasonable price of twenty quid. 'Make sure you have a proper look,' says Scott anxiously, 'there's a bit of water damage and the title page is missing. Otherwise it'd be more like a hundred and fifty quid.' I pass a pleasant half hour in this quaint corner of Chester and leave with several other of Scott's recommendations under my arm.
I stop and read one of old LTC's spooky stories in a spot called Pemberton's Parlour or the Goblin Tower, a sort of big arched bus shelter built into the wall. This would seem an ideal spot for young Cestrians to learn the arts of love or to experiment with controlled substances but for the fact that the council have put a massive gate on it. Piqued, someone has thrown a Greggs wrapper and a can of Red Stripe over the gate. Serves them right. I'm sure old Mayor Pemberton would rather his parlour were being used for a bit of youthful hi-jinks than left mouldering behind chains. Maybe not, though. Back in 1730, John Pemberton built this tower so he could keep an eye on his workmen below, so he sounds a bit of a sourpuss.
In the distance are the Welsh hills as you turn left along the wall and head down past the Roodee, prettiest racecourse in England, to the Watergate. I've only been to the races once, Ladies Day, Aintree 2003, at the invitation of Granada TV, and I lost all my money while Jimmy McGovern and John Parrott made a bloody fortune. Typical bloody Scousers. But if I do ever go back to the races, it'll be at Chester, where I can at least go broke in gorgeous surroundings.
The Watergate, by the way, is a legacy of when Chester was a port. Not just any old port; the busiest in northern Britain, no less, taking regular deliveries of olive oil and fish sauce for the homesick Roman garrisons pining for a change from cabbage and spuds. Then with spectacular bad luck it silted up and the trade moved away to ports with actual water in them. Chester's history tends to loom at you from unexpected corners; the old Spudulike on Bridge Street had a Roman hypocaust just behind the salad bar.
I walk past the Dee, scene of my mum's maritime disaster, and watch a man dressed as a Roman legionnaire waving an unconvincing spear at a party of kids in maroon blazers before my eye is caught by a public house. I'd heard a lot about this place as I'd chatted with Chester folk. The Albion Inn, below the city wall on the corner of Albion and Park Street, looks like a typical backstreet boozer albeit festooned with flags and blackboards. Get down to street level, though, and you become aware of the pub's unique character. The blackboard reads 'The English Pub At Its Unspoilt Best. Opening Times: If we are open, we are open, if we are closed, we are closed. No Chips. No Fry-ups. No U.H.T. No silly foil portions. No children. No plastic playground or music machines or big screens. Plenty Good Food. Real Ale. Good Wine. Family Hostile!'
This seemed slightly cranky and unfriendly at first. For one thing, 'No Chips' is just snobbery. If they're good enough for Nigel Slater and the bistros of Paris, they're good enough for a pub in Chester. But after half an hour inside I was willing to forgive them anything. You could say that the pub is themed, though I'd say it when the landlord isn't listening. 'Themed' usually means decked out as a Bondi Beach surf shack or festooned with agricultural implements in a poor approximation of a Connemara saloon bar. But not here. The Albion Inn just hasn't changed much since 1915. There are adverts for Fry's chocolate, cast iron fireplaces, William Morris wallpaper and tasteful reminders everywhere of the Cheshire regiment and the young lads who may have drunk a pint here after enlisting at the nearby drill hall, oblivious of the horrors to come.
All was peaceful that afternoon, though. I soaked up the gentle hum of conversation around me. A couple in muted linen, clearly having an affair, were talking about Debussy; some young office workers were raving about the Thai green curry; a cheery clutch of middle-aged men were bemoaning the fortunes of Chester City. I sat in the dappled sun, drinking my pint of real ale, leafing through a guidebook and tucking into my Tunstall Tortilla: black pudding, cheese and onion in a Staffordshire oatcake. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.
It was hard to leave the Albion Inn but I did. I had to. I got a phone call from a radio producer friend telling me that a nice man from a bookshop in Chester had rung the BBC to say that I'd left my credit card there. And so I walked the whole circuit of the walls again, back to Gildas Books, slightly slower this time thanks to the added cargo of tortilla and beer.
Later and slower still, I made my way back to the station along City Road which, as a legacy of the railways I imagine, is lined with the kind of independent hotel that used to be quite swanky but have now been rather left behind by the modern chains. The Westminster, the Queens, the Belgrave; all going slightly to seed though still boasting 'colour TV. in all rooms' and 'tea- and coffee-making facilities'. On the train, two appalling and very posh students from the Home Counties were discussing the rules to some game. 'It's f***ing wicked, yah, if you don't have a joker in your pocket, you have to drink a pint of beer out of your shoe.' They talk about the girls they're going to 'do' during Freshers' Week and then both take out copies of Nuts magazine. I take out my newly acquired, slightly foxed LTC Rolt and think again about building that wall from Bristol to Skegness.
* * *
When I was a child, I thought Wigan was a spa town. I thought this because we had a branch of Spar. I got my Beezer comic and Opal Fruits there. Later I learned that a spa town was something altogether grander and that Wigan certainly wasn't one but that Cheltenham, Bath, Epsom, Tunbridge Wells and Harrogate are.
But for the discovery of a chalybeate well in the late sixteenth century, Harrogate would have no greater an opinion of itself than Hunslet, Hull or many another Yorkshire town. But as the fame of its healing waters spread and so the fashion for 'taking the waters', so Harrogate prospered into the genteel, elegant, enormously pleased-with-itself place that it is today.
Its streets are wide and tree-lined, its houses Georgian and breathtakingly expensive for these parts and its hotels seem the sort of places where the linen is always starched, the waiters gouty and breakfast finishes at eight.
Perhaps this is a gross slur. Perhaps every room has a PlayStation and a plasma screen TV and they'll mix you a Scream
ing Orgasm at four in the morning. Perhaps blame Alan Bennett, whose famous Dinner at Noon documentary found him staying at the Crown Hotel Harrogate reflecting on the etiquette of tipping and poached eggs and Country Life magazine. I thought about climbing up the hill to see if he'd checked out yet but it looked a long way from the centre of town and my view of the route was obscured by the strikingly ghastly new conference centre whose design merged Tutankhamen's tomb with a Latvian recycling plant. I hope it's nicer on the inside otherwise I pity those poor sods spending three days in there talking about new directions in bacon packaging.
Maybe I didn't give it a chance but I didn't warm to Harrogate. Part tourist trap, part dormitory town, unwarrantedly snobby, it was 'neither mickling nor muckling' as Billy Liar might say in his cod-Yorkshire patois. This really was fur coat and no knickers territory. Walking up the steep drag behind the famous Royal Baths, you'll find those twee little shops that sell golliwogs and scented soap jostling for position next to dodgy nightclubs and a long-defunct pizzeria with smeared windows and a filthy facade. Harrogate, I mused, is a bit like a Georgette Heyer heroine with a bottle of alcopops shoved down her petticoat. She fancies herself but she's not as classy as she thinks she is. I decided that she was the Brighton of the north. On the subject of the famous Royal Baths and Pump Room, I did think about taking the waters but when I popped in, there were a lot of red-faced men in towels and an overpowering smell of sulphur as if someone were boiling every egg in Yorkshire. Either the Crown Hotel had some very hungry breakfasters or Harrogate's celebrated liquid ponged as bad as I'd been warned.
Pies and Prejudice Page 25
