journal of a writing man

writingsof a writing man

Even the New Towns aren't New any more

My cleaning campaign yesterday put my normal routine out of kilter, leaving me in the evening with nothing to do but turn on the TV. Well, I'd uncovered it, and dusted it, and polished it, so I thought I was entitled to use it.

I'm sure that our English love affair with the post-war "new towns", with all its mixed emotions, must strike you as odd. "What's so special about building a new town?" I can hear you say it. Well, let me tell you, the act of taking a few fields in the countryside between hamlets and villages that have seen millennia come and go and saying: "Let there be a town!" seemed pretty dramatic at the time. It was born of our burst of post-war energy, combining with the fifties style explosion, the New Elizabethan Age and our determination to turn aside from the dull, sad austerity that had become a dominant characteristic of our thinking.

I adored them when they were new. They were bright and clean, the trains and the buses ran on time, and people smiled, for goodness' sake. I clearly remember one cold wintry night, oh, well over thirty years ago, walking alone through Crawley New Town, in Sussex, along snow-quietened avenues and feeling a fierce possessive pride in it all. The energy that had created these perfect towns seemed to me to be new in itself, a phenomenon born of fire and unique to the times in which we lived.

Today the New Towns aren't what they were. But that's another story for when I feel like stamping up and down and damning politicians to the eternal........ Nope. I mustn't get side-tracked.

Well. There I was, glass of Retsina at my side, thumb on the remote, flicking through the channels to see what was happening in the world. Somewhere around the forty-third click I arrived at a documentary on the West Country - showing an old town not too far from here. A wild-haired scientist was pursuing TV popularity, waving his arms enthusiastically in a vain attempt to be photogenic. I should have known better and stuck with the German-language dubbing of an episode of Twin Peaks. But I didn't. No fool...

The town was Chipping Sodbury. It's a charming little medieval market town, reeking history, the ancient street plan still recognizable on the ground. Layer on layer of frontage building has sometimes replaced the original buildings or, more often, encased them, and there are little alley-ways leading off into little shadowed courtyards where the stones whisper lost secrets from past every-days.

Chipping Sodbury. Feel the words. Roll them around and chant them. And, nearby, Chipping Norton. Taste that one, too. Don't they just drip an essence of history on to your palette, to be savoured slowly and sumptuously?

Well, it's a FAKE! I didn't know this, and I find my new knowledge uncomfortable. It transpires that this lovely little town is in fact a medieval New Town, laid out on a green-field site, roads moved to accommodate it, and designed specifically to provide income for the local lords and bishops. And many of our towns and villages have the same provenance. It seems the aristocracy built them in response to what were, to them, disastrous changes in England in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries when social-economic structures were beginning to be founded on cash rather than property. They freed serfs to people them, gave them possession over property, and then charged them rent in cash for the privilege. And taxed their commerce. And licensed their markets. And milked and milked them, conserving the position and riches of the ruling classes through the renaissance and way, way beyond.

Oh I could do without this knowledge! I knew I was right to sit reading Keats and let the world go by, running frantic after its own drummer while I sauntered along peaceably to mine.

But there it is, inescapable, hard fact. Chipping Sodbury is an artificial construct, not an organic, natural growth from the eternal patterns of the land. Future poets may stand back in horror similarly when they learn that Crawley and Milton Keynes were engineered in one piece, complete and artificial.

I snapped off the fiendish device but it was too late. This new knowledge was already filtering into my mind, synthesizing and catalyzing new reactions, changing irretrievably what was there, replacing comfortable old memory trains with new, cold, clinical truth.

And the truth is irresistible, of course. I've worshipped at its unfriendly altar all my life. I'll have to pursue this, nail it down, fit it into my own scheme of things.

I'd much rather not, oh, I'd much rather not. I was happy in my ignorance. But the Luddites have never won a war yet and I know that my reactionary response is doomed. So, when my cleaning's done, I'll hie me to the library and drag back some English social history books and start to build another raft of useless knowledge. I wonder if I'll ever find the time to get wise?

The only problem with progress is it's been going on too long.

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