Confessional

So the walk isn't finished and the blog feels incomplete. The methodology was flawed and physical ailments can no longer be ignored. Not to get too down about this though as what we've done has come out well enough. 

I think some of the text, especially about Stoke-on-Trent, suffers from having been written when ill and hacking through the job and lacks something of the energy and feel required for this sort of investigation. Why weren't we speaking to more people, for example? Because I was feeling antisocial, hardly the right frame of mind in which to approach this sort of study. 

And I was struck by a wave of something approaching despair but curiously resembling euphoria on reaching Stoke-on-Trent bus station, overwhelmed by the overlapping failures of the day: of the town's history, of the architecture, of public health, of my health. This confession only runs on because it seems to link in to Orwell's work as set out below.

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Once you discover Orwell was dying of TB during the writing of 1984 the book's paranoid atmosphere begins to make a lot of sense. Utterly disenchanted with ideological thinking after his experiences in Spain and appalled by the Second World War, 1984 begins to read as a description of a worst-case scenario. Conceived and executed in ill health during his self-imposed exile on the Scottish island of Jura, the book reads as a document of political and personal disappointments. 

Orwell was shot through the neck whilst fighting in Spain and nearly died in hospital there as well as having been critically ill with pneumonia in 1933. He seems to have ignored his steadily deteriorating health, writing (and smoking) all the while. It was a disastrous end when it came. Here is some of what he wrote about his suffering in what turned out to be his final notebook. It is not for the faint hearted:

'At first, though the streptomycin [the first real hope of a cure for TB of the lungs] seemed to produce an almost immediate improvement in my health, there were no secondary symptoms, except that a sort of discoloration appeared at the base of my fingers & toe nails. Then my face became noticeably redder & the skin had a tendency to flake off, & a sort of rash appeared all over my body, especially down my back. There was no itching associated with this. After about 3 weeks I got a severe sore throat, which did not go away & was not affected by sucking penicillin lozenges. It was very painful to swallow & I had to have a special diet for some weeks. There was now ulceration with blisters in my throat & in the insides of my cheeks, & the blood kept coming up into little blisters on my lips. At night these burst & bled considerably, so that in the morning my lips were always stuck together with blood & I had to bathe them before I could open my mouth. Meanwhile my nails had disintegrated at the roots & the disintegration grew, as it were, up the nail, new nails forming beneath meanwhile. My hair began to come out, & one or two patches of quite white hair appeared at the back (previously it was only speckled with grey).' 

http://www.jameslindlibrary.org/trial_records/20th_Century/1940s/MRC_bmj/bastian.html

Orwell seems to have contracted TB during his time in Burma and long cultivated it living in poor conditions, whether the trenches in Spain or common lodging houses in Paris, Wigan or the East End. 

This terminal illness can be read as Orwell's Eton penance, his final act of solidarity with the working class. Like van Gogh, Orwell discovered that there's a time when a reckless disregard for your physical health catches up with you, when living on bread and water and everyday exposure to cold and damp in the name of your truth does you in. For van Gogh this meant his teeth falling out; for Orwell it meant TB. Both continued to be lucid and produced their seminal work at the end of their lives: in retrospect, as John Berger says of van Gogh, these lives seem to have an arrow-straight trajectory. 

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Orwell certainly did a better job of living his journalism than we have aspired to in this recent project. Travellodges and B&Bs are too detached from the way people live and this mode suggests the sort of superficial engagement so many travel guides encourage. We want to avoid this; but maybe we also are trying to sell places. How to get the most out of places we visit?

We discussed this when planning the job and were nervous about getting the tone and the terms correct. I'm not sure Orwell always employed the correct methodology:

'From a vantage-point of relative security, he made the odd foray into the lives of the blighted and dispossessed, partly to keep his political nose to the ground and partly because such trips furnished him with precious journalistic copy.'

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n12/terry-eagleton/reach-me-down-romantic 

So partly cynical but also political: you get as close as you can to your subject but you also write. We certainly have ideas for improving future projects and increasing our exposure in a number of novel ways so watch this space. 

Day 4

Stoke-on-Trent

We start in wet snow up through the University area which has a distinctly municipal feel, here amongst the terraces, the jewellers and Halal butchers. Stoke is really an agglomeration of five or six towns and already the place seems unsure where to place the emphasis exactly, a lot of stuff slipping down the cracks in between. 

