Manningham Part 2

Click to get photos a decent size.

It was good to find this small 17th century cluster (weavers’ cottages?) well preserved, while up in the village there was a bakery, the Village Bakery, of a type I've never yet found in London, with homemade pies and proper confectionary like jam and raisin slices (that’s two items) and Eccles cakes. And the rec at the top of the hill had views of Ilkley Moor.

Turning back I inspected a row of high-quality back-to-backs on Heaton Road.

The two houses you see don’t go right through to the back: half way back, another one-room-per-floor house starts, with access to its ‘front’ door through the tunnel that was required by Bradford’s by-laws from the 1860s.

Finally I called in at Lilycroft Primary School (Bradford School Board, 1872-3 -- thus very early; I’d done my preliminary teaching practice there in 1963 when I lived just down the road) and admired the angels in the hall.

By this time the sun was out, everything looked wonderful -- and my battery ran out. So I'll have to go back. As if I need an excuse. Bradford, if often shabby, is magnificent: topography exhilarating -- unlike Leeds it’s a true Pennine town, on the edge of the big hills; the buildings a feast for the eyes; and the history -- which I now know a bit about for the first time (why didn’t they teach me it in school? typical grammar school...) -- adds such richness to what’s there to see.

Blind alleys

Discussion with friend the other day: blind alleys, the value of, how we prize getting side-tracked in the library by something one hadn’t gone in there to find, or at home by taking down on impulse some book one hasn’t read for years, or ever, and settling to read it. In our version of the intellectual life (if we can pretentiously so dignify it) there has to be an oscillation between focused and specific study on the one hand and browsing on the other. Just as a species stays vigorous by mixing and breeding outside the family circle, and people stay interesting by the range of conversations and encounters they let themselves in for, so the way we think needs constant, unprespecified stimulus by what we find up ‘blind alleys’.

Blind alleys look blind because we can’t when we enter them see any way out that connects with where we ‘should’ be going. And indeed there may be no connection, or it may be years before we see one. We go up blind alleys when we ‘should’ be doing something else -- something on our to-do list (or, more likely, these days, on someone else’s to-do list they kindly maintain for us). Think of everything you need to do, write it down on a list -- then heed any strong impulse to do something else completely, something that presents itself as exactly what your soul needs you to do at the moment. I think our instinct for what alleys are worth going up gets pretty reliable with experience.

Giving in to such impulses may make us less productive in terms of turning out articles and getting our marking done for deadlines, but I think it makes us in certain respects better teachers and researchers, as well as more interesting people, because of the range of reference we can bring. We can draw on a rich and unique tissue of semiotic connections; everything has more connections in our minds.

A colleague’s son found school physics boring because the teacher knew only the syllabus and then found university physics inspiring because the teacher made links to the whole universe of knowledge and ideas that he knew about in his/her bones.

We were in Vienna for the history of education strand of a conference -- so went off on a blind alley that had nothing to do with education or with the supposed purpose of our stay; we spent a day investigating ‘Red Vienna’, the public housing schemes built under the socialist city government of the 1920s and early 1930s, the most famous of which was Karl Marx-Hof.






But of course Rotes Wien wasn’t in the end unrelated to our ‘real’ business, which was the teaching of English in the post-war years in a Labour London that was building its own new housing -- into which many of the pupils we’re now interviewing as older adults moved with their families. On the fourth year English curriculum at Walworth (Comprehensive) School in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, public housing was a topic for writing, reading and discussion -- and Simon Clements, one of the instigating teachers, had been going to be an architect. What animated some key English teachers of the 1950s was a similar spirit to that of the Vienna architects and planners of the previous post-war period.

In Saturday’s Guardian (p.12) physicists express their worry that the freedom they prize to explore blind alleys, a liberty to which they attribute many of the great discoveries of British science, is under threat from a government requirement that to get funding research projects must be likely to benefit the economy. ‘The university’s role of pulling in and nurturing deep thinkers will be sidelined in favour of people who can turn profit by making better widgets’. Moreover, recruitment will suffer because current students went in for physics ‘because they wanted to do pure knowledge and curiosity-driven work...’ (survey quoted) -- and such pursuits require permission precisely to pursue curiosity.

It goes without saying that the same goes for the humanities and social science.

What to do with old towns

I'm back from a trip where I'd hoped to get photos but the light was no good: Hay-on-Wye, Malvern and the Severn Way.

