Notes From a Small Island (18 page)

Notes from a Small Island

CHAPTER   SIXTEEN

I SPENT A PLEASANT NIGHT IN LINCOLN, WANDERING ITS STEEP AND

ancient streets before and after dinner, admiring the squat, dark immensity of the cathedral and its two Gothic towers, and looking forward very much to seeing it in the morning. I like Lincoln, partly because it is pretty and well preserved but mostly because it seems so agreeably remote. H.V. Morton, in In Search of England, likened it to an inland St Michael's Mount standing above the great sea of the Lincolnshire plain, and that's exactly right. If you look on a map, it's only just down the road a bit from Nottingham and Sheffield, but it feels far away and quite forgotten. I like that very much.

Just about the time of my visit there was an interesting report in the Independent about a long-running dispute between the dean of Lincoln Cathedral and his treasurer. Six years earlier, it appears, the treasurer, along with his wife, daughter and a family friend, had taken the cathedral's treasured copy of the Magna Carta off to Australia for a six-month fund-raising tour. According to the Independent, the Australian visitors to the exhibition had contributed a grand total of just £938 over six months, which would suggest either that Australians are extraordinarily tight-fisted or that the dear old Independent was a trifle careless with its facts. In any case, what is beyond dispute is that the tour was a financial disaster. It lost over £500,000 - a pretty hefty bill, when you think about it, for four people and a piece of parchment. Most of this the Australian government had graciously covered, but the cathedral was still left nursing a £56,000 loss. The upshot is that the dean

gave the story to the press, causing outrage among the cathedral chapter; the Bishop of Lincoln held an inquiry at which he commanded the chapter to resign; the chapter refused to resign; and now everybody was mad at pretty much everybody else. This had been going on for six years.

So when I stepped into the lovely, echoing immensity of Lincoln Cathedral the following morning I was rather hoping that there would be hymnals flying about and the unseemly but exciting sight of clerics wrestling in the transept, but in fact all was disappointingly calm. On the other hand, it was wonderful to be in a great ecclesiastical structure so little disturbed by shuffling troops of tourists. When you consider the hordes that flock to Salisbury, York, Canterbury, Bath and so many of the other great churches of England, Lincoln's relative obscurity is something of a small miracle. It would be hard to think of a place of equal architectural majesty less known to outsiders - Durham, perhaps.

The whole of the nave was filled with ranks of padded metal chairs. I've never understood this. Why can't they have wooden pews in these cathedrals? Every English cathedral I've ever seen has been like this, with semi-straggly rows of chairs that can be stacked or folded away. Why? Do they clear the chairs away for barn-dancing or something? Whatever the reason, they always look cheap and out of keeping with the surrounding splendour of soaring vaults, stained glass and Gothic tracery. What a heartbreak it is sometimes to live in an age of such consummate cost-consciousness. Still, it must be said that the modern intrusions do help you to notice how extravagantly deployed were the skills of medieval stonemasons, glaziers and woodcarvers, and how unstinting was the use of materials.

I would like to have lingered, but I had a vital date to keep. I needed to be in Bradford by mid-afternoon in order to see one of the most exciting visual offerings in the entire world, as far as I am concerned. On the first Saturday of every month, you see, Pictureville Cinema, part of the large and popular Museum of Photography, Film and Something Else, shows an original, uncut version of This Is Cinerama. It is the only place in the world now where you can see this wonderful piece of cinematic history, and this was the first Saturday of the month.

I can't tell you how much I was looking forward to this. I fretted all the way that I would miss my rail connection at Doncaster and then I fretted again that I would miss the one at Leeds, but I reachedBradford in plenty of time - nearly three hours early, in fact, which made me tremble slightly, for what is one to do in Bradford with three hours to kill?

