Placemaking

Northampton may not actually be the furthest I've ever traveled for this blog, but it felt like it.  Somewhere like Newcastle or Carlisle or even Worcester feels like a part of the larger whole.  I can draw a thematic link from where I am on Merseyside to there.

Northampton, though?  Northampton felt like I was in The South.  It's not, technically, but it certainly felt London-adjacent.  The train I was on was headed to London; there were destinations like "Milton Keynes" and "Leighton Buzzard" in the announcements.  It felt like I was straying out of my bailiwick, which is odd, considering The South is where I was born and brought up.  Perhaps, after thirty years, I can finally say I'm a Northerner.

It certainly greets you with open arms.  While Rugby's 21st century ticket hall was perfunctory, Northampton was gleefully epic, a redevelopment in 2015 gifting it a proper welcome to the town.  Plenty of light, retail spaces tucked away, clean toilets and information boards everywhere.  It was fantastic.  In some ways, it's too good for a station that only gets four trains an hour - two to New Street, two to Euston. 

It also does amateur station art right.  Regular readers (hello you!) will know of my hatred for kids' drawings as "art" on stations.  It looks amateurish and it's mainly there because it's cheap.  Northampton had art by young people on its platform bridge, but it was final exam pieces from a local college and as such was way more interesting.  I had a pleasing wander down taking in the works.

Then there's the All Aboard To Northampton project, started by delightfully-named station worker Elliott Badger, where boards in the hall have been devoted to collecting tickets to Northampton from every station in the UK.  Started in 2020, it's a wonderful confluence of railway nerdism, public art, and just a genuinely nice thing to do.  I spent a few minutes looking for my local stations on the board.  I'm pleased to report that Birkenhead Central is there, as is Birkenhead Park:

...but the Liverpool side is less well represented:

If you're looking for something to do on a day off and you live by a relatively obscure station, there you go.  Head to Northampton.

You actually won't have a bad time while you're there.  I didn't expect this at all - and perhaps my expectations were lowered after Rugby - but Northampton turned out to be a little gem.  It'll never grace a 1000 Places To See Before You Die list, it'll never challenge other cities for tourist dollars, but it featured a neat, compact town centre, some pleasing buildings and was great to visit.

As you'd expect from a county town, Northampton has a long history going back to the Bronze Age, and its mishmash of architecture came from all points of history.  The beautiful central church, All Saints', dates from the 17th century; there's Victorian grandeur and more modern practicality.  Streets have names like "Swan Yard" and "Derngate".  It was busy with shoppers and, this being the school holidays, teenagers being disproportionately excited at being in town on a weekday.

At the centre of the town is the Market Square, an epic space recently upgraded.  It was a pleasure to stroll round, taking in the new, more permanent stalls.  A water feature to one side featured jets of water shooting in the air, much to the delight of gurgling toddlers, and it felt like a proper central space for the community.  I thought back to the continuing, slow motion tragedy of Birkenhead Market, where its redevelopment has been astonishingly unpopular no matter what the council try, and thought they should send a few people here to find out what can be done.  Never mind sticking traders in a converted Argos - make a place. 

I wandered for a while, feeling a little guilty.  I'd not had high hopes for Northampton - in fact, it had taken me a tremendous amount of effort to stop saying I was going to Nottingham.  It was, to me, a place that existed, and didn't really make an impression on anyone.  Could you find it on a map?  Could you name something interesting about Northampton?  I know I certainly couldn't.  It seemed like it had spent hundreds of years quietly getting on with being a decent place to live and work and not bothering anyone.

I paused for a pint.  Obviously it wasn't a perfect place; there was a fair amount of down at heel buildings and businesses.  I'd had to dodge a mass of Just Eat cyclists occupying the pavement by McDonalds and KFC.  There was a huge, hideous leisure development, incorporating a cinema and a gym that occupied a whole block and seemed to be pretty much vacant.  

