Ledbury, Herefordshire, December 2016 - An ideal exemplar of a small English town

I have been in discussion with a Chinese colleague about attitudes to cities, suburbs and villages in our two countries.  We have talked about Sheffield and Shanghai, London and Beijing, the shikumen of Chinese cities and working class housing in the industrial north of England, villages in the Peak District and in the Chinese provinces.  We have talked about the role of the elite, both in culture and in economic structures.  We have contrasted the more organic development of urbanisation and the economy in England with the discontinuities of Chinese history – not just the 1949 transformation, the Cultural Revolution, and the development of capitalism under Deng Xiaoping but also the earlier historic shocks to the system with the replacement of one dynasty by another.

This has led me to consider what might be seen as archetypal English cities, suburbs, villages or towns.  I obviously acknowledge that there are significant differences between England’s various regions, dependent in part on local economic foundations and activities.  But I have alighted on one particular small town that I would put forward as an exemplar of what such a settlement in England is today – at its best.  So my example is not necessarily ‘typical’: it is more like an ‘ideal-type’ as developed by the sociologist Max Weber.  But this is a real town, so I will briefly describe it as it is, rather than for what it represents.

I was in Ledbury earlier this month, repeating visits that I make several times a year.  Many people, told which county it is in, mistakenly hear Hertfordshire in place of the correct Herefordshire: one letter of difference goes with over 100 miles of separation and a shift from the suburban Home Counties around London to the rural fringe of England as one approaches Wales.  Ledbury actually has a direct train service to London – around 5 (rather slow) trains each way a day along a very beautiful line through Malvern, Worcester, Evesham, the Cotswolds, and Oxford.  But it is not a place that features strongly in most people’s mental maps of England, nor on their satnavs (the M50 passes a few miles to the south).

The town had just under 10,000 inhabitants at the time of the 2011 census, having grown rather rapidly in the previous couple of decades to fill in the space up to the bypass built in the 1990s.  There seems to me now a danger that it will grow across the road that currently circumscribes the town.  A recent threat of the construction of an out-of-town supermarket has been thwarted by local activists.  One distinctive feature of Ledbury, resulting from the compactness of the town, is that every able-bodied resident can walk to the main shopping street in less than 15 minutes.

So what is it about Ledbury that makes it such an exemplar of an English small town?  Clearly a lot of its employment lies in servicing the surrounding area – with shops, agricultural suppliers, pubs and restaurants.  But there is also a variety of small-scale industrial employment in light engineering, various manufactured products, and in agricultural processing (a jam factory, and a few miles down the road, a cider works).  November 2016 data show that the unemployment rate in Ledbury (as in Herefordshire as a whole) is well below the national average.  But some of the local activities have resulted in recent immigration – particularly from Lithuania and Poland for work related to agriculture.  In my view this has actually brought some welcome diversity to what was until recently a very white English town.  Walk through the Market Place and up the Homend (its continuation) on a Saturday morning and one will now hear various Eastern European languages, and find products more commonly seen in Vilnius, Warsaw or Wroclaw for sale at a market stall.

Which brings us to the variety of shops in the town – a choice of butchers and greengrocers, two bookshops, a cider shop (perhaps inevitable here), more than one ironmongers, a gunsmith.  And a number of market stalls under the medieval market hall on a Saturday.  Tesco’s is there but tucked away near the station at the northern end of the town.  And for those prepared to go from shop to shop everything sold in the supermarket is also available in the town centre.  Mention of the butchers needs supplementing with a comment on the range of meat in a window a couple of weeks ago – including venison, pheasant, partridge and rabbit as well as the more everyday cuts of lamb, beef, pork and chicken.

Although not so well known, Ledbury rightly attracts its share of tourists – both as day visitors and to stay.  They probably help support the two bookshops, and they certainly frequent the design and craft shops in the town.  And the cafés in the cobbled Church Lane (a path that often appears as a calendar illustration), as well as the Feathers Hotel (a magnificent half-timbered Elizabethan structure) must depend on visitors for a significant proportion of their trade – although when I occasionally eat in the Feathers I find that there are numbers of local residents dining there as well.

And there are educational and cultural attractions to the town.  The poet John Masefield was born here, as was Elizabeth Barrett Browning – and hence the town has created an annual poetry festival. The secondary school is also named after Masefield.

This may all sound as if I am trying to ‘sell’ Ledbury.  But I am not being employed by any public relations consultant for that purpose.  Whilst Ledbury today seems to me an excellent place to live and to visit, there are clearly risks for the future of the town as a balanced organic whole – as also for similar places throughout England.