Bradford's role in life is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison, and it does this very well. Nowhere on this trip would I see a city more palpably forlorn. Nowhere would I pass more vacant shops, their windows soaped or covered with tattered posters for pop concerts in other, more vibrant communities like Huddersfield and Pudsey, or more office buildings festooned with TO LET signs. At least one shop in three in the town centre was empty and most of the rest seemed to be barely hanging on. Soon after this visit, Rackham's, the main department store, would announce it was closing. Such life as there was had mostly moved indoors to a characterless compound called the Arndale Centre. (And why is it, by the way, that Sixties shopping centres are always called the Arndale Centre?) But mostly Bradford seemed steeped in a perilous and irreversible decline.

Once this was one of the greatest congregations of Victorian architecture anywhere, but you would scarcely guess it now. Scores of wonderful buildings were swept away to make room for wide new roads and angular office buildings with painted plywood insets beneath each window. Nearly everything in the city suffers from well-intentioned but misguided meddling by planners. Many of the busier streets have the kind of pedestrian crossings that you have to negotiate in stages - one stage to get to an island in the middle, then another long wait with strangers before you are given four seconds to sprint to the other side - which makes even the simplest errands tiresome, particularly if you want to make a eater-corner crossing and have to wait at four sets of lights to travel a net distance of thirty yards. Worse still, along much of Hall Ings and Princes Way the hapless pedestrian is forced into a series of bleak and menacing subways that meet in large circles, open to the sky but always in shadow, and so badly drained, I'm told, that someone once drowned in one during a flash downpour.

You won't be surprised to hear that I used to wonder about these planning insanities a lot, and then one day I got a book from Skipton Library called Bradford - Outline for Tomorrow or something like that. It was from the late Fifties or early Sixties and it was full of black-and-white architect's drawings of gleaming pedestrian precincts peopled with prosperous, confidently striding, semi-stick figures, and office buildings of the type that loomed over me now,

and I suddenly saw, with a kind of astonishing clarity, what they were trying to do. I mean to say, they genuinely thought they were building a new world - a Britain in which the brooding, soot-blackened buildings and narrow streets of the past would be swept away and replaced with sunny plazas, shiny offices, libraries, schools and hospitals, all linked with brightly tiled underground passageways where pedestrians would be safely segregated from the passing traffic. Everything about it looked bright and clean and fun. There were even pictures of women with pushchairs stopping to chat in the open-air subterranean circles. And what we got instead was a city of empty, peeling office blocks, discouraging roads, pedestrian drains and economic desolation. Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but at least we would have been left with a city of crumbling old buildings instead of crumbling new ones.

Nowadays, in a gesture that is as ironic as it is pathetic, the local authorities are desperately trying to promote their meagre stock of old buildings. In a modest cluster of narrow streets on a slope just enough out of the city centre to have escaped the bulldozer, there still stand some three dozen large and striking warehouses, mostly built between 1860 and 1874 in a confident neoclassical style that makes them look like merchant banks rather than wool sheds, which together make up the area known as Little Germany. Once there were many other districts like this - indeed, the whole of central Bradford as late as the 1950s consisted almost wholly of warehouses, mills, banks and offices single-mindedly dedicated to the woollen trade. And then - goodness knows how - the wool business just leaked away. It was, I suppose, the usual story of over-confidence and lack of investment followed by panic and retreat. In any case, the mills went, the offices grew dark, the once-bustling Wool Exchange dwindled to a dusty nothingness, and now you would never guess that Bradford had ever known greatness.

Of all the once thriving wool precincts in the city - Bermondsey, Cheapside, Manor Row, Sunbridge Road - only the few dark buildings of Little Germany survive in any number, and even this promising small neighbourhood seems bleak and futureless. At the time of my visit two-thirds of the buildings were covered in scaffolding, and the other third had TO LET signs on them. Those that had been renovated looked smart and well done, but they also looked permanently vacant, and they were about to be joined in their gleaming, well-preserved emptiness by the two dozen others now in the process of being renovated.What a good idea it would be, I thought, if the Government ordered the evacuation of Milton Keynes and made all the insurance companies and other firms decamp to places like Bradford in order to bring some life back to real cities. Then Milton Keynes could become like Little Germany is now, an empty place that people could stroll through and wonder at. But it will never happen, of course. Obviously, the Government would never order such a thing, but it won't even happen through market forces because companies want big modern buildings with lots of car parking, and nobody wants to live in Bradford, and who can blame them? And anyway, even if by some miracle they find tenants for all these wonderful old relics, it will never be anything more than a small well-preserved enclave in the heart of a dying city.

