Despite
doing a PhD in Newcastle, and writing about the North-East, I still live in
Chester, a place I have frequented now, with some interruptions, for over ten
years. In September 2006, as a plucky eighteen-year-old, I first came to this
city; then in 2010, at the end of the taught portion of my MA, I moved back to
South Shields, only to return to Chester for work in November 2013.
It is
now November 2016 and much – and little – has changed. I have occupied six rented
properties across two delineated periods: four as an undergraduate and MA
student; two as a working professional/PhD student-come-freelancer.
The
relationship you have to a place necessarily shifts and evolves. This is what I
have been thinking about a lot, 15 months into being a student enrolled in an
institution which I am regularly at (weekly, at present) but on paper (and not
just for administrative purposes) am routinely 180 miles away from.
I’m
meant to be writing a paper on Basil Bunting for a symposium at Durham
University’s Institute of Advanced Study on Saturday 3rd December.
The weird thing – probably the weirdest
thing – about going into doctoral study after having done a few years of ‘real’
work, is that you are largely your own boss, colleague(s), tea-making
facilities, photocopier, diarist and teller of bad jokes and jeerer-on in times
of challenge. You can ‘skive’ and nobody will know, except you, and you better
damn believe that the walk you took this afternoon had some justification in
your research. Oh, hang on, are you making a brew? Milk, no sugar, please.
This
has nothing to do with Basil Bunting, the paper I’m meant to be delivering or
the poems I’m meant to be writing. But… no, maybe it does.
‘Jake
Campbell is a writer who divides his time between Tyneside and Chester’, I have
just written in a poetry submission. ‘His practice-based research at Newcastle
University is an investigation into the nature and identity of belonging in
England’s North-East.’
Can we
‘un-belong’ just as much as we ‘be-long’? I have thought about this nearly
constantly for at least the last year. Those of you who know me outside of the
internet will no doubt have been bored by my frequent comparison of Newcastle
(Tyneside) to Liverpool (Merseyside). For the last 18 months, travelling
between Chester and East Boldon or Tyne Dock (on the Tyne and Wear Metro), I
have emerged from Gateshead/Birkenhead (how serendipitous that both places
carry the ‘head’ suffix?) and been startled by how very alike the two vistas are.
Honestly, take the Merseyrail twenty minutes out of Liverpool, on the Wirral
Line, heading south to Chester, and the view back across to the skyline of
Liverpool will be staggeringly similar to that which you will witness when
travelling out of Newcastle City Centre east through Gateshead towards South
Tyneside. Nominally, this is to do with how the train tracks skirt the two
rivers in a fortuitous mirror-like simulacra; but I think it is also a result
of the cultural, industrial and socio-topographic foundations that both places
are built upon.
I woke
up in the middle of the night last night and I had no idea where I was.
Poet
John Kinsella has a forthcoming book on Displacement. Polysituatedness, according to the pre-blurb on Manchester
University Press’s website, ‘extends
John Kinsella’s theory of ‘international regionalism’ and posits new ways of
reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and
the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the
person occupies place.’ The book is not due
until January next year, but I’m sure that Kinsella would recognise what I mean
when I speak about ‘be-longing’ (with hyphen) and ‘un-belonging’ in not
strictly binary ways. How much do I ‘long’ to ‘be’ in South Shields (or
Chester) and how much is my not being there (being elsewhere) a symptom of
(cause of) my un-belonging?
People
– rightly – direct scorn at the super-rich buying up spaces in our cities and
towns only to spend a fortnight of the year there while pricing out of the
market the local, indigenous communities, often young people. From the Lake District
to Vancouver to London, these issues have been prevalent for some time, and in
some places – like Vancouver, who have put a 15% tax on foreign investors – a sense
of civic appropriateness is beginning to take a stand.
Fleetingly
in Shields and Chester, but nearly always transitory, to what extent are my interactions
with these urban locales meaningful? I pay council tax to Cheshire West and
Chester council (though, probably, I should receive a discount as I am a
full-time registered student) and my rent currently goes to a landlord (whom,
of course, I’ve never met) in another part of the city, via an agency. I buy
food, beer, clothes and other things here: coffee, books, train tickets, but I
don’t know my neighbours, no contractual obligation other than the one for my
rented flat keeps me here, and I am lucky if I now speak meaningfully with or
to anybody in the city who isn’t my
partner. I don’t use the italics as a plea for compassion or understanding: I
merely do so to highlight the fact of my displacement; what it engenders and
how, nodding to Kinsella, place(s) inhabit a person, and a person inhabits a
place(s) even when they are not there.
Walking
around this place I can feel like a ghost. Severed from most economic commitments
originating in the vicinity (incoming and outgoing); not answerable to any
vocational authority in the city or region; and apparently-‘free’ to utilise
the space of the city to my will, I am able to drift through various past
edifices of the once-much-more-significant parts of my life.
