Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  Keeping with the lunar theme, the doctors, inventors and industrialists of the Society met once a month, on the night of a full moon, and set about promoting the latest scientific debates. They probably saw no distinction between their academic work and their role in establishing Britain’s first anti-slavery campaign, in 1788, long before even most radicals suggested the trade should be abolished. Partly this was in response to the fact that much of the wealth of the city at the time came from the manufacture of guns, which were used to capture slaves. The anti-slavery society also organised a boycott of sugar picked by slave labourers.

  The Lunar Society helped establish a tradition of radical movements in the city, though some failed in magnificent fashion. For example a women’s movement was set up in 1825. According to Birmingham: A History of the City and its People: ‘In the mid-nineteenth century a group of young females formed the Birmingham Maidens’ Club, where the members agreed to remain unmarried. But the club had to close down after most of them got married.’

  And there’s the Bullring, so named because bulls were once tied there and taunted for the amusement of passers-by, though now despite its name it must be the most impossible place in the world to get a bull, as the finest matador of all time couldn’t coax it through the underpass, round all the angles, up the steps and across the ring roads to the diesel-filled concourse where its ancestors were prodded for fun.

  There were riots at the Bullring in 1839, led by campaigners for an extension of the vote. And as Birmingham became the centre of the motor industry the city became central to the trade union movement. The engineers who joined miners to shut down Saltley coke depot in 1972, in support of miners’ pay claims, were responsible for one of the most celebrated union victories of the century.

  Birmingham’s response to calamities, such as the pub bombings of 1974 or the decline of the car factories, suggests that they’re seen as traumas that have rocked the whole city, in a way that might also happen in Liverpool or Newcastle.

  Perhaps more importantly in shaping a city-wide sense of community, there’s a shared sense of unease over what happened to Birmingham’s statue of King Kong. It used to stand by the Rotunda building in the middle of the Bullring, possibly because someone in the planning department was misinformed, and believed King Kong ended up on top of the Bullring holding a girl from Selly Oak. At one point someone set fire to his rear, which led to a disputed insurance claim, then at the end of the 1970s he suddenly disappeared.

  Thirty years later you still hear theories about where he went, as if he’s the city’s Lord Lucan. A typical letter in the Birmingham Post in 2011 said, ‘I remember being absolutely terrified of King Kong as the number 50 bus came around the corner of the outdoor markets and HE came into view. I also remember that it ended up on the Stratford Rd at a coach firm’s depot/office.’

  Another story is that he turned up outside a car dealers in Digbeth, and it’s said that in 1976 he was sold for £12,700 to a Scottish company called Spook Erections, which put him in the markets it ran around the country. A recent article in the Birmingham Post informed its readers that the statue ‘has been found lying in a car park in Penrith’.

  Unlike those of Lord Lucan, you’d think these sightings would be easy to verify, what with him being twenty feet tall and incapable of moving, and I can’t imagine Penrith is the sort of town where a King Kong can be dumped in a car park without being spotted, the way you might just get away with it in New York. Or maybe he’ll continue to create these wispy visions, and there’ll be unconfirmed reports of him living in Bolivia disguised as Godzilla, being employed by the CIA to intimidate anti-government forces in Angola, or being melted down by the Mafia after a row about gambling debts.

  Another unifying fact about the city is the one about it enjoying more miles of canal than Venice, although this seems to miss the point, as you might as well boast that there’s more paint in a warehouse in Luton than there is on the Sistine Chapel. The important fact is that it’s quality rather than quantity that attracts tourists when it comes to a canal system. The Birmingham Tourist Board seems to think otherwise, and must assume that visitors to Venice find the place disappointing because there’s only one canal visible from St Mark’s Square, and might say, ‘I hear there are a whopping four round the back of the Stetchford gasworks passing under the M5 interchange where the junkies leave their needles. We’ll go there next year.’

