Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  Brutalism originated in the Soviet Union of the 1950s, so it must be one of the few concepts to have come out of that time and place to be joyfully adopted by English inner-city local councils. At some point someone must have stood up in a meeting at Gateshead Town Hall and said, ‘In place of all the grime in this area, we should make the place livelier by introducing the values of Stalinist Russia.’ He probably added, ‘Furthermore, I propose the installation of gulag kiosks, situated on each street corner, in which residents can be incarcerated in freezing conditions for several years and then shot as dissidents, providing an exciting and innovative approach to the demands of human resource distribution within a context of modern urban accommodation.’

  So now the Rocket sits there, the dominant sight for a community of thousands, a tower which the people of Dunston have to circumnavigate if they want a bag of chips or a pint of milk, the pride of the sort of people who compile Gateshead Architecture, a crumbling, empty, astronomical monument to failure.

  Gateshead has a supplementary problem challenging its self-esteem: that it’s the much lesser-known sibling of famous relative Newcastle, which everyone’s heard of and which has a famous football team, and which has threatened to swallow Gateshead for almost a thousand years. The earliest example I found was in 1080. Before I began reading about the history of the town I made a conscious decision that in my show I wouldn’t resort to the stereotype of Geordies wanting to fight all the time as a source of jokes, as that would be clichéd and lazy. Then I opened my first book, called Around Gateshead. And the second sentence on page 1 went: ‘St Mary’s church was on this site many centuries ago, but in 1080 it was burned down by locals, with the Bishop of Durham inside.’

  Throughout the twelfth century there were constant feuds between the two towns about where the border between them should be. In 1322 Newcastle merchants burned down Gateshead’s fisheries. In 1383 they built a tower at the Gateshead end of the bridge, declared it a bit of Newcastle in Gateshead, a sort of Geordie Gibraltar, and refused to tear it down until 1416.

  In 1552 an Act of Parliament officially annexed Gateshead to Newcastle, the introduction saying: ‘The quiet ordre of the corporacon of the Towne of Newcastle upon Tyne hath bene not a little disturbed and hindered, by the men of Gatesyde. In the said town of Newcastle, they daly comit manyfolde disorders which escape unpunished.’

  According to The County of Durham, ‘The feud grew to a frenzy when the wicked Newcastleites passed the act to amalgamate the two towns. Gateshead rose as one and declared, “The town of Gateshead is good and wholesome. It is known that the South side of the river is deep and more clean than the side towards Newcastle. If we are united with Newcastle, Gateshead would be replenished with evil-disposed persons and thieves.”’

  You have to wonder whether some of this was written by the leader writers from the Daily Express, as only they could argue, ‘Now foreigners threaten to make our half of the river shallow!!!’

  And so, through history, the relationship persists, not just about rivalry but about one side battling not to feel insignificant, so that being from Gateshead must feel like being Muhammad Ali’s flatmate.

  But there is something unique about the town, making it distinct even from its neighbour. One reason why Gateshead has been consistently pilloried as a den of squalor might be that it had an unusually early start at being a centre for industry. The first mines were sunk there in 1344, the first railway started in 1620, and the first house ever to be lit by electricity was in Mosley Street.

  Gateshead also exhibits a love for the bridges across the Tyne, which have no interest in seeming picturesque, but demand human activity, as if this is where the life is, and the land is the tranquil part, because they’re clanky and chunky and together seem joyously unplanned and uncoordinated, but ready for action like a gang of builders leaving a greasy-spoon café at six in the morning. There are the domineering girders of the main bridge, an effete, delicate swing bridge, and a mischievous little road bridge with a red light on the top, so it looks like the main bridge’s impish son, and you don’t want to upset it or the big bridge will clobber you with its rivets.

  There’s an underground system that clunks under Newcastle and Gateshead, that’s big and yellow and rattles and feels industrial, as if it ought to be carrying girders, or that to get off you have to be unloaded by a docker.