Here are allotments, student digs, shut-up parks. Car dealerships suggest a permanent state of out of town. As we approach Hanley there’s a lot of derelict space fenced off, with only odd dumped sofas and bricks for perspective.

An 1828 journal puts Hanley as, 'A large modern town and chapelry and ranks next to Burslem in size, extent and opulence. The town is in an elevated situation, and the streets forming which are irregular, but many of the houses are well built.’

Today you have to adjust your vision slightly to see the 1828 town through the paint-overs and bolt-on shop fronts, but you can still just about make out the town’s reliced ambitions. Attractive buildings with broad roofs and ornate gabling defy their modern requisitions, which aim to simultaneously cancel them out and comment on their plight:

INDECISION

 DIGNITY

 TOFFS!

Orwell thought Hanley and Burslem,

‘… About the most dreadful places I have seen. Labyrinths of tiny blackened houses and among them the pot-banks like burgundy bottles half buried in the soil, belching forth smoke.’

The pot-banks have gone as has the industrial pollution, but there has been a major pay off. What was once a mass industry, an industry to found an identity upon, has all but been eradicated. What was once Wedgwood is now Waterworld and a dry ski slope, begging the questions a). What does Stoke need with a dry ski slope? and b). Would you swap an industry for a waterpark?

The only pottery we can find is at Moorcroft on the outskirts of Burslem where I suggest Ted picks up a souvenir for his girlfriend. He fingers a tiny vase, quickly putting it back down at £190. There’s no more potent symbol of the towns’ shift and decline than their being reduced to selling rare pieces at these prices, this tiny and obscure manufacturer lost in an area desperate for bigger designs.   

The towns themselves are detached signifiers, places come loose from their original meanings. What happens next in these places?

I like Stoke a lot but after a while the walk turns into a penance for all the time I’ve spent avoiding this sort of town. We keep our heads down but the miles turn over junction after junction of empty hairdressers, carpet dealerships and tattoo parlours, as busy roads seethe in the rain. The industrial units reveal, MADDOGS FIGHTING AND SOCIAL CLUB, MADDOGS BALLET; the Filled Oatcakes and Pikelets shop advertises THE HEARTSTOPPER.

Burslem itself is a tragic event and presents itself as a series of repeated visual motifs. The symbol, rightly, is the kiln; one or two of these are visible along with some grand looking towers up on the hill. You’re afforded this good low view because they’ve rubbleized the Doulton factory, buildings collapsing and rotting over another huge waste area. 

What must it do to a town’s psychology to have had such a catastrophe visited on it, and to have this catastrophe fester on like an open wound at the centre of the town?

A stripper falls out of a car and stumbles into a terraced house opposite the Doulton factory, followed by two lads with crates of booze. A guy pulls up next door on a cheap mountain bike and a dog barks at him from behind grimy net curtains. Two women, mother and daughter, talk about going into Weatherspoons and getting fixed up while the young girl with them looks on impassive. Children are neutral up to a point, but how long can you stay neutral in a place like this?

All Images © Ted Allen 2010

Day 3

For Terry Eagleton, Orwell, like Beckett, is a poet of failure.

Returning to Burton-upon-Trent I also feel a sense of failure, a sense of a relationship gone bad. It’s what Tony Harrison deals with in his poetry, that sense that the trajectory of success, of ever more education and cultural engagement, is also the trajectory of failure. As Heraclitus says: ‘The way uphill and downhill are the same’.

Social mobility can leave you with great faults in your make-up, great gaps in your identity. Harrison describes this in mining terms in his poem ‘V’, the landscape of his past a world of sunken seams and broken pit-props, of subsidence and ‘that great worked out black hollow underneath’.

What sort of responsibility to do we owe to our home towns?

It is a greasy type of day in Burton. Adults in tracksuits hang around the Social Security offices waiting for something to happen. You can tell the Eastern European girls by the bleaching of their jeans, made welcome by the Soviet-style brick of the municipal office buildings.