That balance of economic activities could shift, in particular away from what is still a strong local agricultural base and towards the increased importance of tourism.  Any future restriction, post-Brexit, on the recruitment of Eastern European labour, could weaken the more intensive aspects of the agricultural sector – particularly given the fact that there isn’t a local pool of unemployment to be mopped up.  And while tourism and visitor activities today complement locally-orientated service demand, were tourism to grow too rapidly it could lead to the supplanting of shops serving everyday needs.  That could also result from successful planning applications to construct more town-edge retail facilities (particularly supermarkets).   Further urban growth beyond the by-pass could encourage more car use which the town centre could not cope with. 

The British planning system does not give any agency strong enough powers to guard against these various eventualities.  Some of these forces lie with private sector interests, others with the weak responsibilities of the local council.  That is a contrast with China.  When I have asked my Chinese colleague about why various things are happening in small towns and villages across China her answer is always the same – “the government is making it happen.” 

Will Ledbury still be a place that I would recommend in ten years time to foreign scholars or visitors as an archetypal English small town?  I don’t know, but I hope so.

Waitangi Treaty Grounds, New Zealand, and Hong Kong, October 2016 - The sins of the past

The singer Lily Allen has recently been in trouble with the populist press in the UK for apologising for her country’s behaviour and attitudes young refugees in the ‘Jungle’ camp at Calais – recently dismantled.  I have likewise had the feeling that I should apologise in a similar way to some of those I have met of late.  But the difference is that Lily Allen was apologising for things that the UK is doing now: I felt like apologising for things done by my country in the past – and quite a long time in the past at that.

Whilst travelling in the  Far East and Australasia recently I have come up against the history of Britain’s dealings with the Maori peoples of New Zealand, and of Britain’s relations with China over Hong Kong.  Whilst in New Zealand I visited Waitangi, the site of the Treaty of 1840 that brought the land of the Maoris under British control, and I also learned more about the relationships through visiting museums in Auckland (an excellent and even-handed account), Rotorua and Wellington.  In Hong Kong what knowledge I already had of the history of the old British Crown Colony was supplemented by a visit to the Hong Kong Museum of History in Chatham Road South, Kowloon.

The events I felt like apologising for took place in the 1840s, and there is a remarkable coincidence of dates.  The Treaty of Waitangi with the Maoris was signed in February 1840.  Less than a year later the Convention of Chuenpi was concluded with the Qing Dynasty, leading to the cession of Hong Kong to Britain the following year as a Crown Colony. Both these treaties were signed during the period when Lord Melbourne was Prime Minister back in London – a man normally seen as something of a liberal reformist (for example through his reductions in the number of offences carrying capital punishment, or his reforms of local government).

Yet to today’s eyes Britain’s actions in New Zealand and Hong Kong in the 1840s  look distasteful.   Versions of the Waitangi Treaty were signed in both English and Maori, yet there are important differences in wording between them.  Was this just a problem of translation at a time when the two languages had only been in contact for around 70 years, or was there an intention to deceive?   There were certainly differences between Maori and British understandings of what land ownership meant, and different views on the meaning of the English word ‘authority’ in the Treaty, with the British view being that the Maori had put themselves under the authority of the British crown, whilst the Maori felt they had entered into an equal partnership.  There followed massive transfers of land from the Maori to the Pākehā (whites), often for derisory sums of money via what was in effect a compulsory purchase order.  The ramifications of the Treaty and its ensuing relationships are still being played out, as the Auckland Museum made particularly clear, with legal structures in place to adjudicate on claims and to right some of the wrongs done in the decades following the Treaty.

Yet the depiction of the Waitangi Treaty in various places still seems to me to play down its negative consequences.  A number of references to it concentrate on celebrating the Queen’s presence at the 150^th anniversary celebrations in 1990, which was actually the occasion of protests by Maori (not depicted in museum exhibits). 

But perhaps I don’t need to apologise for the actions of my country in New Zealand back in 1840.  The Queen has already done it.  In an unprecedented move the Queen in 1995 issued an apology to the Maori peoples for injustices they had suffered as a result of the Waitangi Treaty – the only known occasion when the British crown has ever said sorry.

The story of Britain in Hong Kong at the same period as the Waitangi Treaty is perhaps even worse.  China was selling large quantities of goods to the west, but China was self-sufficient and bought little in return.  So the British tried to force China to buy opium from the East India Company: when this was rejected by the Chinese Emperor Britain launched the First Opium War to enforce the trade.  The War was only concluded by the hand-over of Hong Kong to the British as a trading base.  Late nineteenth century English fiction depicted the depravity of opium-taking Chinese settlers in London and other ports, but it was British interests that had encouraged the habit amongst the Chinese population at large, doing untold damage to health and social relations.  There followed a Second Opium War between 1856 and 1860 when the British (and other western powers) declared that China was not opening up quickly enough to the opium trade controlled by Britain.  These are unsavoury episodes in British imperial history that I think are not very well known in the UK, and which don’t feature greatly in textbooks of the period. But those that do cover these events match closely in their interpretation with the exhibits and the narrative of the Hong Kong Museum of History.