Still, Bradford is not without its charms. The Alhambra Theatre, built in 1914 in an excitingly effusive style with minarets and towers, has been sumptuously and skilfully renovated and remains the most wonderful place (with the possible exception of the Hackney Empire) to see a pantomime. (Something I positively adore, by the way. Within weeks of this visit, I would be back to see Billy Pearce in Aladdin. Laugh? I soaked the seat.) The Museum of Film, Photography, Imax Cinema and Something Else (I can never remember the exact name) has brought a welcome flicker of life to a corner of the city that previously had to rely on the world's most appalling indoor ice rink for its diversion value, and there are some good pubs. I went in one now, the Mannville Arms, and had a pint of beer and a bowl of chilli. The Mannville is well known in Bradford as the place where the Yorkshire Ripper used to hang out, though it ought to be famous for its chilli, which is outstanding.

Afterwards, with an hour still to kill, I walked over to the Museum of Television, Photography and Whatever, which I admire, partly because it is free and partly because I think it is deeply commendable to put these institutions in the provinces. I had a look through the various galleries, and watched in some wonder as throngs of people parted with substantial sums of cash to see the two o'clock Imax show. I've been to these Imax screenings before and frankly I can't understand their appeal. I know the screen is massive and the visual reproduction stunning, but the films are always so incredibly dull, with their earnest, leaden commentaries about Man's conquest of this and fulfilling his destiny to do that -this latest offering which had the crowds flocking in was actually called Destiny in Space - when any fool can see that what

everybody really wants is to go on a roller-coaster ride and experience a little here-comes-my-lunch aerial dive-bombing.

The people at Cinerama Corporation understood this well some forty years ago and made a death-defying roller-coaster ride the focus of their advertising campaign. The first and last time I saw This Is Cinerama was in 1956 on a family trip to Chicago. The movie had been on general release since 1952 but such was its popularity in the big cities, and its unavailability in places like Iowa, that it ran for years and years, though it must be said that by the time we saw it most of the audience consisted of people in bib overalls chewing on stalks of grass. My memories of it were vague - I was just four years old in the summer of 1956 - but fond, and I couldn't wait to see it now.

Such was my eagerness that I hastened out of the Museum of Various Things Involving Celluloid and across to the nearby entrance of the Pictureville Cinema half an hour early and stood, alone in a freezing drizzle, for fifteen minutes before the doors were opened. I bought a ticket, stipulating a place in the centre of the auditorium and with plenty of room for vomiting, and found my way to my seat. It was a wonderful cinema, with plush seats and a big curving screen behind velvet curtains. For a few minutes it looked as if I was going to have the place to myself, but then others started coming in and by two minutes to showtime it was pretty well full.

At the stroke of two, the room darkened and the curtains opened perhaps fifteen feet - a fraction of their total sweep - and the modest portion of exposed screen filled with some introductory footage by Lowell Thomas (a sort of 1950s American version of David Attenborough but looking like George Orwell) sitting in a patently fake study filled with globetrotting objects, preparing us for the wonder we were about to behold. Now you must put this in its historical context. Cinerama was created in a desperate response to television which in the early 1950s was threatening to put Hollywood clean out of business. So this prefatory footage, filmed in black and white and presented in a modest rectangle the shape of a television screen, was clearly intended to implant a subliminal reminder that this was the sort of image we were used to looking at these days. After a brief but not uninteresting rundown on the . history of the cinematic arts, Thomas told us to sit back and enjoy the greatest visual spectacle the world had ever seen. Then he disappeared, rich orchestral music rose from every quarter, thecurtains drew back and back and back to reveal a majestic curved screen and suddenly we were in a world drenched in colour, on a roller-coaster on Long Island, and gosh was it good.