This
is exactly what I did this afternoon, as the sun began to sink over the river
Dee. The Dee, rising in Snowdonia, north Wales, winds its way to the Irish Sea
via Chester, holding this border city in a cupped embrace before dispensing
itself into banked-up mud flats adjacent to, were it not for the Wirral Peninsula,
that other great river: the Mersey. From the 14th Century, Chester
was an important port city, linking the North-West to Ireland and the
continent. However, the Dee began to silt up in the 18th Century
(despite the excavation of the ‘New Cut’, effectively a straight channel to aid
navigability) concurrently affording Liverpool, and the wider Mersey
conurbations, the fortunes (quite literally) to expand. Chester, meanwhile,
became, well, less developed. To the credit of historic and geophysical
circumstance, the city the visitor sees today is advantaged principally because
of its declining naval, marine and dockside infrastructure. This city, arbitrarily
part of the North-West, feels so
different to Liverpool, Manchester and, yes, Newcastle. Principally and superficially,
that is because it is much smaller, but the knock-on effect of its not having
had a prolonged industrial satellite, connected to its core riverbank, has
meant that in contemporary terms, the city feels much more like present-day
York, or even Oxford, Shrewsbury or other cities in the Midlands and South. No
doubt the Shropshire Union canal stemmed the flow, so to speak, of the Dee’s
misfortune, connecting the city – via North and Mid-Wales – to Birmingham and
Manchester and forming vital trade links with two of the country’s hotbeds
during the Industrial Revolution; but this is a place, I feel, where the
identity of the body politic – insofar as it is comprised of myriad layers of
affected meaning – is missing something, and that something is a historic
manufacturing and nautical base.
On
a visit to post-industrial Tyneside, or to use that clumsy portmanteau ‘NewcastleGateshead’,
no doubt coined to ‘Coin’ the Blairiband New City (of New Labour), tourists may
peripherally be aware that they are at the nucleus of a once-thriving place of
industry, but they are likely more interested in, and steered towards, the new
consumer-based norms of the Pitcher and Piano wine bar, or the Malmaison Hotel,
or the Sage concert hall—all of them, and there are others, sites of spectacle
and consumption: of alcohol, music, leisure. There is a reason Newcastle is
such a magnet for Hen and Stag do’s: its watering holes are numerous, its
hotels are ample and reasonably-priced, and at the back of it all, one can
imagine oneself slaking the type of thirst that could only have been generated
hammering rivets onto ships as the hoarfrost hung over the filthy river and the
mercury plummeted below zero.
Needless
to say, taking a stroll even a mile or two to the west or east, the scars of industry
become much more stark, the money dries up and it – as Brexit has shown –
becomes clear that maybe the task of replacing monolithic industry with haphazard
service jobs hasn’t quite worked. I don’t wish to speak for much further west
of the Tyne than Dunston Staithes, itself an interesting vestige of the Tyne’s
prior might, but I do know the east of our beloved regional ‘capital’ very
intimately. Take the right-angled bend around the river, to where Wallsend is
in a staring match with Hebburn, and you will get an impression of what I mean.
Travel a few miles further, to the Port of Tyne (yes, to be fair, it’s doing
very well) it will become pretty evident that, while industry is still here to
some limited degree, the deliberate conversion of waterside activity from
production to consumption hasn’t at all been a balanced and smooth process. I
am from a time and place where all but the vestiges of this industry remain,
but even now, looking out over the mouth of the Tyne from the Lawe Top in South
Shields or from the High Light in North Shields, it is possible to feel connected
to the rhythms of work and commerce: where the Shields ferry carries commuters;
where the DFDS ferry carries holidaymakers; where ships carry Nissans for the
export market and coal and tea for further processing and distribution; and
where, more philosophically, the ocean meets the river, England meets Europe,
and in the intertidal and littoral zones, we become acutely aware of the ebb
and flow of all life.
But
we’re back in the North-East and I don’t think we were supposed to be. Are we?
My writings about Chester are conspicuous for their absence. Bearing in mind
that this place has dominated the majority of my adult life, it is strange that
I have written so little about it. I am curious about that. Does perspective –
distance – give meaning to place? Do we find symbolism, pattern and connection
only from afar, or can we look for it in
situ?
My
role in Theresa May’s economy may well become more marginalised as the teeth of
Brexit begin to sharpen. I hope that this will not become the case – that writing,
the arts and academic research and curation remain valued as means of interrogating,
exposing and challenging Who We Are And Why We’re Here (And Not There) – but,
in a system clinging not by the fingers but I suspect only the fingernails, to
the thermodynamically limited idea of perpetual economic growth, people who
walk around cities at 3 in the afternoon and don’t even stop to buy a bloody
coffee you cheeky git are likely to become ostracised and pushed to the
margins. Or, so the case might go in one of Peter Frase’s Four Futures.