Outside Costa Coffee the young waiter braves sub-zero temperatures to lay a slalom course of tables and chairs for the inevitable pensioners. There's a log jam of pensioners and young mothers, battling it out with their three-wheeled support vehicles, at the entrance to Cooper's Square. Most of the women in Costa look like Anne Robinson.

Even though it's early we go off in search of the beer, or rather the breweries which give the town its skyline and its odour. It's easy to be nostalgic for the days when Burton was a more compact town, easy to romanticise an industry whose past is represented by bronzes of dignified working men arranged around the town.

Now the place feels as disjointed as a lot of places we've passed through these last few days where the industry still exists but in a bastardized form. These places, once built large upon specific industries, have suffered from a post-colonial or post-war contraction and long since worn an air of detached corporate stupefaction. Bass and Ind Coope become Coors and Carlsberg; bitter becomes lager; jobs stay but identity goes.

Huge industrial units house the massive paraphernalia of modern industrial brewing. We wander around looking at this but then find ourselves, following our noses, out to a dingy parking lot at the periphery of town. This is the rotting hulk of Bargates, subject to wrangling between Tescos (who want to build another store here) and the council who want more cash.

Round the back of CLUB EXTREME and SUPERBOWL 2000 (the future is finite) is the Burton Bridge Brewery. This is a reassuringly low-key sort of enterprise, its location given away only by plumes of a thick and fruity steam billowing out from a small brick garage.

It would be rude not to drink some of the beer, especially as the day is getting greasier all the time. We make for the Duke of Devonshire, a Burton bridge pub, and somebody tells us that Michael Portillo was here recently. We don't let that put us off.

All Images © Ted Allen 2010

Day 2

George Orwell went to Eton. Rory Stewart, who writes brilliantly about his journey on foot across Afghanistan in The Places in Between, also went to Eton. Chatwin went to Marlborough, F. Spencer Chapman went to Sedburgh, Robert Macfarlane went somewhere.

Tramping of a literary sort therefore seems to be contingent on you having been to school Somewhere. You will possess a certain confidence which initially puts you on your feet, expectant and curious amongst the natives. You are confused and searching, probably for yourself or for your father, and you clock up the miles, writing easily as you go.

I didn’t make it to Eton. Today has neither been so macho or so significant. At times we’ve felt like we’re going round in circles.

An initial climb up to the top of Rowley afforded us an intimate look into the estates of Blackheath and Whiteheath in low-slanting winter sunshine: someone cries out for rag and bone from the estates. In the distance West Bromwich Albion football club is just about visible in all its glory.

Some of the arterial roads here are not pretty places. It’s a relief to get to Blackheath, to the familiar ash-tint of the privet and the darkly peeling invalid rails. I’ve still got family who live round here and I’m inclined to be harsh on the place from memory.

Blackheath however is friendly. It’s not just that the shape of the pensioners’ heads which is familiar, the stoop and the haircuts and the ghosts of the roundabout and the market hall. Blackheath is a well-preserved 80s high street, the sort we all bemoan the death of in the new age of Starbucks and Americanised ubiquity. There isn’t even a Boots here, a W H Smith, a Walter Smith, all the energy of modernisation having been drawn by the ultra-mall at Merry Hill up the way. Come here if you miss the 80s aesthetic and 80s shopping principles. This is the late-twentieth century version of the Black Country museum.

On the way to Merry Hill we fringe Cradley Heath, past ‘Best Street’ with the ‘Best’ part spray-canned out. There’s an incident at a ‘Police Community Speed Check’ where three coppers, one with a speed gun, are clumsily searching a youth in a tracksuit. Maybe this guy ran by too fast. He is having his trousers pulled down as we pass - someone is examining a sock. A civilian watching this theatre from a couple of yards. ‘Auto Amusements’ (J.G.Ballard; Michael Hutchence) has a load of old jukeboxes in the window.

A trail of LIDL and ALDI lead to Merry Hill itself. This is where the Black Country comes to express itself.

Ted is, with impressive speed, prohibited from taking photographs and goes off to seek permission in the bowels of the centre. From where I sit some take easily to the centre’s commercial imperatives, to the swimming bath acoustics and extraordinary wipe-clean surfaces. The uniform seems to be bovver boots and skunk haircuts on the women who are hunting in gangs, but it’s actually hard to tell what is fashionable and what’s not (apart from ourselves). Children climb over free-standing cash machines while their parents suck on Diet Cokes. Nobody seems to be particularly happy or sad; nobody has bought much. Consumption is so half-arsed at this time of year that the place is inoffensive, new and slippery and so safe you need never fear anyone will ever record you having been here.

