Where tourists seldom tread, part 2: five great UK towns left out of the guidebooks & More News Here

Cumbernauld

In the 1996 essay Tierra del Fuego – New York, French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard juxtaposes Ushuaïa with Manhattan. “After the ends of the earth, the centre of the earth,” he writes. “But each gives the impression of being on another planet.” The UK’s forgotten towns have an identical relationship with its celebrated, over-touristed ones. They copy big-city retail ideas however fall quick. They emulate vacationer honeypots however can’t ship the items. Many lesser-loved locations are botched simulacra of London, whereas additionally current in opposition to it – for the capital’s prosperity is rooted of their damaged goals, dashed hopes, spent retail and extinct companies. Scotland is the Tierra del Fuego of the UK and has many Ushuaïas. Ayr, Stranraer, Thurso and Montrose all qualify as “ends of the earth”. But Cumbernauld, extra even than these, has discovered itself the butt of nasty jokes, snidey mock-prizes, and common putdowns for half a century.

As a brand new city, it by no means garnered the ironic enchantment of Milton Keynes, and but its megastructure has a brash muscularity that knocks out the competitors.

Conceived in the Nineteen Fifties, it pretty claims to have the UK’s first procuring precinct and “the world’s first multi-level covered town centre”, however that is earmarked for demolition. Called the Alien’s Head by some, it divides the city much more than the motorway, the M80, which pierces its coronary heart, and was constructed “between 1972 and 2011”. Tourist boards would have us stroll round bosky Palacerigg nation park or the museum, which, in flip, factors guests out to the Antonine Wall – the turf fortification constructed by the Romans between the Firth of Forth and Firth of Clyde. But there isn’t any must take the bait.

If you need to wrap your self in the central belt – directly Scotland’s most populous and, for outsiders, the most forgotten, most passed-through, most cliche-free area of Burns’ “haggis” land – take a wander round the chilly concrete and cracked pavements of Cumbernauld.

Grantham

Lincolnshire is greatest outlined by lacks and absences. It has none of the barge-punting prettiness of East Anglia. It’s too far east to be in the East Midlands, too far south to be in the north. It is ostentatiously flat, Lincoln Cathedral’s grandeur in massive part because of the surrounding planitude. Grantham, too, is beguiling. On the Great North Road and East Coast mainline it’s nonetheless eminently ignorable, belonging to that swathe of passable and serviceable English towns (Aldershot, Colne, Kenilworth, Wokingham and many others) journey and leisure industries have shunned. But in the unending post-Thatcher period, all Britons ought to pay a ruminative go to to Grantham a lot as Chinese “red tourists” hit the Mao path. For right here lies a museum displaying the epoch-defining PM’s lumpy mattress, college hockey stick and replica of the rating of Handel’s Messiah, the Victorian Guildhall the place her dad was mayor in the Forties, and her birthplace at the nook of Broad Street and North Parade. It was, famously, her dad Alf Roberts’ grocer’s store, however later grew to become a restaurant (the menu included Chicken Supreme Margaret) and is now “a chiropractic clinic and holistic retreat” the place you possibly can have sizzling needles caught in you whereas mendacity precisely the place younger Maggie dreamed of monetarism, redundancy notices and sizzling dates with Adam Smith.

Take a purposeful stroll round the city’s ethereal centre, with its stable buildings and Isaac Newton statue, and also you sense Thatcher in all probability imagined Grantham a mannequin to copy throughout the nation. Does the city love its most well-known daughter? The plaque on the wall of the former grocer’s could be very small certainly. A 10ft plinth on St Peter’s Hill awaits a statue of the Iron Lady commissioned three years in the past. In February 2021, native sculptor Mark Robla gifted the city a plaster Maggie head on a spike produced from workplace chairs, erupting from a purse. The official effigy is scheduled to be unveiled later this 12 months. Stanley in the Falklands has had a bust of its saviour on present since 2015.

Leigh

Hard to find in Greater Manchester’s mega-sprawl and, as soon as discovered, nonetheless misplaced in time, Leigh exudes the specific unhappiness of once-proud pit towns. In 1828, the first passenger railway in Lancashire (take observe, Liverpool, Manchester) was laid between Bolton and Leigh; the city hasn’t had any trains since Beeching axed the final monitor in 1969. Leigh was annexed politically by Wigan in the 1974 boundary debacle. The once-mighty textile trade frayed a long time in the past (superb Spinners Mill is on Historic England’s Heritage at Risk register). Even rugby league is not any supply of consolation: Leigh Centurions have by no means managed to increase their sojourns in the Super League past a season. At first look, pedestrianised Bradshawgate seems like your standard post-Amazon excessive road, all downmarket/empty outlets in crumby postwar husks, however lookup and also you’ll see vestiges of late Victorian and Edwardian Leigh realised by native architectural hero James Caldwell Prestwich (1852-1940).

