Engel's England

by Matthew Engel

  Little boxes on the hillside,

  Little boxes made of ticky tacky,

  Little boxes on the hillside,

  Little boxes all the same.

  There’s a green one and a pink one

  And a blue one and a yellow one,

  And they’re all made out of ticky tacky

  And they all look just the same.

  Except that the colour scheme in Milton Keynes is nowhere near as daring and varied:

  There’s a beige one and a grey one

  And a brown one and a russet one …

  The glory of England is that it is a palimpsest: every town, every village rests on layers of the past, all of them waiting to be rediscovered. Yet not this one: it is, by and large, a single daub – not a wholly ugly one, but painted in the style of the 1960s, when it was assumed that the motor car was the eternal future.

  I had come here to look for the past, though. Without satnav it would have been unfindable, because it does not rate a proper mention on the signposts. Eventually it appears but only in brackets: Middleton (Milton Keynes Village). This was the original place, so obscure that in the 1960s it had the postal address ‘Milton Keynes, Newport Pagnell, Bucks’.

  ‘MILTON KEYNES,’ wrote Arthur Mee. ‘It lies among meadows through which wind the Ouzel and its tributary brooks, and has thatched cottages which must have looked for centuries much as they look today.’ The second part of that is still true, though there was something theme-parky about Milton Keynes Village: the thatched pub looked strangely pristine (it had been rebuilt after a fire, I discovered); Manor Farmhouse had obviously not seen a muddy hoofprint in decades.

  The only person out on a frosty morning was the postwoman.

  ‘Bit different from your other rounds?’

  ‘I love this one,’ she replied. ‘It’s so peaceful.’

  Peaceful? The roar of traffic was constant. She directed me to the house where the church key was kept, and a grey-haired woman handed it over.

  ‘Umm, you don’t happen to know if there’s anyone left round here from when there was just the village?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Catherine Held. ‘Me.’

  The church was pleasant, unusually light and airy. In Milton Keynes terms Catherine Held was also a reminder of a bygone age. Half a century earlier, she was a teenager, living in this same house with her parents when the plans were announced for a new city (technically, it isn’t a city, but that has never bothered anyone) which ultimately was named after this little spot.

  ‘It was a time when if you missed the last bus back on a Wednesday, the next one was on Saturday.’

  ‘So the news was exciting?’

  ‘Oh, yes. For me.’

  The bus service quickly improved. The farmers were bought out, not especially generously. But for many years the original Milton Keynes remained largely unaffected by the huge surge of population into the area. Then it was announced that the fields round the village itself would be developed. The residents fought, but mainly to persuade the authorities not to use the name Milton Keynes Village for the new houses, so the villagers could maintain their own distinctiveness. So the estate was given the half-hearted name of Middleton.

  ‘We weren’t really part of the new city,’ said Catherine. ‘Now we’re part of it. We heard the cuckoo for years and years. Then one year it never came back.’

  ‘That field over there,’ said her husband, Michael, pointing towards the back of his garden. ‘It was going to be eighteen executive homes. Then it was going to be twenty-three superior homes. Then thirty substantial homes. How many did they build in the end? Fifty-four.’

  But the Helds are not dog-in-the-manger about it all. ‘If you get on your bicycle and go on to the redways [Oh! So that’s what a redway is!] you get an idea of what the planners were after,’ said Catherine. ‘They could have made a much bigger mess of it,’ said Michael.

  And they have not done so bad themselves. Houses in the village fetch a premium. And the noise was nothing to do with the city. It was the M1, which came first.

  An unknown resident once compared Buckinghamshire to ‘a river delta in the rainy season, its swollen arteries (the motorways to London) bursting their banks and flooding everywhere so that – even literally from the air – genuinely rural Bucks appeared like islets of higher ground, with the flood water still rising…’

  I was pointed to that by John Gulliver, a retired farmer and gifted amateur artist living in the village of Preston Bissett, near Buckingham. He remembered when someone moving in or out of the village was a major event. ‘There used to be generations upon generations,’ he said. ‘For me, the village changed when they did away with the cobbled pavements and put kerbstones in. I think that’s when it got a bit suburby.’