  Gateshead was also the home of the Blaydon Races, the famous annual fair commemorated in the Geordie anthem, with its chorus ‘Ganning doon the Scotswood Roooooad – to see the Blaydon Races’. The races were eventually cancelled in 1916 after a riot following the disqualification of a horse, but a few years later a painting of them exhibited in Shipley Art Gallery was still able to attract a huge crowd. Unfortunately a fight broke out in the queue that was so violent the gallery had to be shut down.

  And Gateshead has a sporting hero, Harry Clasper, a local miner who became a world champion in the 1840s, his performances regularly attracting crowds of between 50,000 and 100,000 people. The unlikely sport that dominated the scene at that time was rowing, which now has connotations of Oxford and Cambridge and rowing lakes at Eton. You don’t think of the Henley Regatta as something 100,000 rowdy people would turn up to.*

  Harry redesigned the rowing boat, and invented a new rowing style in which the rower slides back and forward during the stroke. He won the world coxed championship in a boat with his three brothers, and was seven times winner of the Thames Regatta.

  Everyone in Gateshead seems to know about Harry Clasper. When I asked the audience if they knew who he was there was a bored collective ‘Yees, he was a rower,’ the sort of tone you’d adopt if a teenager asked if you’d heard of Jimi Hendrix. He’s theirs, a link with the industry and overcrowding of the past, not just any Victorian industry and overcrowding but Gateshead’s, whose mines, river and concentration of people could combine to make a hero out of a rower.

  Equally theirs is the Angel of the North, a seventy-foot-high statue by the A1, weighing two hundred tons, and perched on the edge of an ex-council housing estate. I went there twice, each time it drizzled and each time a sequence of visitors strode up to its sturdy ankles, smoking or pushing a pram or walking a dog, having decided that this activity would be more pleasurable if undertaken by a seventy-foot-high metal angel. Everyone I spoke to said they visited it regularly, although it’s a work of art, and none of them said they’d ever been yelled at for touching it.

  Harder to explain is the attachment much of the town has to its other most famous monument, the Get Carter car park, the location for the scene where Michael Caine carries out the most famous murder in the film, throwing the actor who played Alf Roberts in Coronation Street off the roof. It was perfect for that purpose, an unforgiving, dismal structure, another shining example of the tribute to concrete that is brutalism. But it was theirs. Instead of ‘Gateshead – you know – the other side of the river from Newcastle,’ they could say, ‘You know the film Get Carter? Well, you know that car park where there’s that murder? Well, that’s the main square in Gateshead.’

  It was known as the Get Carter car park, and the butcher’s opposite one corner of the car park is called the Get Carter butchers. Then the site was bought by Tesco, which promised to demolish it. So a campaign to save it was set up by the Get Carter Appreciation Society. This made for the most unique of preservation campaigns.

  Graffiti was sprayed on the boards erected by Tesco around the condemned brutalist car park, with slogans such as ‘We will never forget’ and ‘You can demolish a building but its spirit will live on’. You could imagine a nightly vigil being held there, with candles across the floor and folk singers singing, ‘Its floors may not suit all but it’s beautifully brutal,’ and a guest speaker from Chile saying, ‘You must remember, the digger may knock over the concrete, but it cannot knock over the spirit of struggle within our hearts. Whatever the outcome, if we fight for this cause, our children and our children’s children will remember we staye
d true to the spirit of the building where Alf Roberts was thrown from the roof.’

  In the days before the demolition, Get Carter car park tea towels went on sale. The final destruction made it onto the national news, a spokesman for the campaign telling reporters, ‘It’s as if Gateshead’s front teeth have been knocked out.’ And this was for the loss of a building that became famous because it was so horrible it was an ideal setting for a film that needed somewhere as horrible as possible. The campaign was yelling, in effect, ‘You can’t get rid of that – it’s horrible!’ But it was theirs, in a way a branch of Tesco won’t be, no matter how horrible it turns out to be.

