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Cumbernauld
Within the 1996 essay Tierra del Fuego – New York, French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard juxtaposes Ushuaïa with Manhattan. “After the ends of the earth, the centre of the earth,” he writes. “However every gives the look of being on one other planet.” The UK’s forgotten cities have an identical relationship with its celebrated, over-touristed ones. They copy big-city retail ideas however fall brief. They emulate vacationer honeypots however can’t ship the products. Many lesser-loved locations are botched simulacra of London, whereas additionally present in opposition to it – for the capital’s prosperity is rooted of their damaged desires, dashed hopes, spent retail and extinct providers. Scotland is the Tierra del Fuego of the UK and has many Ushuaïas. Ayr, Stranraer, Thurso and Montrose all qualify as “ends of the earth”. However Cumbernauld, extra even than these, has discovered itself the butt of nasty jokes, snidey mock-prizes, and basic putdowns for half a century.
As a brand new city, it by no means garnered the ironic attraction of Milton Keynes, and but its megastructure has a brash muscularity that knocks out the competitors.
Conceived within the Fifties, it pretty claims to have the UK’s first buying precinct and “the world’s first multi-level lined city centre”, however that is earmarked for demolition. Referred to as the Alien’s Head by some, it divides the city much more than the motorway, the M80, which pierces its coronary heart, and was constructed “between 1972 and 2011”. Vacationer boards would have us stroll round bosky Palacerigg nation park or the museum, which, in flip, factors guests out to the Antonine Wall – the turf fortification constructed by the Romans between the Firth of Forth and Firth of Clyde. However there isn’t a must take the bait.
If you wish to wrap your self within the central belt – without delay Scotland’s most populous and, for outsiders, probably the most forgotten, most passed-through, most cliche-free area of Burns’ “haggis” land – take a wander across the chilly concrete and cracked pavements of Cumbernauld.
Grantham
Lincolnshire is greatest outlined by lacks and absences. It has not one of the barge-punting prettiness of East Anglia. It’s too far east to be within the East Midlands, too far south to be within the north. It’s ostentatiously flat, Lincoln Cathedral’s grandeur largely as a result of surrounding planitude. Grantham, too, is beguiling. On the Nice North Highway and East Coast mainline it’s nonetheless eminently ignorable, belonging to that swathe of passable and serviceable English cities (Aldershot, Colne, Kenilworth, Wokingham and so on) journey and leisure industries have shunned. However within the endless post-Thatcher period, all Britons ought to pay a ruminative go to to Grantham a lot as Chinese language “purple vacationers” hit the Mao path. For right here lies a museum displaying the epoch-defining PM’s lumpy mattress, college hockey stick and duplicate of the rating of Handel’s Messiah, the Victorian Guildhall the place her dad was mayor within the Forties, and her birthplace on the nook of Broad Avenue and North Parade. It was, famously, her dad Alf Roberts’ grocer’s store, however later turned a restaurant (the menu included Rooster Supreme Margaret) and is now “a chiropractic clinic and holistic retreat” the place you may have scorching needles caught in you whereas mendacity precisely the place younger Maggie dreamed of monetarism, redundancy notices and scorching dates with Adam Smith.
Take a purposeful stroll across the city’s ethereal centre, with its stable buildings and Isaac Newton statue, and also you sense Thatcher in all probability imagined Grantham a mannequin to copy throughout the nation. Does the city love its most well-known daughter? The plaque on the wall of the previous grocer’s could be very small certainly. A 10ft plinth on St Peter’s Hill awaits a statue of the Iron Girl commissioned three years in the past. In February 2021, native sculptor Mark Robla gifted the city a plaster Maggie head on a spike constructed from workplace chairs, erupting from a purse. The official effigy is scheduled to be unveiled later this 12 months. Stanley within the Falklands has had a bust of its saviour on present since 2015.
Leigh
Arduous to find in Higher Manchester’s mega-sprawl and, as soon as discovered, nonetheless misplaced in time, Leigh exudes the actual disappointment of once-proud pit cities. In 1828, the primary passenger railway in Lancashire (take be aware, Liverpool, Manchester) was laid between Bolton and Leigh; the city hasn’t had any trains since Beeching axed the final monitor in 1969. Leigh was annexed politically by Wigan within the 1974 boundary debacle. The once-mighty textile business frayed a long time in the past (superb Spinners Mill is on Historic England’s Heritage at Threat register). Even rugby league isn’t any supply of consolation: Leigh Centurions have by no means managed to increase their sojourns within the Tremendous League past a season. At first look, pedestrianised Bradshawgate appears to be like like your ordinary post-Amazon excessive avenue, all downmarket/empty retailers in crumby postwar husks, however search for and also you’ll see vestiges of late Victorian and Edwardian Leigh realised by native architectural hero James Caldwell Prestwich (1852-1940).
