Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  At one point during a show in Crawley I suggested that they must get used to timing conversations to fit in the moments between long-haul flights to Chicago. They all looked utterly bemused, as if to say, ‘Is there an airport? Near here? Are you sure? We’ve never noticed it.’ But it turned out I was the one misinformed, because the flightpaths are organised so that no planes fly over the town.

  The airport is simply a huge workplace that dominates Crawley, making it like a giant modern pit village. And that makes it cohesive, for example with a Labour Party that’s as established as that in any old industrial town, although it’s only had fifty years to go through the cycle of being formed with enthusiasm, getting a Member of Parliament elected and then collapsing in a cloud of disillusionment.

  The airport should make people across Crawley feel a sense of camaraderie. For example, its presence means that no buildings in the town are allowed to be more than four storeys high. The Hawth Theatre boasts that it’s the tallest structure in town, so if al Qaeda choose to attack Crawley, it’s the theatre they’ll go for.

  And maybe the fact that so many people are connected to one workplace has enabled a local football team to become implanted as part of the culture, in a way that’s taken place in few British towns since the 1920s, by which time the bases of most football clubs had become cemented. Crawley Town FC was helped along the way by the wealth of a character of the sort who, to stay legal, newspapers refer to as ‘colourful’, and who was suspended from football for corruption at his previous club in Boston. To get a sense of life at Crawley Town, here’s a report by a visiting fan of their match with Bath City: ‘Their manager, a rather large Steve Evans, spent the whole match pacing up and down the touchline, shouting abuse at the Bath players, the referee and everything else that holds existence on the planet. At half time an announcement was made that went, “There’s an old man that lives behind the stadium and has made a complaint. He says there’s too much noise and we need to quieten down. So let’s make the bastard even more annoyed and make some noise.”’

  Now, the theory that all towns, however corporatised, retain an underlying soul, is stretched to the limit in Milton Keynes. There can be few places that try so hard to live up to their image. The first sign that something’s not healthy comes as you drift through the Buckinghamshire countryside towards the town, and pass the first roundabout, which has a grid number. So a sign will tell you this is H4 or V5 roundabout, as if you’re a Lilliputian moving through a giant game of Battleships.

  What’s more disconcerting is that, apart from these grid numbers, the roundabouts all look identical. The view in every direction from each of them is of a highway with trees perfectly spaced on each side, and a giant rectangular warehouse behind the trees, so you’ve no idea if you’ve been past this bit already or not.

  You’re entrapped in this grid with no way of working out what direction you’re going; although I haven’t tested this, I expect the town planners have fixed it so compasses don’t work here, they just spin violently the way they’re supposed to do if you’re in the Bermuda Triangle.

  The most sinister warehouse belongs to River Island. It stretches the whole length of one grid section, a shiny oblong block with no apparent entrances, no bobbles or chimneys or bits sticking out, just a perfect smooth geometrical structure that’s far too big for River bloody Island. If all the clothes in all the world’s River Island stores were put in a pile, they would barely fill one corner of this complex, and if it emerges one day that it’s full of long corridors and solid steel doors that open only after a biometric sensor scans your iris and a sugary automated voice with an American accent says, ‘Identity confirmed – you may proceed to the excavation section,’ and where an army of ex-Death Row inmates are building a tunnel to China in preparation for an invasion, I shan’t be entirely surprised.

  With no churches or pubs or graffiti or bridges or landmarks to plot your position you find yourself not only lost, as you can be in any town, but unsure where you are in relation to the rest of the world, as if you were in a rowing boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The grid numbers only make it more confusing, as you pull over and try to calculate that if you’ve just passed H5, and the one before that was V6, then H7 must be to the right, which, as H9 cancels out V3 over 5 divided by x, the angle of the line H2–V8 must be equal to the sum of V1 squared.

