From destruction to dithering – a half century of strategic visions for rail in the North and East Midlands

 While waiting the other afternoon for my train at Stoke-on-Trent – a station that might have been designed for Hampton Court and then re-purposed to Staffordshire – I was astonished when a Virgin train (ex Manchester Piccadilly) came rumbling in, next stop Euston in a mere 1 hour 28 minutes. Non-stop from the Potteries to the capital, wow, I never expected that ! However, predictably enough, though sadly enough, it was followed not long afterwards by my train (perhaps it should be renamed a “train-lite”), a tinny little East Midlands Trains one-car diesel that came limping in on its snailpaced cross-country route from Crewe to Derby, packed and cramped, knees not so much under chin as sideways across aisle. “The North Staffordshire Line”, as it’s marketed and glamourised (“Where Stations are part of the Community”).

Railway-wise, this is not the most well-endowed part of the world and, as the thermometer nudges 30, now is the summer of our Midlands Disconnect. Later on there was a delayed connection at Derby attributed firstly to there being another train in front (not a man with a red flag, then?), and secondly to a points failure. Who knows? Who cares? Come back Reggie Perrin, all is forgiven. Average speed, Stoke to Nottingham, 25 mph.

As regards improvements to our railways, points failure isn’t usually a problem; many good and valid points are made by many people on many occasions in many parts of the country. There’s no failure of points, no shortage of them. The difficulty is getting anyone to act upon them.

In the 60s the infamous Dr Beeching’s main legacy to the north and east Midlands was the destruction of the Great Central (splendidly engineered : Marylebone – Rugby – Leicester – Nottingham – Sheffield – Manchester, in fact HS2 by any other name). The subsequent losses of the Nottingham to Melton Mowbray route, and of the northern chord through Chaddesden, east of Derby (both routes now built upon) were also critically unhelpful. Much of the damage, though, could still be rectified with a little gumption and imagination, and not all that much money.

Today, there are many pressure groups and societies eager to reverse the mistakes of the Beeching era, yet nothing much ever seems to happen, at least in these polar wildernesses way beyond the arctic far side of the political event-horizon called the M25. Witterings extend for decades and then die. Shortage of money is the usual excuse; there’s no shortage of money, it’s merely in the wrong place (London). And as with points, there’s no shortage of ideas. 

Several proposals - including some of those listed below – are generally deemed to be plausible, yet are at best scheduled to take decades to implement – in other words, no one wants to take responsibility for them. Kicking the can down the track, as this dismal May-era terminology has it. Among ideas (mostly well-known ones, plus my own observations) for the north and east Midlands, which would involve relatively little infrastructure work, and could theoretically be completed very quickly, would seem to be the following:

1) The freight line between Trent Junction and Willington could be opened for passenger traffic, for selected trains not calling (and having to reverse) at Derby, thus speeding journey times between Nottingham and Birmingham.

2) HS2 – good idea in principle, lousy in specifics, obscene in terms of cost – if built at all should call at East Midlands Parkway, allowing trains from London (having shaved a couple of minutes or so off current Midland main line times) to proceed directly to Nottingham or Derby, without all the faff and time-wasting of having to connect to another mode of transport at Toton (tram with 15 intermediate stops to Nottingham, or slow train going back in the reverse direction). Toton HS2 hub is a thoroughly daft idea - as anyone who isn’t a craven politician or someone with a vested interest can spot immediately by looking at a map. It’s in the wrong place, and too far north. Or why not an HS2 station beneath East Midlands Airport? Is it because there's no joined up transport policy trying to integrate air and rail travel, a vision able to glimpse beyond environmentally catastrophic proposals to cover most of what used to be Middlesex with extensions to Heathrow?

3) There are proposals to re-connect the Derwent Valley line from Matlock, through Bakewell, towards Manchester. This proposal conflicts with walkers and cyclists who use the magnificent Monsal Trail, with its viaducts and tunnels. With respect, there are many places where one can walk or cycle; this well-engineered line is simply too valuable to be used in this way. The rail proposals should proceed. A direct line from Derby and points south and east to Manchester and the north-west.