I headed back to the station.  The board that recorded the passing bikes in the cycle lane had ticked off another twenty or so riders.  A pair of mums had a loud, joyous conversation while their kids played around them.  A spread of graffiti on a developer's hoarding was, for some reason, Alice in Wonderland themed - we're all mad here.  It was all good.  

Rugger Bugger

 

Notoriety shifts your perception.  Because you've heard of somewhere, because it's "famous" for some reason, it gains a prominence it might otherwise not deserve.  I expected Pontefract, for example, to be far more impressive than it actually was, because it was a place I'd heard of.  It was elevated above a hundred other northern towns because something had lodged it in my brain.

I came to Rugby with similarly elevated expectations.  Rugby, the station we've all passed through on our way south on the train.  Rugby, prominently signposted from the motorways.  Rugby, home of the school, home of Tom Brown's Schooldays, home of rugby football, home of Webb Ellis taking the ball in his hands and running with it.  It's Rugby.

 

It gives me no pleasure to report that Rugby's name recognition is about all that it's got going for it.  I left the station and found a tired, beaten down town.  It didn't really exist until the Victorian era.  Rugby School has been here for much longer, since the sixteenth century, but it took a reforming headmaster named Thomas Arnold to transform the institution into one of the first public schools in the nineteenth century.  He did so by effectively privatising it; an establishment set up by local dignitary Lawrence Sheriff to benefit poor local children was slowly dedicated to fee-payers from outside the area.  (Another school, pointedly called the Lawrence Sheriff School, was founded to try and deliver the free education he'd wanted to provide).  

Around the same time, the railways cut across the land to the north of the town, and a junction there swiftly brought industry and new residents.  The town swelled to fill the space between the school and the station and the result is a mainly 19th and 20th century construction that's having problems coping with the 21st century.

My route into town took me past the businesses and homes that you find in station hinterlands.  Ethnic shops, tanning salons, hotels built for builders and salesmen.  A vitamin shop had a large burly plastic man stood outside.  Attempts had been made at regeneration, with new flats slotted inelegantly into the spaces, cul-de-sacs of redbrick turning their back on the main road.  Cut Price Carpets, chemical engineers, tyre shops.  I passed a hardware shop with a window display saying No Bulb Ban Here! (While stocks last) and I was in the town centre.

There is, effectively, a triangle of pedestrianisation at the heart of Rugby, and it's as tired as a thousand other post-industrial centres.  This could've been anywhere UK.  Closed shops turned over to discounters.  A WH Smith (while it lasts).  Coffee shops and burger bars.  An American candy shop as large as anything on Oxford Street.  That meanness, that grimness, that you get in a place where you now need therapy to recover after retail therapy.

How do we solve this?  How do we get our towns back now we've all moved away from shopping in person?  One or two empty shops become four or five and suddenly everything is forlorn, abandoned, unpleasant.  I can only think we need to consolidate and squeeze them together.  Accept the retail isn't coming back, knock them down, build homes for people in their place because we do actually need those.  Do it properly too; we've all seen the bedsits behind cheap double glazing and badly bricked up shop fronts. 

At the end of the road was the school itself, a fortress closed off to the town around it.  It became clear that while Rugby School continues to produce the higher echelons of our society - the Wikipedia page of Old Rugbeians includes bishops, politicians, soldiers and writers - they are not spending their cash outside the hallowed walls.  There may as well be a moat between the town and the school.  I imagine the only interaction between the two institutions is the local bars and clubs being very strict indeed with their ID checks to stop the heir to the Earldom of Farquarson getting steamed on cheap cider in their establishment and attracting the wrath of the headmaster.

At the front is the statue of William Webb Ellis, the boy who apparently invented rugby by picking up a ball and running with it.  This story is, of course, bollocks.  For starters, nobody reported the tale until after Webb Ellis himself was dead - he became a clergyman and died in the South of France in 1872, four years before he got the credit for the game.  Secondly, it's hard to believe that any PE teacher - and particularly a PE teacher at a Victorian public school - would look kindly upon a boy breaking the rules of a sport and would happily suggest they make a new game of it.  We all know PE teachers, nasty little fascists in polyester-nylon mix, ready to bark and scream at the cowering boys in their charge.  