The grand, primarily redbrick edifices are in want of conservation, however Prestwich’s Leigh Pleasant Co-operative constructing is daring and assured, whereas his baroque city corridor, with decorative cupola and stained-glass home windows representing the city’s industries, is a masterpiece. Inside the doorway is a museum the place you study Leigh people are often known as “foyer gobblers”, in reference to a stew made by lobbing something out there right into a pot, and to tell apart them from the “pie eaters” of Wigan; that native heroes embody Ian McKellen and Georgie Fame; and that Tom Burke, a miner born in 1890, went on to have an unbelievable profession as an opera singer, met Puccini, carried out alongside Nellie Melba at Covent Backyard, and was nicknamed the “Lancashire Caruso”.
Reverse the city corridor is the brutalist Turnpike Centre, AKA Leigh Library, in-built 1971 by the architectural agency of JC Prestwich & Sons, no much less. The massive, geometric aid, solid in concrete, is by William Mitchell, who supplied summary adornments for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and Birmingham’s Quayside Tower. Leigh has a department of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and a hyperlink to the Bridgewater Canal. Observe the latter’s towpath to the Lancashire Mining Museum at Astley Inexperienced, resting place of the final remaining winding equipment and headgear from the Lancashire Coalfield. One other, much-loved mining legacy is Pennington Flash, a small lagoon shaped by subsidence; bream, perch, roach, rudd, tench, pike and some huge carp hang-out its seedy depths. Non-anglers can stretch their legs within the surrounding nation park.
Guildford
A Welsh hotelier as soon as advised me the important thing to promoting upmarket lodging was nailing the “Gee-you” market. I had no thought what he was speaking about until he defined that he was referring to the GU postcode. “Greater than half of our purchasers are from Guildford or close to to it,” he mentioned. “They’ve the cash and they’re near the motorway.” Flip the socio-economics and descend on a city slated by many as a dull-as-death dormitory. Guildford has the sorts of belongings you’d anticipate – fort, museum, excessive avenue, SUVs. However extra shocking is Hinemihi, a picket Māori assembly home shipped right here from New Zealand’s North Island in 1892, and the stays of one of many oldest synagogues in western Europe – in-built 1180, and buried beneath the ground of Waterstones. The neo-gothic cathedral, gloomily austere, featured within the 1976 movie The Omen.
Guildford is fantastically nicely related, with three main traces converging right here, categorical providers to London (32 minutes, stopping as soon as at Woking), buses to Heathrow and a practice to Gatwick. Earlier than the pandemic, there was a direct practice to Newcastle. The 153-mile North Downs Manner, which has its japanese excessive at close by Farnham, passes by means of Guildford on the outdated Pilgrim’s Manner. As GU-ers would anticipate, the slopes of the Surrey Hills AONB are at all times balmy and plenty of are clad in chardonnay vines.
Runcorn
For hundreds of thousands of Lancastrians, Cestrians, Mancunians and suburban scousers, Runcorn is an emblem of sunshine, freedom and hope. Since its erection in 1961, Runcorn Bridge (later formally renamed Silver Jubilee Bridge) was the one strategy to cross the River Mersey and Manchester Ship Canal to enter north Wales. From right here, the onward journey to Colwyn Bay, Rhyl and Llandudno was a hazy, pleased, heady blur, with even the jams on the outdated A55 a part of the enjoyable. The parallel railway bridge, a colorless, span-less affair, delivers a comparable hit to the car-less. Since 2017, the sweeping Mersey Gateway has given the estuarine location its personal Golden Gate. Cynics may argue that every one this discuss of transit is what Runcorn deserves, but it surely’s time beach-bound travellers pulled over to have a look round Runcorn. For there, within the shadow of the bridge, sit the remnants of the outdated new city, envisioned by Arthur Ling in 1964, with state-of-the-art neighbourhoods like Castlefields, lauded on the time as “the way forward for sustainable residing”, and modernist Southgate Property, with its porthole home windows, designed by James Stirling.
Demolition has razed a lot of the utopian dream, however the reminiscence lingers within the maze of cul-de-sacs and bargain-basement Bauhaus-esque terraces. The 12-mile devoted Busway, with its “stations” and raised part at Purchasing Metropolis (designed by Fred Roche, of Milton Keynes’ fame), might be toured on bus numbers 1 and a couple of. Runcorn’s burgermeisters have opted to this point to listing solely historical websites like Norton Priory (Grade 1) – well-known for its St Christopher statue – and 18th-century Bridgewater Home (the duke’s pad whereas the canal linking Runcorn, Manchester and Leigh was beneath development). Whereas these are venerable landmarks, the final remnants of the brand new city additionally deserve some sort of safety. Footpaths alongside the canals and Weaver Navigation present escape routes out of Runcorn, however city geographers will favor to cross the bridge, looking over the bird-beloved swirl of sandbanks and rivulets, climate and waves, that make the Runcorn Hole an ever-changing Turner masterpiece, earlier than plunging into Widnes, the chemical capital of Lancashire.
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