Published: 2011
One Man’s Tour of Modern Britain
One of the things I remember from the beery haze of university fresher’s week was the one question we all asked each other in common. The three Ws: what’s your name, what course are you doing, and where do you come from? The memorable thing about this was, when directed at one of the American oversees students, they would happily tell you about their hometown with such genuine pride and affection that you wondered why they ever left. In contrast, almost everyone from elsewhere in the UK would respond: “Yeah, I’m from (wherever). What a shithole.”
There’s a bit of this attitude in Mark Steel’s collection of essays based around visits to a diverse range of towns and cities across the UK, but it is easily trumped by the local pride and affinity amongst the people he meets, even when that pride is directed towards a concrete hippo in a shopping centre in Walsall. It’s based on his Radio Four show of the same name, which is recorded in venues such as church halls in the town in question, with an interactive audience of locals (hearing him goad West Cumbrians about ‘jam eaters’ was particularly amusing, for example). Obviously without the audience involvement, the format of the essays is slightly different, with more time for Steel to explore and reflect on different points.
The towns he visits are suitably diverse: from the relatively touristy (Norwich, Edinburgh) to the formerly industrial (Wigan, Gateshead) to the extremely remote (Orkney, Portland) with a bit of suburbia thrown in too (Surrey, Kent). How much I enjoyed each essay seemed to correlate with the extent to which Steel enjoyed visiting the place, even if the enjoyment is gained less from the location and more from the ennui of the locals (‘there’s nothing to do except kick the seagulls’ as one resident said of Dumfries). Elsewhere, any wit seems to be tempered by the fact that he clearly wasn’t comfortable there. In Andersonstown, the ‘troubles’ are still too close to the surface for comfort; whilst he finds Yorkshire, with its famously tactless and straight-talking inhabitants, “complex and contradictory.”
Some places which I have lived close to and spent time in appear, such as Birmingham. “I’m not sure why Birmingham is so disliked, but it is” he begins. I could certainly identify with its impenetrably confusing road network – I’m not the only one, apparently, who has attempted to navigate my way around it and experienced the disturbing, unique to Birmingham experience of seeing the building I’m aiming for from the car, with no idea how to actually get to it from the elevated motorway. From above, Birmingham looks something like “a Scalectrix course after the dog’s sat on it”, and I’m sure he must be right. This – along with the mish-mash of half-baked planning fads that have given the city a dislocating, disjointed feel – may seem fairly self-evident. But unlike many other commentators, he also finds time to praise its sense of community and identity, which others insist don’t exist.
At the other end of the scale, I still haven’t got any desire to actually visit the depressed former steelworks town of Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, but Steel’s take on it is more uplifting that you would imagine. Amid the derelict industries and endemic unemployment, Steel notes that the town “can’t just be a shithole, else everyone would have left.” He discovers a dominant attitude of determination to pull through bad times together, a kind of hardened jolliness, that is both affecting and uplifting.
Despite the obvious similarities, In Town isn’t really some kind of Notes From A Small Island for the 21st Century. This has more of an agenda about what’s wrong with – and right with – our country. I particularly identify with the theme that unifies most of the essays: that despite corporate uniformity and the trend towards ‘clone towns’ with identikit high streets and chain pubs, these places still retain their own sense of identity, customs and quirks, almost in defiance to the onslaught of Tesco Metros and out of town shopping centres. But equally importantly, he argues, this IS a problem. Steel may be approaching this from an unashamedly left wing perspective, but you don’t have to be of this persuasion to agree that the increasing tendency of our town centres to look exactly alike is a bit depressing. After all, why would anyone (least of all the likes of Bill Bryson, or Lonely Planet et al) want to spend their time travelling around a country in which every town is almost exactly the same as the last one?
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