 

 

I actually played rugby in my first year at high school.  There was a science teacher who moonlit as a PE teacher, specifically as a rugby teacher, and he dragged us out onto foggy fields and made us throw the ball around.  I remember two things from this: that the rule of only throwing the ball behind you is bloody stupid, and that the orange rugby shirt that we wore as part of our school uniform was actually quite nice.  The teacher left after first year and we never played rugby again, which was no surprise; my year at school was so nonathletic we couldn't even scrape together enough willing boys to make a football team.  We certainly weren't going to advocate for a sport involving a lot of mud and violence.  (On the other hand, the girls in my year campaigned for the right to play rugby; they didn't actually want to, but they thought it was sexist that they weren't allowed to.  There was no reciprocal campaign by boys who wanted to play netball).

 

I went back into the town, past a Woolworths that still had the sign above, hinting that it'd not been replaced in all the time since it had closed.  I was finding Rugby hard going.  It wasn't nice or fun and the haves of the school ignoring the have nots of the town was all a bit too on the nose.

I ducked down a side street to find the statue of Rupert Brooke, poet and bisexual icon.  He attended Rugby School, the son of a master there, but died in Greece during the First World War.  I'd have got closer but the gentleman on the nearby bench appeared to be in a Special Brew-induced state of agitation so I thought it best to hurry on.

Besides, I wanted to get out of there.  Rugby station has acquired a 21st century ticket hall which is pleasant enough but not exactly distinctive.  It looks like a kit, like a McDonalds restaurant that came off the back of a lorry.

It's far better at the platform level, with nicely restored Victorian buildings and plenty of space to move.  As befits its prominent spot on the West Coast Main Line, Rugby is popular with trainspotters, and I was delighted to see three teenage boys spending their Easter holidays filming cargo trains passing through.  Not every thirteen year old is snorting nitrous oxide and stabbing their way round a shopping precinct.  Most of them are being quite boring and lovely.

There wasn't much to Rugby, and if it didn't have an internationally renowned sport named after it I suspect I wouldn't have felt so let down.  Take away the name and it was basically Crewe with funny shaped balls.  Still, I'm pleased with myself for managing to write a thousand words about it without once mentioning Ben Cohen, Dieux du Stade, or that ITV2 documentary where the rugby lads all got drunk and the cameras filmed them.  Don't pretend you don't know which one I mean.

Left To Centre

My existential wail from the other week came because I couldn't get to Warwick.  I don't think anyone's missed out on Warwick before and wondered if life is worth living; perhaps Charles I during the Civil War, but that's about it.  It was actually the second time I'd tried to visit the town and failed.  I'd booked a trip a couple of years ago and then, for reasons I can't remember - probably brain related - I'd not gone in the end.  But here I was, at Warwick Parkway, finally!

 

Totally worth it, I'm sure you'll agree.

Actually, I'm being unfair.  Warwick Parkway has a multi-storey car park, and I have, in recent years, become radicalised when it comes to multi-storey car parks.  I've become radicalised about quite a lot of things to do with urban planning, mainly since I wandered around the suburbs of Amsterdam and Stockholm.  It really underlined to me that things could actually be better.  Now I'm violently pro segregated cycle lanes (segregated with concrete barriers so they're a route all of their own, not a piddly bit of paint that everyone ignores), I'm vociferously for increased density and constructing apartment blocks and residences above retail premises, and I'm a strong advocate for multi-storey car parks.  If you must have hundreds of parking spaces somewhere - and you do actually need them in a lot of places - then why are we allowing acres and acres of good land to be taken up with concrete spaces, only half of which will get used most of the time?  More multi-storeys, that's the answer.  Less land, more parking, and actually more secure too because there's only one or two ways in or out so they can be better monitored.  In 2025, there is no excuse for Tesco to build a superstore surrounded by tarmac.  