  Milton Keynes is a town that must have been designed by a mathematician, one of those philosophical ones like Pythagoras who saw numbers as the only part of the universe that embody perfection. Even the one building you can see as you pass through the town on the train is a huge cube comprising hundreds of identical glass squares on all sides that looks like part of a puzzle for super-intelligent giants.

  Outside the station all is chillingly symmetrical, with even the lamp posts having spherical tops so the pattern isn’t spoilt. I assume there must be bylaws to ensure that this picture is maintained, so that if you’re planning to walk down one side of highway H2, you have to get someone to walk down the other side at the same speed, to stop the place becoming lopsided. As an experiment, somebody should try something like leaving a kettle on the pavement to see whether an official would place one on the other side within minutes, maybe having emerged from a pipe that leads to the control room under River Island.

  I took my son around Milton Keynes when he was twelve, and he found it bewildering, which I suppose was a good sign. Two years later I told him I was going back there to do a show and he said, ‘Oh no, you’ll be on stage and someone in the front row will slyly pass you a note that says “Please help us”.’

  Defenders of the town point out that it’s a pleasant environment, with open spaces and lakes and a low crime rate and efficient schools and all sorts of activities, but the qualities advanced as positive aspects are all top-down, as if arranged by a happiness committee. They’ve been organised by the people who produce brochures that say: ‘And if ballooning is your preferred leisure activity, then it’s up, up and away with the Milton Keynes Hot Air Ballooning Association. Yes, whether it’s double word scores at the Indoor Scrabble Centre on H3 or artificial shark fishing at the hexagonal lake on the corner of V7 and H5, you’ll find all your desires are catered for here in Milton Keynes.’

  Living there must feel as if you’re part of a social experiment, with cameras following you to monitor the effects of issues such as triangular shapes on the heart rate. It was born when a Labour housing minister, Richard Crossman, announced where it would be built in 1966. The chairman of the committee set up to oversee the building of the town told Crossman he wanted a ‘properly planned publicly owned town’, and there was clearly an idealism driving the project. Maybe the dream owed something to the dominant socialist view of the time, that aspired to create order from above, organised by the state, as practised by the Soviet Union. In which case, on top of the gulags and the pact with Hitler, we can blame Stalinism for Milton Keynes as well.

  The result is a town that’s too clean and ordered. The state of mind of those most eager to defend the new town is shown in the book Milton Keynes: Image and Reality, which boasts: ‘By the mid-1980s we could aspire to be almost at the same level as Croydon.’

  In some ways the place has been a success, like a mini-America, built on immigration and a promise of a stable community on a new frontier. If there’d been a properly funded public-relations department in Washington in the 1800s, they’d have probably made adverts saying ‘Come to America’ in which cowboy children ran across Kentucky holding red balloons.

  But like the police officers who run the village in the film Hot Fuzz, who are so determined to keep their domain perfect that they arrange the murder of anyone who transgresses the etiquette of idyllic rural life, you feel the people who arrange Milton Keynes feel uneasy if anyone does anything to threaten the place’s controlled order of perfection.

  It’s symbolic that in order to get a Football League team, Milton Keynes bypassed the route of developing a
club within the community, and brought one in, the MK Dons, a team that had been Wimbledon in South London until its owners took it as a franchise and planted it in its new home.

  What you feel the town needs is grubbiness. It needs a market with kids’ clothes tattily piled on a table next to a man with sideburns selling second-hand CDs by the Average White Band and Supertramp. It needs an area the rest of the town warns you not to go, a kebab shop that’s the subject of rumours about missing puppies and a pub that everyone claims to have been in on the night Mad Jimmy went berserk with a cattle prod.

  Where the old socialist planners and modern corporate planners agree is that society, and the towns that make a society, should be organised from above. But in time Milton Keynes will develop a soul from within. There will inevitably be bands and rappers, poets and writers who complain eloquently about the town and so help to give it a human touch. Eventually the football supporters will identify with the team enough to moan incessantly about it, and it will become part of the community.