  Birmingham’s canals are another sign of its influence at the start of the industrial age. They were the earliest in Britain, created to transport iron from the Black Country to the centres of engineering. Now, for all the canal miles that gives the city, not everyone is confident of their value as a tourist attraction. For example, when a friend arranged a canal boat weekend in Worcestershire, she was told by the agency that made the booking, ‘We don’t recommend you take the boat into Birmingham. You just don’t know WHAT might happen.’

  As fearful overreactions go, I’d say that beats those people in the 1980s who would give the advice ‘Don’t drive through Brixton,’ as if the place had fallen to bandits and warlords who’d ambush random families heading for a day trip to Brighton. How dangerous can crossing the nautical border into Birmingham really be? Are these waterways notorious for pirates? Do hooded, eye-patched gangs of youths jump on board and demand at the point of a sword that you hand over your tea, coffee and potted plants? You can see how getting away from danger would be a problem, with a shout of ‘Step on it!’ and then a gentle ‘puff puff puff puff splosh’ as the barge crept towards its maximum permitted speed of four miles an hour. Maybe the whole system is like Apocalypse Now, with barges moodily rolling towards their destination while the captain sits on board wistfully chewing grass and keeping watch in case of ambush from the rebels of Tipton.

  But Birmingham’s canals give it a myth of being an English Venice, which has become a part of its identity. It also has its university, its Test match cricket ground, Cannon Hill Park and its football clubs, all unique, and all possible to cross without the use of a flyover or underpass, though this probably infuriates the planners who designed the city’s layout in the 1960s, who must watch Aston Villa and think, ‘That player could nip up the wing much quicker if we’d been allowed to put a bypass on the halfway line, to cut out the bottleneck in midfield.’

  And Birmingham has its accent, which people are so rude about you could probably arrest them for hate crimes. But more important than what outsiders think of it is the fact that the place has its own accent. Unlike Glasgow, which has an accent not all that different from other cities in southern Scotland, or London, whose accent stretches to Southend and Luton, Birmingham’s is its own. In this world of stultifying sameness where it’s so hard to be genuinely original and unique, Birmingham has a one-off.

  So the city defends its dialect with pride, and if it should ever be in danger of getting diluted it ought to be preserved, the way Welsh is, by insisting that all children in the city are taught in Brummie and that the road signs should be in both English and Brummie.

  On top of this, Birmingham can claim to be the place where the Balti curry was invented. There are areas such as Sparkbrook that are lined with Indian and Pakistani cafés, with plastic tablecloths and lopsided portraits on the wall that may be of the owner’s father or could be the President of the Punjab.

  Birmingham’s image probably isn’t helped by its confused status as Britain’s second city. Whereas that title was accepted across most of Britain until recently, in a poll in 2011, 48 per cent said Manchester was the second city, and 40 per cent said Birmingham. This only matters because of expectations, otherwise people in Oswestry would be gutted every time a new survey emerges that says it’s missed out on second-city rank yet again, despite the new windows in the post office.

  But something needs to be done about Birmingham’s centre, because the joys and quirks of the city are hidden behind the oppressively unwelcoming concrete algebra puzzle that is its unfathomable heart. It’s
like writing a captivating novel but insisting that the cover smells of raw sewage.

  The planners do make regular attempts to renovate the Bullring, but with delicate architectural genius they always manage to make it even uglier. It’s as if there’s a committee somewhere that thinks, ‘Just one more flyover and then it will all be sorted,’ so that by now an aerial view of the place makes it look like a Scalextric course after the dog’s sat on it. The latest attempt at renovation entailed the creation of a giant, mesmerising bubbly thing in the absolute centre, that looks as if each day it’s going to get bigger by eating the first twenty people who walk by.

