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August 06, 2005
English counties gazetteer : Northamptonshire
Whilst the viability of noble families' tenure of their country piles is not a matter productive of great anxiety for us, Pevsner's surmise that "the county is far enough from London to avoid developments which would make it less attractive to continue residence, and near enough to London to make continued residence possible even in the twentieth century" is transferable tout court to the principal source of rural ruination in contemporary times: tourism and its attendant gewgaw developments.
Some of the ingredients for a conversion to tourism are in place: Notably, the towns of Northamptonshire, which once shod the nation, have for the most part lost this speciality, and Northampton museum proudly displays the impressive achievements of the county's shoemaking industry, from artisan to industrial processes, as a heritage interest. But despite the inevitable decline of industrial might, geographical centrality allows the midlands a basis for commercial survival as the distribution hub of mainland Britain: Whilst the rest of us, as consumers, are afflicted with its eyesore developments and dubious ersatz produce, it is Northamptonshire that is home to the gigantic corrugated-steel megalith that is Tesco's distribution centre. If the first principle factor of industrial capitalism, mass-production, has been entirely outsourced in literally outlandish fashion, to the immediate detriment of that segment of England north of the M25, the secondary factors of logistics and distribution remain by nature stubbornly rooted in the dynamics of material geography.
Beyond the thundering of juggernauts on arterial roads, the county boasts hidden treasures in the form of its many villages. Locals will continue to be quietly proud of them for as long as the area is unjustly but happily neglected in tourist guidebooks and itineraries, for they are a paragon of the modest beauty of England. Although Pevsner's verdict on the Northamptonshire countryside is unduly harsh (there certainly are beautiful open spaces - although not 'wild', since this is predominantly agricultural land - where anyone taken with the stark flatness of the east anglian fens will feel at home; there is lush greenery and thick forest, there are ancient gnarled oaks, there are sleepy rivers with occasional meandering barges), it is true that the wealth of Northamptonshire's peculiar aesthetic and historical interest is concentrated more in its buildings: particularly its churches (at least a thousand years worth, in a surprising variety of forms), but also a rich vein of industrial redbrick, and modest houses in both the local orange stone and brick, largely unspoilt by the conspicuous breezeblock extensions of the nouveaux-riche.
The inhabitants somehow manage to preserve these villages without smothering them in twee hyperreal simulation; there is a relaxed assurance to the thatched indian takeaways on village greens, the consultancies housed in old shoe factories, the shops dating from the dawn of the century now stocking printer cartridges along with aniseed balls and knick-knacks of pre-war provenance. Why? Because the area has not suffered an influx of aesthetic speculators who begin with good if misguided intentions, but having ultimately bound themselves to wringing a profit from aesthetic charms, end by a desperate and clumsy application of all manner of marketing technologies (often in league with local authorities) which gradually hollows out the real source of that charm. The parasites leave behind empty shells no less dead for their shiny exteriors, bereft of the indwelling life the process of whose calcification, it is discovered too late, can be neither retarded nor accelerated without consequence.
Of course, the organism is already ailing: These unhappy creatures arrive only when economic depression has set in (true capitalists, they spot an exploitation gap; disingenuous as capitalists, they are gladly courted with grants from misguided interventionist government 'regeneration' initiatives). They are not the solution, of course, but merely a quick fix: the grants will run dry, their little art galleries will soon founder, their organic crops will rot, their guesthouses will fail or become affordable only to their old friends from the capital, and a more profound, chronic malaise will overcome the place. Only the ritualistic bleating of marketing slogans and forced fawning over the 'loveliness' of their surroundings will keep out the hard truth that 'lovely' is not enough. In such ways do ill-considered dreams thwart themselves.
In Northamptonshire, the villages may have become predominantly a home to commuters and executives both home-grown and incoming, but in all truth one must be glad that at least in becoming a home to working people the places have not reached that level of queasy reflexivity that threatens the counties closer to London (and far enough away to qualify as 'escapes' e.g. the south-west: hence we discover the transformed version of Pevsner's dynamic). Consequently you can enjoy the countryside without being constantly told via a variety of display media what you are enjoying, why you are enjoying it, and why you should be grateful for having been allowed to overpay for it.
