Mark Steel’s In Town. Mark Steel

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       COPYRIGHT

      First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.4thestate.co.uk

      The right of Mark Steel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      IN TOWN. Copyright © Mark Steel 2011.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780007412426

      Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780007412433 Version: 2015-01-21

       DEDICATION

      This book is dedicated to all the people

       who’ve lived in history, in towns or other places, without whom it would not have been possible.

      Contents

       Cover

      Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

Penzance

New Towns: Basingstoke, Crawley, Milton Keynes

Birmingham

Didcot, Oxford

Wilmslow

Wigan

Horwich

      London

      Outer London

      Hereford

      Norwich

      Boston

      Surrey

      Merthyr Tydfil

      Edinburgh

      Orkney

      Dumfries

      Andersonstown

      Colchester

      Exeter

      Portland

      Motorways

      Yorkshire

      Nottingham

      Coventry

      Walsall

      Lewes

      Gateshead

      Kent

      Bristol

      Conclusion

      Bibliography

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

      Also by the Author

      About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

      What’s the point in going anywhere if the place you go to is the same as the one you left? Who’d bother going on a holiday that was advertised as: ‘Visit the magic of the Seychelles, it’s IDENTICAL to your own house.’

      Imagine if in Tunisia, instead of the background of the call to prayers, the mosques played Magic FM. Or if Paris didn’t have that slightly exotic drainy smell, because EU regulations had compelled the place to be cleaned with Jif.

      Once, in the New York subway, a huge woman barged into me and yelled, ‘Hey, out my way asshole!’ And it was marvellous, because that’s what’s supposed to happen in New York. It was as exciting as when I was nineteen and went to Amsterdam and bought a lump of dope off a man in a woolly hat but it turned out to be mud.

      After taking the trouble to go to the Lake District you want it to smell of cow pats, and at Blackpool you want everything to look as if it should be in a Carry On film.

      Having toured Britain plenty of times, usually to talk to an audience for the evening, I find these local quirks compelling. For example, on the way to Skipton, in North Yorkshire, I noticed a road sign to a town called Keighley. Later, during the show, I asked the audience, ‘Is Keighley your rival town?’ And the room went chillingly quiet, until one woman called out with understated menace, ‘Keighley – is a sink of evil.’

      There was something delightful about this, because it was an expression of specifically Skipton malevolence.

      Similarly, I went to Merthyr Tydfil, a blighted town at the top of the Rhondda Valley that’s been shut down bit by bit. After the show the manager of the theatre told me, ‘People often come in and ask what time a performance is starting, so I’ll tell them, “It starts at seven-thirty,” and they’ll say, “Oh, that’s a pity. I won’t be able to come to that, as I’ll be drunk by then.”’

      And somehow there was a warmth to hearing that, because it was a story of distinctly Merthyr despair.

      Before appearing in Stockton-on-Tees, in the North-East, I was sent a message on Twitter by a local resident that said: ‘This town is where Joseph Walker invented СКАЧАТЬ