4) The spur through the south tunnel at Dore should be reinstated, allowing trains from the major East Midlands cities (Nottingham, Derby, Leicester) to reach Manchester and Liverpool directly, along the Hope Valley line, without the tedious detour and reverse at Sheffield. That’s presumably why the spur was built in the first place.

5) The Derby-Crewe line should be served by proper long distance trains (preferably ones with knee space) which could connect, at the eastern end, to Nottingham (and hence Newark and Lincoln, Grantham and Skegness) and at the western end, to Liverpool and Liverpool Airport, Manchester and Manchester Airport, Chester and North Wales. Much like things used to be.

6) Midland Line electrification should continue northwards, beyond the present ludicrous intention to stop at Market Harborough. “Just say no” to bimodal nonsense and The Fat Controller. He of the domed and shiny cranium; hopefully he’ll soon be history.

7) Proper trains should run between Leicester, Nuneaton and Coventry. In the north, routes could extend to Nottingham, Derby, Sheffield and beyond, and in the south, to Leamington Spa, Banbury, Oxford, Reading and points south and west. This would relieve pressure on Birmingham New Street and provide easier access from the East Midlands to Birmingham Airport. A “Midlands Connect” that can’t provide decent connections to the region’s major airport and to one of its largest cities is a joke.

Enough. I believe there is much that could be implemented in a short time with minimal cost. Nothing very new is being suggested here, merely the undoing of the short-sightedness of an earlier generation of politicians. Now, of course, our accountants – sorry, our politicians, not junior smartarses who talk about “train stations”, no, nothing like that at all - are not only visionary, but are able to inspire us with impressive logos, like the Northern Powerhouse and Midlands Connect. Entirely free of charge (and without the need to spend millions on feasibility studies, working parties or focus groups) I would like to offer them – and The Fat Controller in particular - another logo: JFDI.

Zappa on a pole

If you wanted a wonderfully freaky name for a musical genius you could hardly do better than the one bestowed by Francis and Rosie Zappa upon their son, born four days before Christmas 1940, in Baltimore, Maryland. And if you were a proud and freedom loving people eager to shake off decades of political oppression, and wanting to symbolise imagination, creativity and – indeed – freedom, one unlikely yet accurate choice you might make for that representation, would be the very same - Frank Vincent Zappa.

 

In 1990, Frank Zappa, soon to be diagnosed with prostate cancer, was in Hungary at the invitation of the mayor of Budapest, Gabor Demszky, celebrating the demise of communism in Eastern Europe. On 29th June, Frank, his wife Gail, Demszky, and Arunas Toras, were enjoying a cruise on the Danube. Toras was the mayor of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. I’m not sure what the specific personal connection was, but evidently Zappa’s music was popular in Lithuania, a country which did not achieve independence from Soviet domination until January 1991. Four years after that (and two years after Zappa’s death on 6th December 1993), a small memorial to the musician was erected in a slightly scruffy square on the west side of the Vilnius city centre. Designed by Konstantinas Bogdanas, who had made something of a career out of creating busts of Lenin, it isn’t an obvious likeness of Zappa, but all the same I was pleased to see it on my visit there last week, tangible evidence as it is of a mildly wacky and anarchic streak in Lithuanian life. Given the constant threat from the east, long may that streak continue and evolve.

Brexit - the marmalade factor

Seville’s oranges are notoriously unappetising if eaten as oranges; processed into marmalade they provide a crucial commercial and culinary link between that delightful Andalucian city and the United Kingdom.

In Seville is the magnificent Museo de Bellas Artes, which specialises in Spanish art, much of it religious in nature, and featuring significant collections by the likes of Murillo and Zurbarán. Entrance to the museum is free to citizens of the European Union. The day of our recent visit happened to coincide with the European elections. We declared our nationality to the lady at the ticket window, and expressions of doubt as to our future membership of the EU passed between us. Doubt and regret.

 
I felt a strong and immediate pang of something like loss. How could we be stupid enough, how could we be small-minded enough, how could we be self-destructive enough, to have reacted to the inadequacies of politicians in Westminster and Brussels, by wanting to deny ourselves all this? To reject hundreds of years of European civilisation, not just the great works of art and the mindset of which they speak, but marmalade too? 