In this positive depiction we have to except some of the towns which share equally in the lamentable general decline of all UK small towns. Northampton itself is another matter: although somewhat divided in itself between shabby and upmarket areas, the centre has a palpable vitality (perhaps because it still has a thriving market). On the outskirts, the huge park at Abington, where we watch the local cricket team practice, is a testament to the generosity of one of those noble families of this county of "spires and squires". It's an outstanding model of the victorian municipal gardens, complete with aviary, tearooms, bowling greens and tennis courts, and a superb museum (an idiosyncratic family collection of exotica housed in old mahogany cases, supplemented with local history exhibits, with no strident curatorial intervention and a pleasing dearth of 'multimedia displays'.)
Also notable is the wonderful St. Andrew's hospital, an exemplary 19th-century 'asylum for pauper and criminal lunatics' set in a sprawling hundred acre site. (Amusingly, in view of its changing clientele it was later renamed as the 'General Lunatic Asylum for the Middle and Upper classes'!)
By chance we discover that it is the setting for an alfresco performance of Two Gentlemen of Verona: which happily turns out to be a faithful and witty performance by local company Masque Theatre in a unique setting: more than equal to many professional london performances.
portraits in haybale
In the soon-to-be-kaput indoor market, Northampton
As the day ends and we walk down a disused railway overhung with foliage, light is filtered by the dust thrown up in great clouds by the combine harvesters.
Posted by robin at August 6, 2005 07:00 PM
Comments
This is all so beautiful. I feel quite privileged to have read and seen this one in particular, and do hope I'm not interrupting. I'll do my best not to go to Northamptonshire, however that chance running into the Two Gentlemen...oh, well, that might not happen to an American...
Now that I'm happily refurnishing and re-decorating a bit too lavish-severely (sparse, sharp) for the size of my apartment (according to friends who say I'm making the rooms narrower and higher, which I think is only to be commended; but I don't care, because I still have some smoke smell from fire that started two floors below on May 25th and ruined most of my things, caused a temporary evacuation, then floor scraping, polishing, painting and even door replacement), I don't begrudge anyone having this soft summer; and the photos are just lovelier than ever (I don't mean just lovely!)
Best wishes! Sometimes these things work!
Posted by: Patrick J. Mullins at August 16, 2005 11:10 PM
thanks! nice to know it's appreciated...bad luck with the conflagration though :(
Posted by: robin at August 16, 2005 11:13 PM
I was taking another look: the necessarily changed, but slightly clumsy 'General Lunatic Asylum for the Middle and Upper Classes' is one of the most hilarious things I ever read (although I'm fairly sure it shouldn't be.)
Posted by: Patrick J. Mullins at August 17, 2005 04:32 PM
Even in the throes of foaming schizophrenia, the true gentleman would be mortally offended by being housed in a pauper's asylum!
Have you read Iain Sinclair's book "London Orbital"? - he has a lot of interesting stuff in there about the victorian asylums (their position well outside city limits foreshadows the path of the M25 - where once were madmen now are salesmen).
Posted by: robin at August 18, 2005 09:39 AM
No, I hadn't, but they have it at the NYPL, so I just ordered it. I like that kind of thing very much, and I was just beginning to find some of Durrell's writing about Corcyra sleep-inducing. He was always better on Alexandria than anywhere else.
Yes, indeed the pauper/nobleman problem, but I was captivated even more by the insistence on keeping the middles in their places, if they were going to have to share space with them. Once the upper classes got committed, they might not remember to have made sure to preserve the divide.(I don't know whether they could have said just 'the higher classes' and felt safe.) Also thought 'general' was funny to use before 'lunatic asylum'--especially when it got immediately very specific. There are such differences between British English and American (even in 1957, Higgins sang 'in America they haven't used it for years')that I wonder if even in the 18th and 19th centuries we used the word 'lunatic' on our institutions of this sort, but I've done no research.
Since you've been talking about this interesting matter of distances not too long and not too short which can help preserve the character of places, I would like to ask you what you think of the Vale of Evesham and the town itself, which had interested me, as I still do tend to like lush-looking places and this is called 'the garden of England.' I think it is less than 20 miles from Stratford, but is that far enough to be away from the shitshack type galleries and gimcrackery places and too many hordes of holidaymakers? (I hate Starbucks, etc., too, but if there's only one, I can usually avoid it.) I had liked the way it looked on the Avon from what I could tell, a lot of colour there.
It's definitely true that in New York you can find one-of-a-kind Central and South American places, and a couple of spectacular new Chinatowns in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx; which you cannot nearly so much in the further-out suburbs: they've become migraine-inducing in their homogenization, whether rich or poor.