  One day the protest groups, the graffiti artists, the eccentrics and flawed shards of humanity that make a town whole will emerge. They’ll shave corners off the angles and put irregular-shaped objects in the centre, and while the original architects might shudder at the unravelling of their plans, Milton Keynes will become a town at last.

  Birmingham

  I’m not sure why Birmingham is so disliked, but it is. People try to change its image by renovating the Bullring Centre every couple of years, and its citizens often tell you the city has more miles of canals than Venice, but it makes no difference. It’s like the last year of a discredited government, when ministers are changed, and policies relaunched, but no one notices, because by now the Chancellor could give everyone a bar of gold and people would say, ‘Typical of the thieving bastards.’

  Maybe it’s the train station that does it. It’s surely the gloomiest, dingiest station for any major city in Britain. On the way there, you clatter past the airport and fields and light and the football ground, but this openness doesn’t make you feel at all free and airy, because you know it means you’re hurtling towards the damp darkness of New Street station, just as you wouldn’t think, ‘Ah, what a delightful breeze to set me up for the day,’ if you were a prisoner sailing across San Francisco Bay to start your time in Alcatraz.

  The layout has been carefully designed so that on the platforms no sunlight can enter, even on midsummer day, like Stonehenge in reverse. The first time you go there you think, this can’t possibly be the station for Britain’s second city, and assume the train took a wrong turning and went down a disused mine-shaft. Then hundreds of people struggle with their cases along the unlit narrow platforms, like refugees from the Russian pogroms, though at least those lucky bastards had a crying family to greet them and put their luggage on a donkey. At New Street there’s a search for the stairs to the Bullring, where, even if you’ve been there fifty times before, you stand and look around for several minutes thinking, ‘Now where am I supposed to go?’

  Because you’re in a traffic roundabout you can only escape from by navigating subways and uncrossable intersections that no map can help with. So you submerge yourself into the concrete, deciding to follow a path and seeing where it takes you, becoming so confused you wouldn’t be surprised if you came out opposite the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Even in the middle of the city you’re surrounded by flyovers and vast traffic islands that make you feel you’re really not meant to be there, as if you’ve accidentally wandered into a military zone, and you expect an official to come running towards you screaming at you to get down, and launching an investigation into how you got in without anyone noticing.

  Even in a car you get hopelessly, flailingly lost amidst the motorways and flyovers that govern the centre of the town. Surely motorways are supposed to link cities, not circulate around the middle of them. If you’re going from Leeds to London a motorway is handy, but if you’re popping out for a packet of biscuits you shouldn’t need to take the M6 to junction 5 and find the seventh exit off the Aston interchange that leads to the Spar.

  What you mustn’t do is miss your turning. You see the bit of Birmingham you want to go to, maybe even passing right by the exact building. And you look up at the road sign that tells you to get in this lane for Birmingham east and keep straight on for Birmingham south-east and straight on then back in a loop and sort of diagonally across and round again for Birmingham east by south-east, and you scream, ‘What? Which?’ to yourself, and try to hedge your bets by straddling three lanes at once until you feel the whole motorway is hooting in a Birmingham accent, and you follow the lane that you decide is logical but now you’re going back past the building you’re supposed to be at, unable to exit the motorway. This shouldn’t be too much of a problem, you assure yourself, as you can easily take the next exit and find your way back, but you go a mile and then another mile and past the city centre and there’s no way off, then fields start appearing and it begins to get dark and you can only look forward to running out of petrol so you can get taken home by the RAC.

  When I first had to negotiate the matrix that is Birmingham city centre it explained a scene I’d often experienced in my youth. My mum’s side of the family lived in Erdington, and whenever we visited them my dad would spend the first forty minutes of our stay stood on the doorstep with my granddad discussing the route.