  But the suburbanisation process gets hastened because Bucks has always beckoned to London as a useful, seemingly empty, not over-beautiful dumping ground for pretty much anything. Sometimes the locals fight it off: at one time the villages west of Leighton Buzzard – Cublington, Dunton, Stewkley and, appropriately enough, Wing – were favourites to be obliterated by the third London airport.

  The Roskill Commission, which was set up to find a site for the airport, actually voted to plonk it here. But by the time the report appeared, it was the 1970s not the 1960s and the placid acceptance of progress that greeted the build-up of Milton Keynes had evaporated. ‘Do you think these farmworkers would not fight?’ cried the Rector of Dunton, Rev. Hubert Sillitoe. ‘The English have always fought. I would give my blessing to people who fought because I believe it is licit for a Christian to bear arms in defence of his own home.’ The government coughed politely and ultimately gifted the airport to Stansted.

  Buckinghamshire was cunning as well as militant: note the rector’s use of the emotive word ‘farmworkers’ rather than, say, ‘management consultants’. Ever since, rural Buckinghamshire has been perpetually on its guard against fresh intrusions. Sometimes, I think the whole place just melds into one village that might be rechristened High Dudgeon or Great Umbrage. Cublington and Dunton are now at peace, or at least only low dudgeon and little umbrage. The places bearing arms, or at least up in them, lie south and west, on the proposed route of the HS2 super-duper railway line to the North-West.

  Next to Preston Bissett is Twyford (not to be confused with any other Twyfords), a fair-sized village with a pub, a community shop, a school, a church with an ornate Norman doorway and a Chinese takeaway. Behind the church is St Mary’s House, the old vicarage, containing the remnants of a medieval hall house which Gary Eastman, the director of a construction company, has been painstakingly restoring for the past twenty-five years. Seventy metres from his north wall, across a flood meadow, is the trackbed of the long-forgotten Great Central Railway. And behind that …

  Well, sometime in the 2020s (or, this being England, the 2030s or 2040s), there, according to the government, will be the route of HS2: on an embankment four metres above the meadow, with trains travelling up to 250 mph and emitting sound of around ninety-seven decibels. Comparisons in this area are complex, but this is just above the level of a pneumatic drill.

  The Twyford Action Group, with Eastman in the van, has not surprisingly been prominent in the Stop HS2 campaign. The problem is that, unlike an airport, this cannot be palmed off on to Essex. It runs through Buckinghamshire or nowhere, and the politicians have been surprisingly steadfast. I am all for Nimbyism myself and would bear arms in defence of my home if I thought I could shoot straight. The problem is that if we Nimbies won every round, we would all still be living in medieval hall houses or mud huts. Eastman understands this. He is in construction: he even builds power stations; he believes the country needs infrastructure, and that the economy needs major projects to create employment. But not this version of it: ‘The business case is just a joke.’

  ‘So what should we be building instead?’

  ‘The third runway at Heathrow.’

  ‘Someone else’s nightmare.’<
br />
  ‘Of course it is. But it’s absolutely necessary in my view.’

  There was, I sensed, an air of impending doom in his voice. The case for the line rests not on the first leg to Birmingham, but its eventual extension to the North. Most of the antis I met just said, ‘We wouldn’t mind if there was anything in it for us’ – i.e. we’re agin it because there are no plans to include a stop nearby.

  Eastman is hoping for mitigation, notably a berm between the village and the railway to deaden the sound. This, according to the HS2 company, depends on justifying it to the government and on the availability of spoil to build it. The villagers have already achieved one victory: the original plan was to build the new route hereabouts along the Great Central. It’s now been agreed to site it 140 metres further away from the village. It was a victory for the villagers and one which Eastman helped achieve.

