Places, pathways and people
I’m setting out on a new academic journey but it’s irretrievably linked to where I come from, and where I want to be. That’s how it should be, of course, but in the process I need to learn about how to write about places, and people, in a way that is less polemical than some of my writing, and less partisan than much of it. So this slightly indulgent piece of writing is part of the learning process, as well as a waymarker for my journey. It’s also the start of a process of reflective journaling that is intended to help me learn, and manage my learning.
I’m due to start an M.Sc in Place Management and Leadership in a few days; it’s the culmination of a journey that I began consciously twelve years ago, and which has its roots in where I’m from, so it makes sense to start with those two departure points.
Twelve years ago Northumberland County Council was transitioning into a unitary authority, with a generations worth of local authority boundaries being swept away. Highly paid consultants were working hard to find new ways of explaining the diverse communities and places of Northumberland. One of the weaknesses of the work that emerged was that it didn’t understand the difference between places and communities; another was that it marginalized communities of memory and tradition that mean some residents of Bedlington still talk as if the incorporation of the Durham exclave of Bedlingtonshire into Northumberland was a travesty of justice. (It happened in 1844, in case you’re wondering).
Wiping the slate clean in 2008 was a provocation, an invitation to those who cared about tradition and history to bring their understanding of the past into the present, with all the simmering resentments and disputes that went with it or which could be imagined.
As someone who rapidly found himself conscripted into clerking committees, especially Area based committees, I found myself travelling from place to place, seeing those diverse communities in their multi dimensional reality, so far from the lines drawn on a map or by socio-economic categorization. I began to wonder if there were theories and ideas about place that worked better than the conclusions that underpinned our work.
To give you an idea of how unnatural and out of kilter those Northumberland Areas were in 2010, I was clerk to the North Area committee, which stretched for some fifty odd miles from the edge of Ponteland on the outskirts of Newcastle to the Scottish border. I may have had huge fun consulting tide timetables to organize meetings on Holy Island or cricket fixture lists to organize meetings in the pavilion in the shadow of Bamburgh castle, but there was nothing natural or coherent about that area.
That was one departure point for my curiosity about place.
The other one, the almost unconscious departure, would have been when I started school, and discovered my world expanding. I was born and brought up in a new town, Cwmbran, in a new estate of Corporation houses that hugged a contour between the former agricultural and mining land at the top of the valley, and the industrial village of Pontnewydd that was wedged between the canal and the river, bisected by a railway line.
Further up the valley the new housing estates were served by a row of brand new shops in classically late 50s new town style. For those of us below the church and the school, there was the option of walking down the hill into the village, or buying staples from two corner shops that persisted in the terraces grouped along the road from Pontnewydd to the old mining community of Upper Cwmbran. ( You can see my dad talking about that estate, and what it meant to him, and families like ours, in this BBC video about Cwmbran.)
To get to school, to the corner shops, or the village, meant leaving the estate through paths that pre-dated its construction, and which reflected older patterns of movement. You couldn’t ignore the facts; the dates written on the plaques on the walls of the church, the years engraved into some door lintels, the way the Victorian terraced houses were so different to our new corporation houses, the rough gravel surfaces of un-adopted back lanes and bridleways. Of course, I was five, and none of this sank in consciously, but unconsciously, as I sang in the choir at the church or delivered newspapers and milk, the sense of variety, difference, and the types of place became familiar.
Looking back, the presence and then the demise of the corner shops was almost inevitable, and yet I still felt a sense of loss. Tremeers was on the corner of Maindee Terrace and Mount Pleasant Road, and happily soaked up some of my pocket money on Monday mornings if I was early enough to divert on my way to school. It was a classic corner shop that thrived while staples had to be bought everyday because fridges weren’t ubiquitous and cars were rare. It’s only half a kilometre from Tremeers to Pontnewydd Village, but the return journey rises thirty metres in those five hundred; that’s a substantial climb laden with groceries, never mind with a pram or pushchair.