Having said all that, Warwick Parkway wasn't actually built with decks of parking.  As you ride into the station from Birmingham you can see all the open air spaces it was originally given, spread either side of the road and now looking distinctly overgrown.  They still exist as overflow but now the mult-storey's there, right next to the station, nobody bothers with them.

It's not a looker, but it gets the job done, helping to spread the load from the tiny main Warwick station.  It also has a distinctive station totem which I'm afraid I'm going to file under "style over substance".  It's an interesting shape, but look how tiny the writing is for the station name; surely you could've spread it over two lines so it was more prominent?

I walked under the railway bridge, past the entrance to the unattractively named Stanks Farm, and to the edge of the village of Hampton Magna.  Those of us who've watched a lot of low-brow 1970s sitcoms will know that Hampton is Cockney rhyming slang (Hampton Wick = dick), and Hampton Magna sounds like a Latin teacher trying to boast about his attributes to the games mistress without letting on to the kids.

I'd had a choice of two ways into Warwick proper from Parkway station.  Heading north would've taken me to the Grand Union Canal, skirting the top of the town centre, while the southern route was across the fields and directly into Warwick.  I'd chosen the latter.  There's been enough towpath walks on this blog, to be frank, and it had been a while since I'd been for a proper walk in the country.  I fancied a hike across open land, taking in the sights and sounds.

I scaled a stile and followed a well-worn dog walker track between the agricultural land and the rear of the village houses.  The owners of the homes had split their back vistas into one of two categories.  Some enthusiastically enjoyed the wide open views of the fields, with low fences and balconies and terraces.  One had various road signs over the side fences, really embracing the "outdoor room" concept.  The other category were the security conscious, or perhaps, paranoid, who looked at that footpath as an easy way for burglars to get into their home to steal their Faberge eggs and bone china.  These people erected high fences, some with makeshift anti-intruder spikes on the top, and had thickets of thorny bushes between me and their back lawns.

The morning rain hadn't muddied the ground too much, enough to soften my walk a little, though there was also thick tough grass holding the path together.  At a division between acres, the path sank down.  One of the trees had fallen in a storm, covering the stile to the next field with a canopy of branches, creating a tiny nest.

I love these hollows in woods and forests, tucked away spaces you can hide in.  Aged eleven or twelve, my friends Sanjay and Neil and I would go to the fields near our house to our "base", a gap in the trees you slid down a slope to reach.  Thinking about it as an adult, it was clearly a generational space, subtly passed on from one group of adventuring children to the next, each of them thinking it was their secret.  We would hide out in there after school, doing nothing, talking, making "traps" that never worked, reveling in our tiny separate universe.  

One day we went there and found torn up pages from a porno magazine scattered across it - Actual Hedge Porn.  Dumped there by teenagers who probably moved in when we went to watch Neighbours and eat our dinner, it felt like a violation; our base wasn't the protected home we thought it was.  We cleared away the Hedge Porn (loudly expressing absolute disgust throughout; two of the three of us unsurprisingly turned out to be homosexuals) and tried to get on with things but it was never the same again.  Our sanctuary was ruined.  

(A few years later, we'd return to the same base as older teens with some cider and playing cards and spoiled it for whatever eleven year old was using it at that point.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose).

Warwick is bypassed by the busy A46, a dual carriageway that runs from the M40 to the M6 via Coventry.  It's unsurprisingly a busy through route and I wondered how my footpath would cross it.  The Ordnance Survey map had been vague about it, not showing a footbridge, so I assumed it would be an underpass.  I hoped it wasn't full of rubbish, or waterlogged.  I didn't fancy wading through inches of water.

I was in luck.  There wasn't an underpass.  There wasn't anything, in fact.