  Kent

  There’s something lurking beneath Kent. I spent the first eighteen years of my life there, and I still don’t know what it is. Sometimes you’ll get a shifty look from a stern, silent and slouched pair of smoking stubbly blokes, as if they’re thinking, ‘I reckon that arsehole knows about our illegal bear-baiting club that starts every night at two in the morning in Farningham Woods.’

  The town I was brought up in – Swanley – specialised in petty crime, the way Luton made hats or Sunderland made ships. But Swanley had the last laugh, because its industry is still booming. Maybe that’s because it always emphasised the ‘petty’ part of the trade, making every effort to nick the most worthless tat, so lads with curly hair would look both ways as if they were in an amateur production of Oliver!, then mutter in your ear, ‘I’ve got a box of Welsh-Portuguese dictionaries – three quid the lot.’

  When I was seventeen I teamed up with a mate to start a business buying useless cars, polishing them and selling them for a profit. We bought a Ford Corsair for £12, gave it a wipe and advertised it in the newsagents for twenty-five. We got a call from Nobby, one of a family of hundreds who all lived on the same estate, who were regularly mentioned in the Dartford and Swanley Chronicle when they were convicted of burgling each other.

  Nobby came round to look at the car. We assumed he was going to use it for some ill-fated felony. ‘Can I have a look inside?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course,’ we said, as any car dealer would.

  So he got in – and drove off.

  There was a pathetic forty seconds or so after we watched him turn the corner, before we looked at each other and mumbled, ‘It doesn’t look like he’s coming back.’

  The 30,000 people of the town are served by one pub, the Lullingstone, which must be among the most dangerous buildings in the world to enter. Going in there if you’re not familiar with most of the regulars is suicide. Those people who go all the way to Switzerland are wasting their money: all they need to do is buy a one-way ticket to Swanley, then pop in the Lullingstone and say, ‘I’m not from round here.’ That should do it.

  My friend Linda Smith was from Erith, a few miles from Swanley, and after she died I saw an article about her in which she was quoted as saying, ‘I often used to argue with Mark Steel about which was worse, Erith or Swanley. I’d make a good case for Erith, but in my heart I knew he was right.’

  There’s a Roman villa just outside Swanley, beautifully preserved, with a mosaic floor and plenty of columns, that’s the only reason for anyone to visit the area. If you take a peek at the town itself you’ll understand how the Romans made it all the way to the edge of Swanley, but not to the actual centre, and probably returned to plead, ‘Caesar, their legions poured forth from the Lullingstone with many thousands of pool cues and a mighty cry of “Fuck off up to Sidcup.”’

  Between Swanley and Erith was Dartford, the metropolis we looked on with envy, for here was a town so important it had a Pricerite and a Co-Op. It even trumped our major enterprise, as illustrated in a poem written by Edward Cresy in 1857 about the main occupations of towns in the area. It went: ‘Sutton for mutton, Horton for beef, South Down for gingerbread, Dartford for a thief.’

  I found myself lost in nostalgia when I revisited Dartford, because so many shopping malls and TK Maxxes have replaced the old city centre that I could hardly figure out where anything I remembered used to be. A local historian was trying to explain the new layout to me when I suddenly felt a soothing glow of security as I recognised a building that brought back warm memories. ‘Ah,’ I beamed, ‘there’s the magistrate’s court. Now I know where I am.’ Its dull municipal brickwork reminded me of the day I was done in the juvenile court for nicking records. I recalled that with some affection, probably because it meant I got to spend a rare weekday with my dad. If only I’d known about the town’s poetry, I could have told the magistrate when asked if I had anything to say before sentencing, ‘As Edward Cresy said, Dartford is for a thief, so I’m only upholding the town’s tradition, sir.’

  The tragedy of Dartford is that if you return after many years you find yourself in a recurring exchange. After noting that the old cinema where I saw Papillon and the film version of On the Buses had closed, I was told, ‘That’s because there’s a cinema complex at Bluewater.’ The old record shop where I bought – actually paid for – the first Clash album had shut, as there was an HMV at Bluewater. Clothes shops, restaurants, all had succumbed to the giant Bluewater complex three miles up the A2. When I saw that West Hill Hospital had shut down, I thought, ‘Oh no, I suppose now if you have a heart attack you have to go to the Bluewater Cardiac Complex, between Gap and River Island’.

