Peterborough

another thing: why is the Daily Redcoatandwellygraph's "which aristocrat is shagging which landowner's daughter except we don't use the word 'shag' oh no we're not vulgar like that Nigel Dempsey johnny" column called "Peterborough"? I mean, did Lord Hartwell's family come from there as well or something?

something hip was happening in peterborough c 1240.

i go through it on the train quite often, but i have never stopped there

When I was a kid, there was this TV ad campaign featuring Roy Kinnear dressed as a Roman encouraging ppl to relocate to Peterborough with a message at the end "Freefone x to find out more about the Peterborough Effect" (I think it was accompanied by a written message across the screen with the 'U' written as a 'V', I CLAVDIVS stylee, but that might be my memory playing tricks). I know it *did* feature Kinnear in his Roman garb going into a classroom and talking to the kids, he mentions London and one smartarse kid puts him right by saying "Londinium" - Kinnear points to him with his spear and says, "Oooh, very good".

You can date the time I was there cos (in an excruciating example of "hip teacher") I completed the sentence "dancing in the disco" (bumper to bumper) that a kid was repeating over and over in one of my lessons.

There is a sprawl of houses called the "Ortons" or something that I lived in for several weeks with a mad Star Trek fan landlady. just so you know.

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... the ad's pay off was 'Petriburghum' - which I suspect has little to do with any roman name for a town. I always thought it interesting that the marketing men thought jokes about Romans would attract thursting inward investment....

David - you live in David Lammy's constituency, do you not? (previously Bernie Grant's seat)

the cathedral looked wonderful in the late-period BTF film I alluded to upthread: I'm sure I'd find it magnificent of itself (I've never even thought of stopping loving cathedrals) but I do wonder how much of its resonance in my mind comes from the Westwood thing: like, that's when it became a part of my private cultural mythology, rather than just a cathedral.

did Andy Bell sing there as a child? I know he was a choirboy. I think that's why I always imagined Peterborough to be a total non-place when I was growing up, the "Andy and Vince" thing, and Vince Clarke's from Basildon, so ...

what is your book and what is it about?

Yes.

Peterborough cathedral certainly made an impression on me. The west front, as jon says, and a long, dark interior. I also remember sitting in the sun on a bench in the close somewhere. But I can remember almost nothing else about Peterborough except possibly the exterior of the municipal museum.

Dom: only a Northampton fan could say that :).

David: roughly when was your Peterborough experience? and who was the Tottenham MP before Bernie Grant? Norman someone, definitely (a Labour one obv)

Mid 1970s sometime

and who was the Tottenham MP before Bernie Grant?

I don't know. Grant was in for yonks wasn't he? I've only been
in the area for about five years.

Bernie Grant became the Tottenham MP in 1987 I think - somehow the name "Norman Jacobs" comes to mind for his predecessor, but it's probably a false memory. of course I'm the only person on this forum who cares about such things, unless we have a secret political anorak here ...

Well, not exactly, but at least be on parrallel lines (which as any fule kno, spin on).

All these satellite towns - Basildon, Basingstoke, Peterborough, Swindon - seemed to spend the 70s in schizophrenia: at once dumping grounds for unhousable cockney scum, English white trash; and aspiring to be some kind of Modernist American Suburban dream homeland. I wonder if Peterborough is the onlyt one to have much in the way of 'real' history: perhaps this is what made the admen decide this was to be it's USP.

Those white trash had kids who made good music. I love the Andy Bell and Westwood links (Peterborough/Slough the guy gets more Ali G by the second) but nowhere has yet produced a band who can talk about these places with the eloquence of an XTC.

Perhaps that's because Swindon has something on Peterborough on two counts: 1) it DOES have a history, only a more recent one, and the railway works is as good in its way as a cathedral; 2) wild ancient downland beats mad inbred fen anytime.

These two aspects of hte place are shot through XTC's music: are they perhaps the only band of all the 100s that have come from such places who actually sing about staying there, rather than doing everything they can musically and humanly to put the place behind them?

I'm glad a combination of Westwood and the cathedral got Peterborough under your skin. I feel similarly about Tricky and Bristol (both St Mary Redcliffe and the Cathedral) and have never understood why the connection isn't obvious to everyone.

I'm sure you're right about the use of Peterborough's history as a USP (it was officially the "Soke of Peterborough" until the local government reforms of 1965 which also created Greater London, a very Ealing / Boulting Brothers turn of phrase, if you get my point ... amazing to think that was only dropped three years before it became a new town).

actually it was having a very close personal friend from Peterborough (though he hasn't lived there for YEARS) that *really* cracked it and brought out the meaning in the other things I've mentioned in this thread: there's the way that Fairport Convention (one of this guy's favourite bands - that was in fact the thing that brought us together) played an early gig in Whittlesey outside P'boro in the year the town was designated a new town, the way Fairport embodied a progressive-left cultural movement which reacted strongly against Wilsonian suburbanisation and obsessive "newness", the fact that Harmar Nicholls' daughter Sue (yes, the one from Coronation Street) had a record in the charts that same summer while her father held on by three votes ...

Westwood Snr's official signature when bishop was "William Petriburgh", I believe, so maybe that *is* the Roman name for Peterborough. the elder Westwood was certainly one of the few bishops to still take the Tory whip in the House of Lords by c.1988: the erstwhile "Tory party at prayer" turned dramatically against Thatcherite monetarism while Maggie was citing the influence that a Methodist (supposedly "Christian socialist") upbringing had had on her economic theories. Bill Westwood, however, remained a good friend of Mrs T, so that's one of my key themes right there: just as Thatcher unwittingly unleashed a whole torrent of cultural influences which have contributed to the death of old Tory England, so the son of her favourite Anglican bishop became the crystallisation of this process (Tim only became nationally-known through Radio 1 after the station was *forced* to change its format and demographics when the Tories threatened to privatise it if it didn't distinguish itself from the commercial sector: had that not happened, TW might have remained a London phenomenon as he was on Capital Radio c.1987-94).

great post, robin - that westwood stuff is solid gold.

Recall reading (in Hosking's "The Making of the English Landscape"?) that the main line railway which made Peterborough prosperous in the (?) nineteenth century was to go through Stamford, but the good burghers of Stamford didn't want it (prosperous market town, no need for it etc etc). Given a different decision at that point, P'boro might have been the quaint relic and Stamford the larger regional centre.

towns like Stamford really could not foresee the extent to which they'd be overtaken as the main sources and generators of wealth during the Industrial Revolution, could they? this is on my mind because I just wrote a piece on the subject that two people in this thread should already have.

oddly enough, the man who jumped to the falsest conclusion about my taste (assuming that I'd hate Fairport Convention, presumably because he knew some of the other things I liked) actually did some of the technical work on Westwood's show at Capital in the early 90s, despite it hardly fitting into his own tastes. another paradox in a thread already brimming with them.

a classic example of Tory England being stabbed in the back and destroyed by its own children. it is to the Conservative movement what Gary Davies playing Frankie Goes To Hollywood would have been to the Labour movement of November 1984 (the same length of time after Thatcher's first victory as we've now had since Blair got in): the realities of its old heartlands as they are today which the movement, locked in its own private mythology and unable to transcend it, can't understand.

did Labour itself instigate the reinvention of its heartlands under Wilson in the way the Tories did under Thatcher? I suppose they *endorsed* it, at least, with the Beatles' MBEs.

Mind you, he then said on Saturday that there was "not a sprinkle" when he was DJing at the Stratford Rex late on Friday night, which I fear may be another Notting Hill '97 hypocrisy.

Westwood is as hot as ever, of course. and he's DJing in P'boro on Xmas Eve!