When,
on my walk this afternoon, I reached the point where the Shropshire Union Canal
expels into the Dee, and turned onto it to begin my home stretch, I was shocked
not by the sheer physicality of the new student flats, which have been under
construction for around a year, but by the massive marketing slogan draped over
their nearly-finished outline.
‘THE
TOWPATH: LOVE YOUR UNI YEARS’, beamed the marketing guff, in stark white on
red. The word ‘fresh’ appears somewhat arbitrarily (one assumes a newly-built
flat would not be stale) and there is of course direction to the adjacent
marketing suite. Told to love (or do) anything, we tend to question the
motivation and instruction. As it happens, I did and do love my uni years. I’m
still in them, after all, but how should I feel – and here I am imagining that
these flats were completed in the early part of 2006, on one of my visits to an
open day at Chester – about being sold rhetoric which implores me to ‘love’ my
uni years? Are not the years already slipping by before I have had time to
consciously enjoy them?
For
those not familiar with the site, let me briefly explain a) the controversy and
b) the personal significance. The controversy is the same to be found in any
university city: namely, a town and gown tension, exemplified by a burgeoning
Higher Education sector; the ‘intrusion’ or ‘studentification’ of city spaces
(usually but not always on the peripheries) at the expense of local and
long-term residents; and the collusion of a private sector set to profit monumentally
from often shoddily assembled buildings which will perpetually be rented to transitory
residents, for short-term gains over a long-term timescale. Liverpool has these
problems, Newcastle has these problems, Cambridge has these problems. It also
has the benefits and, in a city like Chester, these are often overlooked. Before
the early 2000s, there probably wasn’t what we would today describe as a ‘brain-drain’
in Chester, but certainly the University was far less developed (it was still a
college of Liverpool, for a start) and places like Manchester, Leeds and
Birmingham were probably much more appealing to the would-be student. I have
nothing other than lived experience and anecdotal evidence on which to stake my
claims, but take it as a fairly sound (if biased) thing of me to say that the
University being here has made this a far better place to live.
You
will have noticed that the b) personal significance of The Towpath development
was implied towards the end of my last paragraph, but let me tell a short
anecdote to add context. On the bottom right of that picture is the beer garden
and part of the building of my favourite bar in probably the world or at least
the city of Chester: Telford’s Warehouse. Named in honour of the
Shropshire-born industrial pioneer responsible for much Great and Good work on
the UK canal network in the 19th Century, the pub has been a staple
part of my social and personal life for around a decade. About two hundred
yards from where this photo was taken, on Whipcord Lane, my partner lived for
three years as an undergraduate, and we would regularly take a short walk from
the terraced house she shared along the canal to Telford’s, to sip pints of
bitter and listen to people strum acoustic guitars (and, on one memorable
occasion, a fifty-piece orchestra) at the bar’s still-going-strong open-mic
night. This is the place I took my family for sandwiches and beer before and
after graduation and it is the place where I have vomited after doing too many
tequila slammers and the place where I have had foosball tournaments and
planned the future and drank to absent friends and made new ones. One of my
mates from home even once drove from Newcastle, to Chester, on a whim because
there was especially pleasant guest ale on.
Now,
you assume that I will tell you what has become synonymous with so many of
these stories of gentrification: that the bar is under threat. In fact, no:
actually, the opposite is true. Purchased outright by the owners this year,
Telford’s, should it choose to embrace them and offer student deals while
keeping true to its roots as a community pub for residents of the Garden
Quarter, stands to be the new local of a several-hundred-strong army of
freshers. People like me, ten years ago, and ten years later.
The
way water courses rise and fall, whether over days or centuries, in line with
tidal pull, pollution and other environmental and human-based factors, has
always fascinated me. Strolling beside the Dee and the Shropshire Union canal
today, I had in mind the thought that my connection to this place would seem to
be ebbing. With no ‘work’ here and no other reason to stay than my partner’s
job, it might be the case that, just as in 2010, we soon leave this walled
city, with its views over to Wales. There is beauty here: of a traditionally
British kind, yes – all Tudor buildings, lazy river cruises with high tea and
compact cathedrals – and it is probably a beauty borne of historical,
geographic and cultural happenstance. It is different to what I know
intimately, in the North-East, and I don’t sit in places like Telford’s
anywhere near as often as I ought anymore, but the student flats opposite are I
think tied into that: they speak of a new generation of incomers (and some
locals): people who will be paying a huge deal more than me, to study and live
here, and who, maybe, might be from other riversides, and who might, in 2026,
walk down by the Dee and think about what has flown away, passed on; and also
what has remained, silted and shored up, safe, secure, permanent.