  Bottlenecks at Bearwood and cut-throughs at Stetchford were traded with new roundabouts in Digbeth and roadworks up the Bristol Road until it seemed they must have exhausted every possible route from anywhere to anywhere without working out how to get through Birmingham, and would soon decide, ‘So next time I’ll go back through Longbridge, across to Edgbaston, drive across the cricket ground to deep square leg, up to New Street station onto the gloomy chilly track and get the train, ’cos I’m buggered if I know how to get here by car.’

  It can’t just be the inaccessible, terrifying centre that makes it so hard to sell Birmingham as an attractive city. Even people who don’t have to suffer the rigmarole of getting there because they already live there find it hard to be cheerful about their town. I wanted to be positive myself, so I had to ignore websites called – and I’m afraid these are all real – ‘Erdington is a Shithole’, ‘Bearwood is a Shithole’ and ‘Smethwick is a Shithole’. I think they’re all independent and not part of the shithole franchise, but eventually I found one that actually promotes the city, called ‘Birmingham is not Shit’. (I showed it to my son and he said, ‘The sad thing is that’s the official council website.’)

  The blurb explaining itself goes: ‘“Birmingham is not Shit” loves Birmingham’s people, arts, animals, buildings and grass verges.’ I’m not sure this is encouraging, when you’re trying to promote the positive side of the second biggest city in Britain, and after four things you’re down to the grass verges. ‘Birmingham is not Shit’ launched a competition for Brummie of the Year, and I thought, ‘Ah, that’s quite sweet’, so I looked up who were the finalists, and it said, ‘Due to foul and abusive comments this year there will be no Brummie of the Year.’

  In the search for a positive view I saw a film about the city, featuring Telly Savalas, the iconic actor who played Kojak. For some reason he presented this tribute to the beauty of Birmingham, and at one point he says: ‘There are so many beautiful sights, such as the inner ring road, a majestic network, miles of concrete and flyovers that link with the Aston Express.’

  I really, honestly don’t want to be cynical, but without question when Telly Savalas saw the script he must have been straight on the phone to his agent screaming, ‘Is that the best they can do, the motherfucking ring road? Hasn’t the place got a beach, a mountain range, something that links up with somewhere better than the Aston fucking Express?’

  It does make the place marvellously earthy, though. Whenever I hear people talk about the wit of football fans, the poetry of the terraces, I always think of Birmingham City, whose anthem goes: ‘Shit on t
he Villa, shit on the Villa tonight, shit on the Villa, because the Villa are shite.’ You can only imagine the excitement as the author paced around his kitchen for inspiration at three in the morning, yearning for a rhyme that went with tonight, and suddenly yelling, ‘I’ve got it – SHITE – it’s PERFECT!’

  Something else the town can boast is that there are apparently more lap-dancing clubs per head of the population in Birmingham than in any other city in Europe. Strange that, isn’t it? You’d think that blokes in Birmingham should be able to attract women without paying for it. ‘Shit on the Villa, shit on the Villa tonight’ – don’t tell me the women don’t go for that.

  And yet historically Birmingham should be as proud of its intellect as anywhere. For example, any account of the period from around 1790, when science and rational thought had to battle to win their place in European culture, gives a huge mention, alongside Darwin, Franklin and the pioneers of medicine and electricity, to the Birmingham Lunar Society.

  Pathetic though it may seem, I can’t help but wonder at the wisdom of calling their groundbreaking group the Birmingham Lunar Society, because I imagine them standing outside each night going, ‘Yep, it’s still there, that moon. It’s a bit smaller than last noit, I hope it don’t disappear altogether, or we’ll have to close our society down.’

  Another possibility is that it made sense for Birmingham to emerge as a centre for science at the time, as it was a city driven by engineering. This was a period when viewing the world with a scientific mind was still a challenge to the religious order, so Birmingham became a home for radical groups who saw the new discoveries as a political statement. To view the moon as a satellite that could be studied and analysed was an affront to those who saw it as a heavenly body driven by God’s will.