  To get to Bluewater you turn onto a slip road and descend between cliffs, as if you’re being driven into the headquarters of an evil genius. Then you enter the sparkly, spacious monument to shirts and bracelets and muffins, and wander round and round, not sure where to gaze until you lose concentration and start wondering whether you’ve been past Monsoon already maybe twenty minutes ago or was it two hours and your legs start to feel weary but you feel you must keep going and maybe you’ve been here several days now and you tell the same woman for the fourth time you wouldn’t like her to demonstrate how your skin can feel vibrant and energised once she’s cleansed it with soap made of natural salts from the Dead Sea combined with walrus whiskers and then it occurs to you no one appears to leave this place so you have a panic attack and yearn for the moment when you might emerge like the prisoner who escapes at the end of Midnight Express and begin the process of reacclimatising to society and to natural light.

  On one visit to Dartford, by train, I was sat opposite two guards in uniform who were discussing Bluewater. One said he never ever went in, as he knew it was impossible to get out of it without losing a whole tortured day. His mate smirked with pride and said, ‘I went in just before Christmas – three presents, twenty minutes and straight back out again. I was like the fucking SAS.’

  Once you’ve managed to get outside, you find yourself in the eerie emptiness that stretches through places such as Northfleet and Swanscombe. I bought a book called Who’s Buried Where in Kent? Kent is probably the only county for which it seems fitting that there’s a book detailing the locations of corpses. It tells you that Henry IV is in Canterbury and Malcolm Campbell is in Chislehurst, and I expected the next page to say: ‘Big Tony – shallow grave in Swanley recreation ground.’

  Maybe it’s the look of Kent that creates a sense of hidden murkiness. The patches of glorious greenery that earned it the title ‘the garden of England’ are interspersed with scenes of compelling ugliness, leaving you unsure what you’re supposed to think. You gaze through the Eurostar window and try to process the sights that go: ‘Rolling hills cement works delightful village orchard fucking great smoky funnels oast house oast house greatest concentration of electricity pylons in universe oast house lush green fields lorry park three hundred diggers in excavation site where motorway’s in four hundredth year of being rebuilt abandoned quarry church spire unspoilt since 1342 five miles of concrete and cables leading to Eurotunnel.’

  Some of the towns plonked between the foliage are places that appear to have been entirely forgotten. I know there is a place called Sittingbourne, because you can see the cranes there from the train to Canterbury, but when’s the last tim
e anyone checked to see what goes on there? One day a civil servant looking through some old folders will exclaim, ‘Hang on – there’s a town here called Sittingbourne whose file must have slipped down the back of a cabinet, because there’s no record of it in any official papers since 1927.’

  Or someone might squeal, ‘Oh my God, we’ve forgotten we put a place at Sittingbourne,’ the way you suddenly remember you left a pie in the oven, and they’ll rush down there to find all manner of mutant underground activity before fencing it off and having the military patrol the perimeter, while signing an order that no one must ever be told of what took place.

  Then there’s the Isle of Grain. This is a marshy piece of land that sticks out into the Thames where it meets the end of the Medway. On maps of Kent it’s left blank: just a grey patch, the way a road map of the South Pole would be. There’s one thin lane that creeps tentatively up there, to an estate of portable homes that look like chalets in a holiday camp, except it would make more commercial sense to set up a holiday camp in a hospice. In 1995 a leisure company did convert the place into a holiday camp, the Allhallows Leisure Park. I looked at its website, assuming the area must have undergone a major transformation since I last went there in 1980. The first review to appear began, ‘NEVER AGAIN!!! The beds were wonky, the shop was empty, the food was awful – will never be going back.’ Then there are four more scathingly awful reviews, before one seems at first to break the trend: ‘Great place. Great food. Shame then that someone set fire to my caravan. Burnt to the ground.’