Suddenly I came over all Paddington Bear. Surely marmalade, euro-marmalade, could still stick us together? None of our political dimwits have thought of this, have they?

What shall we be?

On Saturday, a wild and wet day, I thoroughly enjoyed the unexpected experience (unexpected, because I didn’t know it was possible until I arrived there) of taking the high level walkway, 160 feet up, on the transporter bridge across the River Tees, in Middlesbrough. 

Built in 1911, at a time when we had imagination and purpose, when we had individual, local and national pride, lots of money and first rate engineering ability, the Tees Transporter Bridge is one of only two of its kind surviving in the UK. The other is across the Usk at Newport, Gwent. I dimly remember a third, the one that connected Widnes with Runcorn, and which was replaced by a huge arch suspension bridge, painted pale green. Back then, in 1960, the future was exciting, so very foolishly I took photos of the new bridge, while neglecting the old one, which was demolished soon after.

From the Middlesbrough transporter bridge views extend to the North Yorks Moors, and right across Teesside and into County Durham. On Saturday, the cloudbase was very low and the visibility poor. Even so, sadly, from this altitude, the loss of heavy industry on Teesside was all too apparent, and the rectilinear street pattern of the city, very American in appearance, revealed a great many oblongs of emptiness or dereliction. The waterfront at Middlesbrough – currently a small poxy “viewing area” surrounded by rubbish - could be the location for something truly exciting. But what? If you Google “Middlesbrough” the first results you see refer to football, not to a city of more than 138,000 inhabitants where, in another age, from half a world away, Sydney Harbour Bridge was constructed. Football, of course, is for some folk far more important than mere matters of life or death or engineering.

 

The question of purpose was reinforced when I descended again via the glass lift to ground level, and noticed the municipal logo, “Erimus”, on one of the bridge piers. It translates as “We shall be”. Indeed, hopefully we shall, but what? Not just in Middlesbrough, but each one of us. What shall we be, individually, locally, and nationally? What, in this post-industrial, purposeless, fractured, shabby, morally bankrupt, impoverished, broken down, Britain’s Got Talent, twitchy little nation of ours? What will become of us? What shall we be?

The Magnanimity of City Walks

This week John Cleese observed that London “is no longer an English city”. For reasons both good and bad, he’s partly right and partly wrong. London never was entirely English (the Romans and the Normans, remember them?), but having enjoyed previous spells as the psychological “capital of the world” in the late nineteenth century, during the Second World War, and in the 1960s, London has again become the de facto World City. That is something of which we, as a nation, can be proud. That so many of the world’s peoples should, for a myriad reasons - admirable or otherwise - want to make it their home, and that so many more should want to visit it, implies a destination of unusual quality. World Central. London thus occupies a role different from any other British city and most other urban hubs around the globe  - Paris, New York and Los Angeles being obvious rival contenders. It is an English city, but it is both more and less than that.

Be that as it may, today’s London is not the same metropolis that Cleese first encountered, when first up from Weston-super-Mare via Bristol and Cambridge, and if it were otherwise, it would be a dead city, ossified and stagnant. Vital cities change constantly, though not necessarily, and not always, for the better. Some decline (Florence, Istanbul) or go through rough patches (Berlin, Glasgow). While it is Cleese’s observation of the markedly changed demographics of London that has drawn the hysteria of those congenitally hypersensitive to such matters there is much else that makes the city different from how it used to be, the architecture and the sheer busyness to be encountered almost everywhere being two of the most significant factors.

Cleese gets berated for talking about Englishness. Nigel Farage, who probably  knows better than most what it is like to be routinely and mindlessly slandered by the self-appointed arbiters of righteousness, wrote in his 2011 autobiographical ‘Flying Free’ - “Freedom of speech and belief is not subject to approval by a transitory authority. It is absolute or it is nothing.” That’s almost a definition of Englishness itself. Cleese’s generation (and mine, a decade later) flowered at a time when that sentiment was still true and completely unobjectionable. At the same time, Cleese himself was one of the two gigantic Johns (he was taller than the other one, and had better eyesight) who played a huge role in defining key aspects of English culture – comedy and music – in the mid-twentieth century, right across the English-speaking world, and beyond. So I believe he is more than entitled, as indeed we all are, for whatever reason or for no good reason at all, to like and to dislike what and who he chooses to. That’s called freedom. No ifs and buts.

