Mark Steel’s In Town. Mark Steel

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      On top of this, Birmingham can claim to be the place where the Balti curry was invented. There are areas such as Sparkbrook that are lined with Indian and Pakistani cafés, with plastic tablecloths and lopsided portraits on the wall that may be of the owner’s father or could be the President of the Punjab.

      Birmingham’s image probably isn’t helped by its confused status as Britain’s second city. Whereas that title was accepted across most of Britain until recently, in a poll in 2011, 48 per cent said Manchester was the second city, and 40 per cent said Birmingham. This only matters because of expectations, otherwise people in Oswestry would be gutted every time a new survey emerges that says it’s missed out on second-city rank yet again, despite the new windows in the post office.

      But something needs to be done about Birmingham’s centre, because the joys and quirks of the city are hidden behind the oppressively unwelcoming concrete algebra puzzle that is its unfathomable heart. It’s like writing a captivating novel but insisting that the cover smells of raw sewage.

      The planners do make regular attempts to renovate the Bullring, but with delicate architectural genius they always manage to make it even uglier. It’s as if there’s a committee somewhere that thinks, ‘Just one more flyover and then it will all be sorted,’ so that by now an aerial view of the place makes it look like a Scalextric course after the dog’s sat on it. The latest attempt at renovation entailed the creation of a giant, mesmerising bubbly thing in the absolute centre, that looks as if each day it’s going to get bigger by eating the first twenty people who walk by.

      So it should simply be abandoned. The Bullring, the station, the inner circle and the flyovers should be covered in barbed wire and left derelict, like bits of Chernobyl, and the centre should be moved two miles away, in whatever direction the locals prefer. Outsiders will then arrive in a city it’s possible to walk around, and where it’s possible to imagine that a park may be nearby. They’ll look around for the Asian cafés and the exuberance of Jamaican Handsworth, the abundance of canals and the symphony orchestra, and will hear the accent as a lilting melody, a symbol of the pastoral effervescent jolliness, with its strange cordoned-off area on the outskirts, that is Birmingham.

       Didcot, Oxford

      Didcot must be the town that’s least visited compared to how often it’s seen in the whole country. It’s in the south of Oxfordshire, and consists of two main roads on either side of a tiny pedestrianised centre, a small railway museum, a fire station, a post office and a fucking great power station with six vast funnels pumping out fuck knows what that can be seen from everywhere, including, I should think, on a clear night, outer space.

      If you’re travelling to the Midlands by road or rail, you might casually glance west and note a power station. That will be Didcot. If you’re going to Bristol, you might at some point turn towards the north and see a power station. Didcot. Even when you’re used to this you get caught out, and think, ‘That power station can’t possibly be Didcot,’ but it will be, because it’s on wheels and they must move it to comply with regulations regarding smoke limits in one area.

      It may not be coincidence that it’s visible from so much of England, because Didcot was the perfect place for southern England’s main railway junction, en route to everywhere, in the middle of everything. Many towns grew up around a railway, but in Didcot the railway was the town, created to serve Brunel’s vision of a network from east to west. You’ll probably now be wondering how you can read much more about the impact of the railway on Didcot, in which case you may be drawn to a book I bought called The Railway Comes to Didcot. But unfortunately the opening line goes: ‘In no way is this book a history of the railway in Didcot.’ I couldn’t help feeling slightly cheated by this. It’s possible that another of the author’s books may contain some information in that area, but I was slightly put off by its title: The Long Years of Obscurity: A History of Didcot, Volume One – to 1841.

      Didcot owes its modern existence to Lord Abingdon, who refused to allow a railway to pass through Abingdon village; Didcot was chosen instead. Now it has around 20,000 people, and a sense that the landscape might not be something to put on a tin of biscuits.

      When I asked on Twitter for comments from the town, possibly the two most poignant were, ‘You can always tell on the train to Oxford who’s from Didcot, from their morose demeanour,’ and ‘I seem to remember a character in EastEnders confessing they were from Didcot.’ That is truly disturbing, to be considered a subject of trauma in EastEnders, presumably with dialogue that went:

      ‘We’ve gotta talk.’

      ‘What is it, doll?’

      ‘Look, this ain’t gonna be easy, but I’ll come aht wiv it. I’m from Didcot.’

      ‘You what? Oh no, that explains your morose demeanour, you slaaaag.’

      But the town has developed a stoical sense of pride. Everyone I spoke to there was aware of the Cornerhouse Theatre, which they told me with great satisfaction had been built with money originally scheduled for Reading. And everyone was shocked, shocked, that I wasn’t familiar with William Bradbery, who came from Didcot and was the first person to cultivate watercress.

      As well as being defined by, and looked down upon from all angles by, the towers of the power station, Didcot is also defined by, and looked down upon from all angles by, the town ten miles up the road, which is Oxford.

      To start with, in 1836 the Great Western Railway applied to build a branch line from Didcot to Oxford, but the colleges were the main landowners, and they refused to allow the new route. The reason was that they didn’t want the grubby people of Didcot to be able to lower the tone of Oxford by merrily travelling to it on the train. Eventually in 1843 the colleges allowed the new line, but on the condition that no one below the status of an MA was allowed to travel on it. Now, when I first read this, I was certain that I must have misread or misunderstood the sentence, so to save you going back over this paragraph, eventually in 1843 the colleges allowed the new line, but on the condition that no one below the status of an MA was allowed to travel on it.

      Not only that, but the university authorities were given free passes to travel along the line at any time, to check that no one was trying to catch a ride who wasn’t sufficiently mastered up. So there were actually people looking through the carriages, maybe even wandering down the train calling, ‘Can I see your Masters, please? Masters and doctorates, please. Thank you, Professor. Thank you, sir, that’s fine. Ah, I’m sorry, sir, media studies isn’t valid on a Friday, you’ll have to get off at the next stop.’

      If it hasn’t already received one, I’d like to nominate this for the all-time snobbery award. When discussing their proposal the university authorities must have said, ‘It is quite possible that not being able to speak Latin is contagious, in which case for our finest minds to be in the proximity of these Didcottian dunces could be calamitous to our nation’s intellect.’

      Hopefully the local youngsters found ways round this rule, by flashing a 2:1 in geography at the barrier, then running off before the inspector could check it. Or maybe they forged a BA in philosophy, and then rather than squirming as the inspector asked them for a précis on Cartesian dualism, they panicked and locked themselves in the toilet.

      But it would be a mistake to think of Oxford as a monolithic body of pomposity, because the town is divided between the university hierarchy and a normal population. This has given rise to a tension that goes back to the early days of the colleges in the thirteenth century, and that erupted spectacularly in 1355, when two students complained to an innkeeper about the quality of his beer. According to one account, СКАЧАТЬ