The canal which runs away from the centre is a readymade antidote to the above, a shabby piece of waterway with an on-running border garden of bin-lids and plastic bottles. DUDLEY AND LYE WASTE BRIDGE – like looking into a favourite crack head’s front room.

This might serve as a moniker for Dudley generally. I haven’t been to the town for twenty-five years; neither has anybody else. We’ve been warned that Merry Hill has killed off Dudley town centre but nobody told us it still lived on in some strange zombie form. They charge us £6.50 in GREGGS to hide from what's happening, a very impressive price. Ted says he can’t photograph what’s happening outside, the very fat women and the very thin men, the disproportionate number of outpatients. Whatever romance Blackheath brought to the reconstituted 80s Dudley has destroyed in an instant. I thought Lennie Henry was from this town?

Ted complains that he hasn’t got any portraits and we go into an arcade, a cruelly lit and stunted indoor market area of stalls and cafes, birthday cards and tools. We meet Rachel and Heidi who stalk the aisles of this small arcade and who nearly redeem the whole town, are so friendly and quick around their little manor and insistent that we take their pictures. Apparently I look like I’m investigating something; apparently Rachel runs the furniture stall here.

We haven’t seen a vegetable for two days.

All Images © Ted Allen 2010

Day 1

Objective for the day: to avoid Orwell’s descriptive mistake, what Raymond Willliams calls, ‘Class … described mainly in terms of differences and snobberies in accent, clothes, tastes, furnishing, food.’

With this in mind we take an early train to Coventry. I feel ill, my lungs like a couple of bags of wet cement. We leave London as the sun rises weakly, achieving such an oddly precise departure that we ride the train back into the night briefly, Watford looking strangely like a city underwater.

Coventry city centre offers more terrain than your average and acres more space, indeed the city centre is all space, a mouth with all the teeth removed. It is strangely dead at 8am on a Monday morning. The city centre is pawnbrokers, estate agents, amusement arcades and ‘Peeping Tom News’ where a giant plastic helicopter bleeds out the sound of children’s laughter.

There’s a big collection of model cars in the window of Peeping Tom’s branded DAYS GONE, some sort of fresh joke at the expense of Coventry’s decaying automotive industry, still tragically betraying an attachment.

As if to further hurry the region’s industry into the past we soon come across the Transport Museum and possibly the most ludicrous piece of public art ever conceived. It looks like the city’s varicose veins on show, is too half-arsed even to contemplate here and we decide to move on to the next Coventry automotive landmark: the bus station.

We take the bus into Birmingham. Ted wants to do some shopping but we yomp through the city centre, through familiar asymmetric haircuts and out to the Birmingham – Fazely canal. It’s amazing how quickly the city disgorges you of its modern canalside apartment blocks and spits you out into the more satisfying world of Victoriana. The city’s modern façade is thus revealed as shallow.

Within minutes we are beneath overblown brick arches and peering into derelict ports where the factories meet the canal. Our progress is swift but after two miles we decide the view from the sunken canal is too restricted and escape up and onto an embankment.

There are views into yards where men shove containers around with heavy machinery; there is a digger, dug in high and moving on a pile of assorted dirt and waste. Everything is still very quiet considering the city here seems busy breaking things down/finishing things; the ultramarine canal lends the whole an unusual stillness.

Rabone Lane

This all changes as we approach Rabone Lane. Ted gets some great shots here as we try to work out the source of the noise which is basically a jolly green giant metal mincer over about an acre, chewing up car parts and old fridge parts and piles of filing cabinets.

Orwell has been accused of ‘an aestheticist sensationalism of the sordid’ and we need to be careful not to give in to this temptation here. It’s fair to ask why Ted and I are happy to discover industry on our walk even if it is a little scrappy and the answer seems to lie in the fact that a reassuringly public (noisy) mixed-use landscape belies a mixed economy long since consigned to the tip, has a certain societal honesty.