So Tremeers could survive with a sack of spuds and some basic veg, some bread and some confectionery. The other corner shop in that little Victorian community, mainly jammed into the space between the edge of the hill and the road, went out of business as slum clearance saw off the eighty or so houses in Hill Street and Mount Pleasant Street; soon enough Tremeers was gone as well. Footfall will have played a part in Tremeers surviving as long as it did; Maindee Terrace provided access to an older footpath that took you down to Church Road and the schools, the church, and the Church Schoolhouse that was a part of the community for most of my childhood. (I saw my first real rock group there, at a youth club event when I was thirteen). You can see that footpath in this image cropped from Google Maps, emerging on Church Road as a grey line.
As a child I didn’t have Google maps, or aerial pictures, just that sense that the estate I lived on was a place created alongside and amongst older places. Sometimes we were told explicitly by older residents that we came from the new houses, that they had been before our estate was dreamed of. Mrs Garret would tell us, from the upper storey viewpoint of 2 North’s classroom at the primary school, that she could remember the miners walking to the pit across the farmers fields that were there before we moved in. How much of what she told us was memory, and how much of it an artful recreation I couldn’t even consider until I was an adult (Cwmbran Colliery closed in 1927, so her memories must have been of childhood) but that sense of a place before us, of a community that felt an entitlement to seniority to us newcomers, was rich in my mind long before I left for the first time at the age of sixteen.
Even as the corner shops of Mouth Pleasant were declining and closing, the larger, more vital shops in Pontnewydd village were still thriving, driven by their ability to specialize, to innovate and to capture spending not just on necessities but on luxuries. My first science fiction novels came from the stands in Percival and Jones newsagents, and in Chalmers stationers and fancy goods. Bike spares for second and third hand boneshakers came from a shop that overlooked the abandoned railway station; my mother’s clothes often came from Mrs Smiths womenswear shop, sandwiched between Chalmers chemists and Georgie James’s spar shop.
Even as Cwmbran Town centre was growing into a sub-regional shopping centre with four or five multi storey car parks it was possible to do a weeks shopping for a family in Pontnewydd village and not feel that necessity had triumphed over pleasure. As my dad’s accomplice and assistant in the shopping I got to watch as he chose the lamb carcass he wanted this week’s joint cut from; this was shopping so personalized that we could pick and choose in a way that wasn’t possible with the pre-packed meat in Fine Fare in the town centre. If Daniel Miller is right about shopping being located in rituals of love, care and devotion I can never be sure if part of what my father was buying was the sense that someone else cared about what he wanted, not about what they wanted to sell him. I’m not sure he would ever acknowledge it, but I think that every time the butcher asked me, running errands, if I wanted the pork chops cut the way my dad liked them (with a roundel of kidney still attached under the curve of the chop) my dad felt the same pride, the same sense of being an individual that the regulars in his local pub felt when their pint could be pulled without a word being spoken or required. Reading Miller for the first time has been a moment of congruence, when my unformed assumptions about how my dad shopped, and why, could be fitted to a theoretical pattern that they resembled.
What you couldn’t do in Pontnewydd is park outside the shops, or cross the road without a wary eye for the buses making their way around the architectural chicane of the chapel at the entrance to the one way system. One mum with a pram on the pavement would block the entire footpath; the choice young families made to move to shopping in the town centre with its wide open pedestrianized areas and uniformly arranged shops was logical, comfortable and a different kind of luxury.
Every time I go back to Pontnewydd, with my eyes charting the closed down pubs, the ghosts of businesses that are no longer there, I’m struck by the multiplicity of reasons why those businesses either failed or weren’t replaced as they reached the end of their proprietors careers. My instinct is that the solutions, the interventions, would have needed to be as complex, as varied and as surprising as the reasons why businesses failed, moved or simply closed. Talking to the experts, talking to the practitioners who can provide a structure and intellectual base to my instincts is the reason for my journey; travelling with hope and a desire to make changes for the better in the places I care about now.
