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