Posted by: Patrick J. Mullins at August 18, 2005 06:16 PM
as a very amusing travelogue by a misanthropic cheapskate englishman, I'd also recommend Tim Moore's "The Grand Tour/Continental Drifter". I really identify with that man...
Never been to evesham, I don't think – will put it on my list though. As you can probably tell from the general tenor of this site, it doesn't take all that much to impress me...
Posted by: robin at August 19, 2005 08:52 AM
I tend to be easily impressed in the nearby, but usually search for exotica when I go some distance. I used to require certain weathers for the more ordinary things, but now even think heat waves have some sort of charm; peculiarly pleasant the way complacency sets in to one's flaneurisme. Noticed the 'DENTAL' with the backward 'N.' I am fascinated by signs that are misspelled, etc., and a costly sign is ordered to be made anyway: the old 42nd St. used to have 'Neptene Video' as a neon. A Puerto Rican bodega called itself the 'Piomeer Supermarket' (also a neon), a Spanish Harlem restaurant had a plastic sign that read 'Continentalt Cuisine,' and this sign in Chinatown--"Decent Clothes Is Required in the Buddhist Temple." We have the Moore book too. Thanks.
Posted by: Patrick J. Mullins at August 19, 2005 03:45 PM
There's one in Somerstown, "Lebananese Cuisine" it says - you wonder whether (a)the owners themselves can't spell (b)the signmakers can't spell and the owners didn't notice, or (c)the signmakers can't spell and refused to give a refund. There was also one in Lewisham (if bruce is reading this he can confirm) where I think 'tailor' had been misspelled on two different versions of the same massive sign on either side of the shop.
>heat waves have some sort of charm
at least as far as london's concerned, I can't agree - this is why we're in northamptonshire, to escape the inferno!
Posted by: robin at August 20, 2005 12:19 PM
In the case of Chinese, I think it is that they have enough tradesmen of all kinds to only do business with each other, which almost always means ESL. Their menus with 'cold strange-taste chicken' are long-known, so at this point I only count big signs. However, some things boggle the mind, as when you get block letters edged in 'gold,' as in Flushing, Queens, whose sizable facade actually reads 'No. 1 People's and People Chinese Restaurant.'
Posted by: Patrick J. Mullins at August 20, 2005 06:29 PM
I think I may be the 'lurker,' my unspoken remonstrations notwithstanding, and only 2 days having passed since I had crashed! So many thanks for the demons the lurker needed, since I tend to polytheism for brief periods, possibly due to garish tastes. Anyway, that Hyperstition thread is going to get several more reads from me. I like to read things I can only partially understand, and that's a really good one.
I was afraid I'd say something idiotic or ignore something important, so I enquired of you of one of our mutual internet acquaintances, but she probably thought that was unnecessarily precious, which it most assuredly is. Anyway, I believe Reza congratulated you around the time you said you were 'becoming half of 1 which is 2 and also 3', so I just thought you got married, and maybe there was a child or 2 involved! Hell if I understand rudimentary mathematical interpersonals...so I will congratulate you on whatever it is, even if it is a menage a trois, or a ghoulish intellectual experiment a trois ou quatre, or something like in Durrell's 'monsieur', which begins 'the avignon quintet.' While in another comment parents were supposed to have expressed doomsaying sentiments about the 'endeavour'. Just don't use Endeavour on your manufactured sign (or be sure to misspell it), as that is the name of a horrible religious cult somewhere in Michigan.
No matter, the internet is cool for codes like that. It seems you moved to London from Penzance but are staying in Northamptonshire from the heat.
This gives me some ideas for new fiction, especially the term 'committed amphibian' you've used in that thread. Does rarefaction sometimes have to carry the burden of truth? Tee hee...
Posted by: Patrick J. Mullins at August 21, 2005 05:58 PM
actually I was talking about a certain persian 'lurker' who appeared on another thread, and who I hoped might be able to tell us something about the weird creatures in the archway of the church at Earls Barton (see above).
As for the rest, I can see I'll have to make my writing more cryptic since you managed to work out what I'm talking about. Yes, it's both. But only 1 (to arrive in about a month's time)
Posted by: robin at August 22, 2005 11:17 AM
That's terrific! After I wrote this yesterday, I did realize I hadn't considered the possibility of upcoming twins as I wasn't sure whether the ultimate sum somehow might be four. Good for you!
Posted by: Patrick J. Mullins at August 22, 2005 02:51 PM