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.