Cleese’s later career has – perhaps inevitably - been less amusing than his earlier one, and because he’s 79 and has lived for many years outside the UK he makes himself an easy target for holier-than-thou finger-waggers. However, the key point he is getting at, and one with which I agree absolutely (and it is not unrelated to the fact of getting older) is that we are a less tolerant society than we used to be. This is ironic, because the more that attempts are made to enforce tolerance, the worse matters become. Fear of saying the wrong thing takes precedence over personal conviction; Cleese has dared to speak his mind, and good for him.

Compared to the mid-twentieth century what we have here today is a society in which everything has to be just-so, algorithmic, pre-defined, budgeted, quantified, formulaic, procedural, box-ticked, programmed, legalistic, deliberate, unironic, simplistic, shallow, sanitised, unimaginative, assertive-aggressive, angry, loud, unsubtle, inflexible, humourless, self-righteous, devoid of initiative, tediously literal, and often profoundly dim and depressing. Oh yes, and of course, smart. Smart is very important.

Seen from the perspective of older age, that’s the nation we have become, the kind of people we have become. Not, it has to be said, what we traditionally think of as English. I think that is really what John Cleese is getting at. Our traditional good-humoured fondness for self-deprecation has been turned round and weaponised by those who don’t appreciate such traits. We’re expected to be very left-brained, as befits a gadget-obsessed, money-fixated, quantitative-minded, secular society. In other words, half-brained. Not all of us, of course, but more than enough. Not much future for Basil or for the Ministry of Silly Walks. Not much future in being old, decent, sensitive, imaginative, or honest. Not much future in being silly.

Cleese’s last TV series “Hold the sunset” unfortunately lacked the focused scripts or hilarity of “Python” or “Fawlty”. Conventionally, perhaps, comedically, it was not a great success, but for me, Cleese limping laconically round the dog-emptying leafy avenues of Richmond was a delight – I was just waiting for him to erupt into some venomous outburst – but even though that never quite happened, his persona seemed spot on for a man of his age and past achievements. I felt I could read his thoughts: now that’s acting for you. What that gentle suburban setting emphasised for me, though, with my peculiar psychogeographical predilections and all that, was the difficulty in finding the kind of London that so many of us grew up to love; it was there in the programme, and it certainly still exists in small pockets, but you have to seek it out. This isn’t about simplistic observations of ethnicity or class, but rather more about the intangibles of subjectivity and atmosphere, of architecture and environment and way of life. England, London, as it used to be.

Nostalgia gets ridiculed, unfairly, but a sense of place and permanence contributes to psychological well-being. That’s a big part of Englishness (or any other national identity) – the streets and houses, not necessarily who lives in them. The trees, the horizons, the sky. Take away your origins, and don’t be surprised by subsequent unhappiness. When you’re getting on, you appreciate the comforts of familiarity, and you don’t always need edginess or change. If you’re younger you do need them, you need to live in the present and in the future, and you’ll reject much of what John Cleese (or I) have to say.

Not everyone will be entranced by Richmond, of course, so you have to wander around the vast and varied city and find what grabs you. Dalston or Catford, perhaps. You need to be generous and open minded, magnanimous (that Churchillian word) towards what you don’t personally get, adopting the attitude of the expectant flâneur (if you can put up with such pompous terminology) - because those moments of revelation that this is London can occur in unexpected locations.  Just round the next corner. Wow !

 
Whatever else it implies, Englishness has a lot to do with a sense of place and belonging, even more so with a sense of respect and love and longing, and – as Cleese has noted - with quietness, good manners, humour, and politeness. An attitude, a way of life, a shared past, a togetherness, a commonality. And – it would be nice to think – a common future goal. Qualities easy to mock as old-fashioned, elitist, reactionary, inefficient, boring and … old.  But, why ever not? They served us fine for long enough. For my money, Cleese is someone who has given me many hours of side-splitting pleasure, and for that I’m immensely grateful. He’s a national treasure and is to be hugely respected. Perhaps he should retire to Weston-super-Mare or to a small hotel in Torquay.