  So it should simply be abandoned. The Bullring, the station, the inner circle and the flyovers should be covered in barbed wire and left derelict, like bits of Chernobyl, and the centre should be moved two miles away, in whatever direction the locals prefer. Outsiders will then arrive in a city it’s possible to walk around, and where it’s possible to imagine that a park may be nearby. They’ll look around for the Asian cafés and the exuberance of Jamaican Handsworth, the abundance of canals and the symphony orchestra, and will hear the accent as a lilting melody, a symbol of the pastoral effervescent jolliness, with its strange cordoned-off area on the outskirts, that is Birmingham.

  Didcot, Oxford

  Didcot must be the town that’s least visited compared to how often it’s seen in the whole country. It’s in the south of Oxfordshire, and consists of two main roads on either side of a tiny pedestrianised centre, a small railway museum, a fire station, a post office and a fucking great power station with six vast funnels pumping out fuck knows what that can be seen from everywhere, including, I should think, on a clear night, outer space.

  If you’re travelling to the Midlands by road or rail, you might casually glance west and note a power station. That will be Didcot. If you’re going to Bristol, you might at some point turn towards the north and see a power station. Didcot. Even when you’re used to this you get caught out, and think, ‘That power station can’t possibly be Didcot,’ but it will be, because it’s on wheels and they must move it to comply with regulations regarding smoke limits in one area.

  It may not be coincidence that it’s visible from so much of England, because Didcot was the perfect place for southern England’s main railway junction, en route to everywhere, in the middle of everything. Many towns grew up around a railway, but in Didcot the railway was the town, created to serve Brunel’s vision of a network from east to west. You’ll probably now be wondering how you can read much more about the impact of the railway on Didcot, in which case you may be drawn to a book I bought called The Railway Comes to Didcot. But unfortunately the opening line goes: ‘In no way is this book a history of the railway in Didcot.’ I couldn’t help feeling slightly cheated by this. It’s possible that another of the author’s books may contain some information in that area, but I was slightly put off by its title: The Long Years of Obscurity: A History of Didcot, Volume One – to 1841.

  Didcot owes its modern existence to Lord Abingdon, who refused to allow a railway to pass through Abingdon village; Didcot was chosen instead. Now it has around 20,000 people, and a sense that the landscape might not be something to put on a tin of biscuits.

  When I asked on Twitter for comments from the town, possibly the two most poignant were, ‘You can always tell on the train to Oxford who’s from Didcot, from their morose demeanour,’ and ‘I seem to remember a character in EastEnders confessing they were from Didcot.’ That is truly disturbing, to be considered a subject of trauma in EastEnders, presumably with dialogue that went:

  ‘We’ve gotta talk.’

  ‘What is it, doll?’

  ‘Look, this ain’t gonna be easy, but I’ll come aht wiv it. I’m from Didcot.’

  ‘You what? Oh no, that explains your morose demeanour, you slaaaag.’

  But the town has developed a stoical sense of pride. Everyone I spoke to there was aware of the Cornerhouse Theatre, which they told me with great satisfaction had been built with money originally scheduled for Reading. And everyone was shocked, shocked, that I wasn’t familiar with William Bradbery, who came from Didcot and was the first person to cultivate watercress.

  As well as being defined by, and looked down upon from all angles by, the towers of the power station, Didcot is also defined by, and looked down upon from all angles by, the town ten miles up the road, which is Oxford.

  To start with, in 1836 the Great Western Railway applied to build a branch line from Didcot to Oxford, but the colleges were the main landowners, and they refused to allow the new route. The reason was that they didn’t want the grubby people of Didcot to be able to lower the tone of Oxford by merrily travelling to it on the train. Eventually in 1843 the colleges allowed the new line, but on the condition that no one below the status of an MA was allowed to travel on it. Now, when I first read this, I was certain that I must have misread or misunderstood the sentence, so to save you going back over this paragraph, eventually in 1843 the colleges allowed the new line, but on the condition that no one below the status of an MA was allowed to travel on it.