The first was the best. Hay-on-Wye is a small, densely textured, hand-made town, topologically interesting (on a hill with a perfect riverish river below it) and architecturally intriguing. Every building is different, and every combination of buildings creates a different space with constant variety of slope, width, scope of view and angularity. Nearly every building is in stone and slate, and each represents a separate venture by the builders, who’ve been at it since medieval times. Presumably because in modern times, before the book trade came, the place was of little economic importance there are few recent buildings to spoil it – in contrast with Tewkesbury which we later walked the length of, a formerly handsome town made dirty, noisy and visually squalid by traffic and post-war building.

The famous bookshops in Hay are as good as their reputation claims, often representing inspired ‘repurposing’ of good old buildings. This was most notably in Booths: three storeys of bookshelves, generously laid out, on the spacious stone floors on what had been a vast warehouse and sales depot for agricultural supplies (seed and the like). The wooden staircases were wide with fine carved balustrades. And although the town had its gift shops, overall it was not tackily touristy: the book trade was too dominant, and, presumably, the annual festival which doubtless brings a crowd that prefers books, coffee-places and restaurants to ‘gifts’.

I wonder how many sad and moribund small towns that have outlived their economic importance could be revived by taking on some such new specialist function. There are magnificent vast buildings doing nothing much in places like Dewsbury. On our drive back through the Cotswolds old mills had been converted for antiques sales, a development I feel less enthusiastic about but performing, I suppose, a real redistributive function in an economic transformation whereby older objects of utility lose their use value, to be replaced by Ikea furniture and John Lewis saucepans; the antiques sales change this stuff into items of aesthetic and exchange value. But I'd rather see something being made, or something local being sold, in our old towns and cities: is that feeling just a sentimental refusal to embrace modernity?

We stayed in Malvern as a base for walking some of the Severn Way. It’s a once-classy, comfortable Edwardian town, Elgar-saturated, which unlike Edinburgh spreads over the lower eastern slope on one side of a sudden long ridge that springs abruptly from a broad plain. We climbed the hill’s well-worn paths in late afternoon and caught, when the cloud lifted, the sun setting over the Welsh hills, and the sunnier valley behind us to the east; an experience of concentrated and spectacular geography. We saw sun and cloud over the Welsh mountains to the west and the wide plain to the east. But the town, once prosperous because of the water from the springs from which we refilled our bottles, had evidently outlived its point and seemed depressed, with too many charity shops. Due for repurposing like Hay. But the appealing Red Lion pub which its terrific meals in the bar didn’t feel at all moribund.

The Severn was undoubtedly a river of substance but less dramatic than I'd hoped, the water low and hardly moving. I'd love to see it in spate. Evidence of last summer’s flood was everywhere in obliterated sections of footpath, improvised earth defences and plastic bags in trees. It was still good, coming from London and Surrey, to be able to walk for six miles and back along it through uninterrupted countryside with a constant variety of bird life – grazing swans and geese, a heron silhouetted on a topmost branch -- and signs of incipient spring. (The Severn Way did take us under the M50, but that didn’t seem too intrusive.) Tewkesbury, our furthest point, was a let-down, and the hotel we hit on awful, but on our walk back the sun came out, it felt like the real start of spring and Upton-upon-Severn, where we ended, had fine buildings and a riverside pub.

Pershore, Worcs., finally, which we drove through on the way back to London, seemed worth revisiting: an intact old town that at least architecturally looked inspiring. Whether it has much of an economy we couldn’t tell.

Concluding thought on architecture: although we saw nothing notable in the way of contemporary building, either in commercial premises or housing, it does exist – e.g. some of the houses in Grand Designs. What I don’t think I've ever come across, though, is good design of estates, neighbourhoods or quarters, nothing that’s as satisfying as the configurations that arose in old towns as a result of a few major imperatives, like space for a market in the main street, and constraints, like having to use local materials. And the absence of planning regulations governing width of streets, distance between buildings etc. These conditions led to ‘rich texture’ and visual density. Modern planning rules and materials don’t seem to have resulted yet in towns that are good to walk in.

Modern architecture is great at the massing of large forms, and at the detail of handrails and doorknobs, but its intervening spaces tend to be dead: too much roadway and parking space, and boring grass around buildings that are themselves insufficiently articulated to be interesting as you walk past them rather than viewing them from a distance. In Hay there were ‘spaces left over after planning’ that got used interestingly, for piles of timber or for kids to play on. All the new housing developments we saw depressed the spirits, although the individual houses were often inoffensive. The prospect doesn’t look good for these new ‘eco-towns’.