The grand, primarily redbrick edifices are in want of conservation, however Prestwich’s Leigh Friendly Co-operative constructing is daring and assured, whereas his baroque city corridor, with decorative cupola and stained-glass home windows representing the city’s industries, is a masterpiece. Inside the entrance is a museum the place you study Leigh people are often known as “lobby gobblers”, in reference to a stew made by lobbing something accessible right into a pot, and to tell apart them from the “pie eaters” of Wigan; that native heroes embody Ian McKellen and Georgie Fame; and that Tom Burke, a miner born in 1890, went on to have an inconceivable profession as an opera singer, met Puccini, carried out alongside Nellie Melba at Covent Garden, and was nicknamed the “Lancashire Caruso”.

Opposite the city corridor is the brutalist Turnpike Centre, AKA Leigh Library, inbuilt 1971 by the architectural agency of JC Prestwich & Sons, no much less. The massive, geometric aid, forged in concrete, is by William Mitchell, who offered summary adornments for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and Birmingham’s Quayside Tower. Leigh has a department of the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and a hyperlink to the Bridgewater Canal. Follow the latter’s towpath to the Lancashire Mining Museum at Astley Green, resting place of the final remaining winding equipment and headgear from the Lancashire Coalfield. Another, much-loved mining legacy is Pennington Flash, a small lagoon fashioned by subsidence; bream, perch, roach, rudd, tench, pike and some massive carp hang-out its seedy depths. Non-anglers can stretch their legs in the surrounding nation park.

Guildford

A Welsh hotelier as soon as informed me the key to promoting upmarket lodging was nailing the “Gee-you” market. I had no thought what he was speaking about until he defined that he was referring to the GU postcode. “More than half of our clients are from Guildford or near to it,” he stated. “They have the money and they are close to the motorway.” Flip the socio-economics and descend on a city slated by many as a dull-as-death dormitory. Guildford has the varieties of stuff you’d anticipate – citadel, museum, excessive road, SUVs. But extra stunning is Hinemihi, a wood Māori assembly home shipped right here from New Zealand’s North Island in 1892, and the stays of one of the oldest synagogues in western Europe – inbuilt 1180, and buried underneath the ground of Waterstones. The neo-gothic cathedral, gloomily austere, featured in the 1976 movie The Omen.

Guildford is beautifully effectively linked, with three main traces converging right here, specific companies to London (32 minutes, stopping as soon as at Woking), buses to Heathrow and a practice to Gatwick. Before the pandemic, there was a direct practice to Newcastle. The 153-mile North Downs Way, which has its jap excessive at close by Farnham, passes by way of Guildford on the previous Pilgrim’s Way. As GU-ers would anticipate, the slopes of the Surrey Hills AONB are at all times balmy and plenty of are clad in chardonnay vines.

Runcorn

For thousands and thousands of Lancastrians, Cestrians, Mancunians and suburban scousers, Runcorn is a logo of sunshine, freedom and hope. Since its erection in 1961, Runcorn Bridge (later formally renamed Silver Jubilee Bridge) was the solely approach to cross the River Mersey and Manchester Ship Canal to enter north Wales. From right here, the onward journey to Colwyn Bay, Rhyl and Llandudno was a hazy, joyful, heady blur, with even the jams on the previous A55 part of the enjoyable. The parallel railway bridge, a colorless, span-less affair, delivers a comparable hit to the car-less. Since 2017, the sweeping Mersey Gateway has given the estuarine location its personal Golden Gate. Cynics would possibly argue that each one this speak of transit is what Runcorn deserves, nevertheless it’s time beach-bound travellers pulled over to have a look round Runcorn. For there, in the shadow of the bridge, sit the remnants of the previous new city, envisioned by Arthur Ling in 1964, with state-of-the-art neighbourhoods like Castlefields, lauded at the time as “the future of sustainable living”, and modernist Southgate Estate, with its porthole home windows, designed by James Stirling.

Demolition has razed a lot of the utopian dream, however the reminiscence lingers in the maze of cul-de-sacs and bargain-basement Bauhaus-esque terraces. The 12-mile devoted Busway, with its “stations” and raised part at Shopping City (designed by Fred Roche, of Milton Keynes’ fame), might be toured on bus numbers 1 and a couple of. Runcorn’s burgermeisters have opted to date to checklist solely historic websites like Norton Priory (Grade 1) – well-known for its St Christopher statue – and 18th-century Bridgewater House (the duke’s pad whereas the canal linking Runcorn, Manchester and Leigh was underneath building). While these are venerable landmarks, the final remnants of the new city additionally deserve some type of safety. Footpaths alongside the canals and Weaver Navigation present escape routes out of Runcorn, however city geographers will desire to cross the bridge, trying out over the bird-beloved swirl of sandbanks and rivulets, climate and waves, that make the Runcorn Gap an ever-changing Turner masterpiece, earlier than plunging into Widnes, the chemical capital of Lancashire.

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