To get to the other side I was going to have to chuck myself across four lanes of traffic traveling at seventy miles an hour.  Memories of Frogger, and particularly, Frogger being squished under the wheels of an HGV, bounced around inside my head.  I hovered at the edge and then, spotting a break in the traffic, I made it across to the central reservation.  There wasn't a gap for pedestrians, so after an inelegant scramble (legs going higher than they have since my days in the can-can chorus line) I was on the other side and readying myself for another dash.  I mistimed this one, with one car going faster than I thought, and I practically jumped into the bushes on the far side.  A small yellow arrow on a post pointed the way forward, almost sarcastically I thought, a sort of and after all that effort, this is all you have to look forward to.

These were grazing areas, a metal feeding trough empty in the centre, the ground rough and untended.  The animals were presumably still in the sheds at this time of year, ready to be sent out with their newly-born young once the worst weather was behind them.

My main reason for picking this route over the canal path was this way took me over the racecourse.  The footpath carries you straight over the track, into the central island, and then back over the track again at the far side.  I liked the small, proletariat rebellion of walking on this privatised space, usually reserved for money.  It's like when I take a route across a golf course and enjoy the irritated looks from men in bad polo shirts for violating their links.

I'm not really sure how I feel about horse racing as a sport.  The Grand National is this week and Liverpool is in its usual excited state about the event.  I'm pretty sure one in every five items purchased on Merseyside in the next few days will be worn on Ladies' Day.  Watching a race, and placing a small bet, is exciting, and can be a fun afternoon out.

On the other hand, horses die in these races, and I'm not sure any animal should die for the amusement of humans.  Betting is a terrible scourge that has ruined lives, and having been on the train back from Chester during the Races, I can safely say that most of the people who attend do so mainly for the bar and not so much the thrill of the game.  It's tricky for me.  In my usual woolly way I have compromised by not betting on the Grand National or watching it but also not actively opposing it in any way.

The centre of the racecourse - the Lammas Field - was popular with joggers and dog walkers.  One man entered with an excitable spaniel who immediately ran off into the distance.  "Tiger!" yelled his owner.  "Tiger!  Tiger!  Tiger!".  There was no sign of the dog, who'd vanished into a copse, so he broke out a whistle and blew on it a few times.  Still no sign of the spaniel.  Finally, entirely of its own accord, he broke cover and ran back to his owner, who gave him a treat for eventually coming to heel.  I'm not sure anything was learnt that day.

Netting surrounded the very middle of the space, and signs told me this was to protect ground-nesting birds.  Apparently the Lammas Field was a popular spot for skylarks and zoning an area for them resulted in a significant rise in their numbers.  I have to admit I take a certain Darwinist perspective on this.  You're a skylark; you can literally fly.  Why on earth are you putting your precious young on the ground where there are thousands of predators?  Loads of other birds have managed to build their nests in trees and high spaces.  If you're so thick that you put your eggs in the way of foxes and cats and snakes then frankly, maybe you deserve to go extinct.  Still, judging by the noises emanating from behind the fencing, the plan was working.  The air was filled with the squeaks and squawks of hungry baby birds.

At the far side, three Asian tourists were excitedly watching a robot water the racetrack.  I ducked under the barriers and left, finally reaching the town itself.  Warwick is an extremely historic town, occupied continuously since Saxon times, so obviously I was excited to see an ancient relic preserved for everyone to enjoy.

Look at that gorgeous font!  It could do with a wipe down with some antibac, mind, but still, what a lovely little moment.  I walked up the hill to the West Gate, the traditional entry point to the town crowned with a chapel above.

 

 

The walkway is surprisingly deep, mainly because the chapel above, and really making you feel as though you are crossing into another era.  The 21st century is left behind; beyond is the past.

 

 

It's not as far back in time as you'd expect, however.  There was a fire in the town in 1694 which obliterated most of the buildings, and as a result, Warwick is far more early Georgian in its architecture than anything.  Wide symmetrically-fronted houses line the streets with sash windows and pillared entrances.

 

I headed for the Market Square, where a busker was plucking out Cavatina on his guitar.  Nice old ladies stood around having chats with baskets of shopping; expensive sports cars in discreet greys and blacks slid round the corner.  There were hairdressers and beauty salons, and I passed both the Masonic Lodge and the Conservative Club.  Anthony Eden was the Member of Parliament here for thirty years, and Warwick was Conservative throughout; tight, polite, moneyed.  A little repressed.