  Not only that, but the university authorities were given free passes to travel along the line at any time, to check that no one was trying to catch a ride who wasn’t sufficiently mastered up. So there were actually people looking through the carriages, maybe even wandering down the train calling, ‘Can I see your Masters, please? Masters and doctorates, please. Thank you, Professor. Thank you, sir, that’s fine. Ah, I’m sorry, sir, media studies isn’t valid on a Friday, you’ll have to get off at the next stop.’

  If it hasn’t already received one, I’d like to nominate this for the all-time snobbery award. When discussing their proposal the university authorities must have said, ‘It is quite possible that not being able to speak Latin is contagious, in which case for our finest minds to be in the proximity of these Didcottian dunces could be calamitous to our nation’s intellect.’

  Hopefully the local youngsters found ways round this rule, by flashing a 2:1 in geography at the barrier, then running off before the inspector could check it. Or maybe they forged a BA in philosophy, and then rather than squirming as the inspector asked them for a précis on Cartesian dualism, they panicked and locked themselves in the toilet.

  But it would be a mistake to think of Oxford as a monolithic body of pomposity, because the town is divided between the university hierarchy and a normal population. This has given rise to a tension that goes back to the early days of the colleges in the thirteenth century, and that erupted spectacularly in 1355, when two students complained to an innkeeper about the quality of his beer. According to one account, they ‘took a quart of wine and threw the said wine in the face of the taverner, and then with the said quart pot beat the taverner’. The students then fetched bows and arrows, but these were confiscated by local bailiffs, so more students turned up and attacked the town magistrates. A complaint by residents was made the next morning, so the students, being young and full of mischief, set fire to the town. At the end of the day’s fighting sixty students and thirty-three people from the town were dead. By this time I presume the landlord had cleaned his barrels and freshened up his beer.

  You might imagine some sort of sanction would have been applied to the students who started this jape, such as a couple of marks knocked off their business studies final paper for every blacksmith they murdered, or something. But the government blamed the people of the town for the incident. So each year the mayor, bailiffs and sixty burgesses of the town had to attend a mass, and pay a silver penny to the university for each dead student. This penance carried on until 1825, when there was probably only the Daily Mail left screaming that if criminals can get away with a 490-year sentence, it’s no wonder the streets aren’t safe.

  Today the rift between university and town ought to be less pronounced than in the days when students were almost exclusively from the nobility, but this is complicated by the fact that in Oxford the students are Oxford students. S
ome of them, though a smaller percentage even than fifty years ago, may be from working-class backgrounds, but all of them are imbued with a sense of superiority. As you head through the centre of town past the courtyards, the gothic buildings, the boys in black gowns, the quaint bridge that seems designed to tempt you to jump off it into the Thames at two in the morning, the perfect lawns, the entrances behind thick spiky chains, you feel as if you’re at a gig with only a white wristband, but you need a purple one to get past the ropes and the security staff to where people like you aren’t allowed.

  Even so, the town is seductive, with pubs covered in ivy that make you feel as if you should sit at an oak table with a jug of ale being wise, and gentle paths by the river where you have to delicately brush away dangling lengths of weeping willow to walk along them. It’s hard to reconcile yourself to the fact that this is the same Thames that charges through London all full of rage. It seems as if the river must go there to work all day, then commute back home to Oxford and relax by gently rippling past muddy banks on which there ought to be an old man showing his grandson how to whittle.

  So it must seem peculiar to live there if you’re part of the population that has no business with the university. Because Oxford’s college’s aren’t to one side of town, like most work-places that dominate an area, by the docks or on an industrial estate. They’re stood, grandly, peering at you from all angles, reminding you that beyond the gables and the statues are your masters and future masters, and probably a function at which someone’s carrying a tray of tiny sausages to honour a benefactor from the Wellcome Trust.

  This is a world that certainly isn’t dominated by the soulless and the corporate, with no room for individuality. Here they saunter across quadrangles between spires and gargoyles, every delicately designed corner of every building intricately unique.