This sort of ragged spectacle has a novel and satisfying beauty for people living in cities where it’s often hard to make out upon what basis exactly those cities exist.

Further up Rabone Lane the brand names signify only to welders, a world of tatty low-rise units with men creeping around in dark yards staring at long objects in shrink-wrap. At Rabone Lane and Engine Street we suddenly find ourselves at an intersection Ian Sinclair would be proud of. Signs indicate: CENTRE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AWARENESS; MUSCLE MOVEMENT GYM; POTATOES AND ONIONS.

We eventually get out of Rabone Lane, pass the defunct sweat-shops and Probation Service buildings and out into Smethwick proper, to the Sikh temples and travel agents (Amritzar, Bangkok, Tehran) and our first residential section. Orwell writes of ‘the usual villa-civilization’ and there are square miles of it here, all the way to our end-point at Oldbury. This feels stultifying after the industrial areas and not even a few double-locked Transits on front lawns or the odd DIY CCTV system diverts us from our march.

We seem to see people for the first time as we edge towards the old Albright and Wilson factory at Langley Park, pensioners moving slowly away from the pubs and lanky teenagers texting at bus stops. This area is one you see down into as you speed along the raised M5 and I always wanted to encounter it on foot, the chemical chimneys and factory towns. We bungle a proper examination however as the rain begins to come down and we decide to make for our accommodation.

We finish for the day schlepping up the Wolverhampton Road searching for our Travelodge.

All Images © Ted Allen 2010

This is from the press release we sent out Friday morning which sets out our current interest:

‘On leaving West Bromwich by train in February 1936 George Orwell could famously reflect upon, '... the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs'. Equally striking is his vision of, '... the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to mis-carriages and drudgery ... kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drainpipe'.

What would a visitor to Orwell's Black Country 'slums' find when revisiting these locations today? Does any journey through the urban Midlands inevitably dwell on its failures?’

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I have been interested in Orwell in a loose sort of way since school and my first encounter with the paranoid atmosphere of 1984. This interest has intensified since reading the journalism and works of cultural studies, and he now seems to me as much a part of the English cultural heritage as Cadbury’s or Raleigh bicycles, as someone who has a profound effect on how we think of ourselves as Englanders. Apart from being a pioneering and daring journalist, by turns amateur anthropologist and adventurer into the slums of England and abroad, he was a man with a restless investigative temperament who made writing the means by which he might discover a world. He has been described as, ‘… the archetypal Englishman, the most native and English of writers.’

This blog however is not about filling you in on the well-known facts of Orwell’s life any more than it considers them relevant to our current project. Find out more about Orwell's life here:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n12/terry-eagleton/reach-me-down-romantic

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Orwell was a great tramper and tramping is a definite theme of our own project. There seems something faintly anarchic in repeating Orwell’s 1936 winter walk from Coventry to Manchester via the Black Country and the Potteries, offering some sort of spike to the idea of what you should be doing at this time of year (i.e. escaping or conserving) and where you should be doing it (abroad or indoors).

Ours of course is a self-conscious attempt to confront and reveal a landscape (if you can call the West Midlands conurbation that) and engage in the sort of foot-dialogue popular again recently thanks to Londoner Iain Sinclair.

Ted Allen and I can only aspire to Sinclair’s erudition largely because, although we’re both from the Midlands, we’ve been exiled away in London for the last ten years and have long ago jettisoned any cultural baggage we might have carried over from our forgotten pasts. This is probably in line with a lot of peoples’ experience of living away from the northern homesteads, of a wilful cultural dislocation and trendy reinvention in the south east. It seems that Sandwell and Dudley is the sort of place your parents work hard to exit, to make sure you yourself don’t have to grow up there; but this sort of gesture, this mobility is problematic not least for the psyche and that elusive sense of identity.

Ted and I return to the Midlands then at least in part in the spirit of Orwell’s study, as a journey into those curious industrial lands of the imagination, with pen and camera ready to pick up the striking and the resonant. In other respects however this is a journey home.

We can sympathise with the Orwell Raymond Williams writes of, whose lifetime project is to explore his own,

'... uncertain and ambiguous relationship to England: the society he knows and belongs to, yet in other ways, except in abstraction, does not know at all.’