  Unfortunately for him, that puts his house outside the zone whereby he could sell it to the government at market price. ‘In theory my house is worth about £1.25 million right now. If I could sell it at all now, I would get half that. I’ve put twenty-five years into this and it’s halved in value.’

  There is another irony. If the Great Central had never been closed, there would be an extra route to the North, ideal for freight if not passengers, and there would be no case for HS2 at all.

  I drove south to Stoke Poges and arrived, as one should, just before dusk, which, at the end of November, meant 3.30 p.m. I was looking for what is probably the most famous churchyard in the world, but it was impossible to find. Eventually, someone gave me directions to the church and I ended up at a modern block: St Andrew’s Church. Luckily they were serving tea in there and, after a quick gulp, I was redirected to St Giles, nearly two miles away. There was no sign to it at all.

  There is a car park but it closes an hour before sunset (‘We’ve had quite a few cars torched’), which would have been mighty inconvenient had Thomas Gray been driving: he might have had to find another churchyard.

  But somehow Gray parked himself here, probably in 1742, perhaps under one of the immemorial yews, and began the most famous, and perhaps the most beautiful, evocation of evening – that most magical English time of a day – in the canon.

  Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

  The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

  The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea

  The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

  And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

  Now fades the glimm’ring landscape on the sight,

  And all the air a solemn stillness holds.

  Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

  And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

  Oh yeah, right. Instead of a lowing herd, there was the lowing of successive take-offs from Heathrow and the traffic of the M40 and the drowsy tinklings of a chainsaw. But inside the church, the declining light through the stained glass bathed the place in a moody glow.

  Gray is buried in a sarcophagus outside the east wall, along with his mother and beloved aunt. He is not mentioned on the tomb itself because there was no space: the fate of the writer through the ages. But there is a memorial stone on the wall and a monument hidden away in a wood – so discreetly that, in the gloaming, I originally failed to find it, although it is very large and rather coarse. Apparently, there used to be a regular traffic of American tourists here, on a coach from London that offered this as a package with Windsor Castle. And they would stand and recite the elegy in homage.

  But that trade seems to have ceased. Perhaps American visitors have become less cultured; perhaps, like me, they were affronted by the racket; perhaps it was because the route took them through the one town in Britain more universally derided than Milton Keynes.

  To my astonishment, it took more time to get from St Andrew’s to St Giles’ than it did from St Giles’ into Slough. The very name Slough is the first problem; Betjeman compounded it (‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough’); and its reputation has stuck ever since, as when the famously ferocious Mr Justice Melford Stevenson, uncharacteristically faced with an acquittal in his courtroom, told the defendant, ‘I see you come from Slough. It’s a horrible place. You can go back there.’ The Slough Sewage Works is often held responsible for the stench on the M4.

  In the First World War, a huge acreage round here was used as a dump. In the 1930s that turned into the Slough Trading Estate, which generated a light-industrial boom town that absorbed thousands of migrants from the depressed areas.

  But the town never weathered. It evolved into a national joke, the obvious site for the Wernham Hogg Paper Company, whose regional manager was David Brent in The Office, the most resonant sitcom of the early twenty-first century. Its one tourist attraction (if we accept Eton as being elsewhere) might have been the observatory where Sir William Herschel discovered Uranus. But, with Slough’s instinctive gift for marketing and PR, it got demolished in the 1960s.

  Too tired to drive home, I resolved to spend Friday night in Slough. Some of the pubs were lively, including one known as the Herschel and a modern one called Wernham Hoggs. The High Street was almost deserted save for a few shadowy figures in hoodies, mostly lurking in doorways. I opted to eat in Pizza Express, which was deserted, perhaps the only Pizza Express in the country to have no trade on a Friday night. ‘We’ve been busy all week and all day,’ said the waitress. ‘But people don’t come to Slough to go out. They mainly go to Windsor.’

  I took in the fact that we were only four miles from Windsor, two from Stoke Poges and less than three from Eton, the Wall Game and Angus Graham-Campbell’s contrasting tartans. Is this a great country or what?