 

 

At the far end of the square the Shire Hall had been extended with a delightful 1960s frontage that I have no doubt is despised by the residents for being far too modern looking.  Like the Courage off-licence sign, I thought it was great, and I realised I was getting into that slightly chippy state of mind I get in historic places where I celebrate the new and ignore all the lovely ancient stuff.

 

I carried on, past a statue to the boxer Randolph Turpin, who I'd never heard of but who apparently had the nickname "Licker".  Do with that what you will.  The plaque on the statue recorded that he was Middleweight Champion of the World, 1951, and yes, that is a very short reign.  He got the title by beating Sugar Ray Robinson, but their contract specified that Robinson could have a return match if he lost, which he did two months later.  Turpin promptly lost.  

 

There's something very British about putting up a statue to someone whose notable sporting achievement was basically one match.  It's like lauding Scott of the Antarctic or the orchestra playing on the Titanic as it went down; victory isn't necessarily what we celebrate.  We cling to our heroes where we can get them.  (Incidentally Turpin's post-boxing life is quite depressing so I'd really recommend not reading up on it if you want to stay jolly).

 

 

I skirted the impressive St Mary's Church and its war memorial, past a plethora of expensive lifestyle shops (one called itself the little shop of lovely things), and I got my first sighting of Warwick's most famous landmark, the Castle.

 

Although it's medieval in origin, Warwick Castle's been a country house since the 17th century, and not much use as a defensive bulwark since then.  It looks properly Olde Worlde, though, which is why it was bought by the Tussauds group in the Seventies and is now run as a sort of Alton Towers With Dungeons.  The castle has falconry displays, reenactments, historic tours and a large working trebuchet.  It's Ye Grand Day Out For All Ye Family.

 

I didn't go in.  It's £39 admission on the day, reduced to £22 in advance (after my last couple of aborted trips I wasn't going to risk an advance ticket), and I am extremely cheap.  It also seems to be very much angled towards entertaining the kids, and I'm always afraid that if I go into that kind of place as a single man I'll be branded a paedophile and asked to leave by a uniformed security guard. 

 

Instead I looped back to the High Street, and from there to the Market Square again.  The busker was in the process of being moved on by a Police Community Support Officer.  He objected loudly in a strong Eastern European accent: "but what harm am I doing?  I am just making music!  People like it!"

The plastic policeman was unmoved.  "Busking is not allowed here," he repeated, over and over, nudging the man to wrap up his belongings faster.  Tory, I thought.  I headed indoors for a break.

For a while I sat and drank my lager, while a man at the next table went through the Only Fools and Horses box set he'd just bought from a charity shop, running through the contents to a silent wife ("There's no disc K!  No, wait, there it is.")  I felt like I'd seen enough of Warwick.  It was nice enough but hadn't captured me.  I was glad I'd visited, but didn't feel the urge to return.

 

 

I headed for the station through the dark trees of Priory Park.  A few spots of rain began to drop as I skirted its edges, passing under the railway and along a row of neat council houses.

 

The station itself was in the middle of an upgrade.  Lifts were being introduced between the platforms, meaning that the subway underneath was closed; it meant I ended up walking in an almost complete circle to try and get to the main building.  I dodged a lorry full of equipment and headed to the platform.

 

Warwick station does have an Attractive Local Feature board, of sorts.  I have to say it's probably the most pathetic one I've seen for a long time.  Would this make you leap off the train, filled with excitement at the prospect of visiting the Castle?

 

It's another reminder that I really don't like Chiltern Railways, once again for inverted snobbery reasons.  It's funny how quickly I turn into Citizen Smith when I'm among the moneyed set.  I was glad to be getting a train back to the People's Republic of Merseyside, where I belonged.  Not one of the common bits, mind.  I have standards.