  November 2012

  By summer 2014 Gary Eastman had accepted that overall defeat was inevitable and that HS2 would be built. Twyford had achieved some tactical successes: the line past the village will now be protected by both a berm and an inner wall to deaden the sound. The government has also offered some compensation to homeowners outside the full buyout area: however, Eastman has been told the maximum available is £22,500. He has been advised his house is effectively unsaleable, and likely to remain so until after the line is built, whenever that might be. ‘We’re staying,’ he says. ‘We’ve got no choice.’

  22. Tally-ho, isn’t it?

  LEICESTERSHIRE

  After nightfall I parked, over-cautiously, on the edge of town and walked a long way past the 1950s semis. Many of them were decorated, as for Christmas, though it was too early for that. Some of them had fireworks issuing from the back garden, as for Bonfire Night. But it was too late for that.

  The front gardens were paved for extra parking rather than tended, which was one indicator that this was not a traditional English suburb. The few houses with names were called Krishna Kunj or Sita Ram, which was a more obvious clue.

  This was Melton Road in Leicester, which morphs into the terraced houses of Belgrave Road: ‘the Golden Mile’ and the centre of Indian life in Britain. Tonight was Diwali, the festival of light. It marks, among other things, the Hindu New Year (in this case the year 2069) and the victorious return of Lord Rama after his battles against the demon king of Sri Lanka. It is also an occasion to invoke the goddess Lakshmi, symbol of prosperity. All the adverts and signs wished people ‘a prosperous New Year’. None of your sentimental Anglo-Saxon ‘happy’ stuff.

  The official action was centred on Cossington Street Recreation Ground, where the city council had erected a stage on which a succession of Indian dance troupes, all grace and arms like Lakshmi herself, performed attractively but repetitively, interrupted only by self-important speeches from officials. The real throng was on the street, mainly in family groups: the kids clutched their parents with one hand and let off handheld bangers with the other. It might have been a Matlock-style passeggiata, had it been easier to find a passage.

  In contrast to Blackpool, Leicester’s Golden Mile stretches less than half a mile but the golden
bit is no exaggeration. The shops concentrate on three things: Indian sweeties, saris and jewellery. And the jewellers don’t mess about: the focus is on gold. It suits the local taste: Leicester’s Indians are mainly Gujaratis, well known in India for their business acumen and also their love of bling. But there may be another reason. Gold has always been the luxury of choice for communities whose roots are shallow ones. It is portable, hideable and famously gains value in difficult times. And this is a community still not wholly certain it might never have to uproot itself again.

  ‘Is your job always as gentle as this?’ I asked a relaxed-looking police sergeant, as he benignly savoured the atmosphere.

  ‘I’ve had worse duties.’

  ‘Because there’s no drinking, I assume?’

  He nodded. ‘Bit different from the city centre on Christmas Eve.’

  The crowd was, I suppose, about 90 per cent Asian. And it was huge: 10,000 in Cossington Street alone (according to the Leicester Mercury, though only on page 25, there being no trouble and thus no news), many thousands more on Belgrave Road. There were a fair number of white faces: the Golden Mile restaurants are where the communities intersect. But it was only as I was leaving, when I saw four youths in patkas, that I realised I had seen no other Sikhs at all, even though Diwali is a Sikh festival as well as a Hindu one.

  I doubt if there were any Muslims either, not even from the substantial Somali bloc now centred nearby in St Matthew’s. This was a night for Leicester’s dominant community, who mostly came from Gujarat via East Africa in the early 1970s to what was then an overwhelmingly white city. It is an extraordinary, little-explored turn of history.

  In the late 1960s the newly independent East African countries started low-level harassment of their Gujarati traders, who had sat uneasily in the middle of the social structure throughout the imperial era, hated by the blacks, despised by the British. At first Britain resisted letting them settle here, even if they held British passports. But in 1972 the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin shifted from harassment to expulsion, and the situation changed from a grumbling problem to a humanitarian emergency, and Britain had to respond.