There is a repeating element in the story of the west’s attitudes to China in the 1840s.  Today, just as then, there is a massive trade imbalance with China with the country exporting very much more than she buys from outside.  In the single month of August 2016 alone China had a USD 52 billion surplus on external trade.  What can China now be persuaded to buy from elsewhere (other than the foodstuffs and raw materials that constitute its biggest imports – and with many of the materials being processed for export as manufactured goods)?

Should we now apologise to China for the Opium Wars?  In one obvious sense yes, but in another way the fact that Hong Kong remained a British crown colony until 1997 provided a haven for refugees from China after the 1949 Revolution and has continued to act even now as something of a fulcrum between China and the West.  Certainly there was a difficult colonial history up until the Second World War of racism, the sexual exploitation of women, gambling and drug taking, but more recently Hong Kong has played a more benevolent role on the global stage – albeit with some of its freedoms now threatened by the China of which it is now a part.

So I won't apologise to those standing around me in the museums of New Zealand and Hong Kong who come from Maori or Chinese backgrounds.  But I would love to get inside their heads and understand what they are thinking as they read about the British actions of the 1840s, and examine related exhibits.   As the French proverb has it – perhaps it is just a case of autres temps, autres mœurs (other times, other standards).  Or perhaps L.P. Hartley had it right at the start of his 1953 novel The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”  But does everyone recognise that attitudes can change?

Christchurch, New Zealand, and Hong Kong, October 2016 - Natural disasters

Even as sophisticated as human societies have become, and as unsparing in their pressure on the environment, there are occasions when nature ‘strikes back’ in some way, with significant or even drastic consequences – even in the most advanced cities.

Over the past six weeks I’ve been in a series of towns and cities where everyday life has been forcibly stopped – or where it could be (again) at some time in the future.  I have been in San Francisco with its stories of the effects of the 1906 earthquake.  I have been in Napier in New Zealand where the 1931 earthquake led to the city’s reconstruction producing an almost-perfect art deco town.  I have been in Auckland which sits on a volcanic field that is by no means extinct.

But the two places I have recently visited and which are the main subjects of this blog are Christchurch in New Zealand − which suffered devastating earthquakes in September 2010 and February 2011 and where aftershocks have continued ever since – and Hong Kong.  The latter may seem surprising as it suffers neither earthquakes nor volcanoes.  But a few days ago I witnessed the city coming to a standstill because of a typhoon – a different type of potential natural disaster.

Visiting Christchurch, while staying with a knowledgeable local friend, was sobering and thought-provoking.  The two principal quakes a few months apart and lasting together at most two minutes brought the city centre down, and much of it remains down over 5 years later.  Liquefaction caused considerable damage in the eastern suburbs, such that large areas of housing have been cleared and now look like parkland with trees that once stood on the borders of house punctuating grassland.  But in many parts of the city the housing withstood the quakes and could be repaired – but this was housing largely built in wood.   It was constructions in more ‘sophisticated’ materials – brick, concrete and stone – that didn’t ‘give’ to the same extent and which either collapsed or were so badly damaged that they have had to be pulled down: some (such as a major wing of the main hospital) are still awaiting demolition, whilst in other areas, such as part of the High Street, decisions are still awaited on whether renovation and reconstruction is possible on some buildings.

Hence there is a curious doughnut structure to Christchurch today.  Drive through the suburbs and there is now little to see to reflect the earthquakes.  But when one gets to the city centre every vista includes vacant plots of land, or buildings which while still standing are unusable, and everywhere there is fencing shutting off areas of danger or building sites.

Why not abandon the site and move elsewhere?  There is just too much investment in a city of 360,000 people to uproot it and rebuild – and anyway whereabouts in New Zealand, sitting as it does on the boundaries of two great tectonic plates, is going to be safer?  The resilience of the people has been impressive, and they are taking pride in watching their city re-emerge – tinged with regret at missed opportunities.  I was taken to a café, named ‘C1’, which was one of the first businesses to be re-established, and clearly that fact has given it a firm following among local people, of all ages, who filled every table on a wet Sunday when much of the rest of the city centre was deserted.  The total cost of rebuilding Christchurch has risen considerably and now stands at NZD 40 billion (£23.4 billion at 2016 prices) and it is going to be some time before it is completed. 

But what happened in Napier, in the North Island of New Zealand, in the 1930s will not be repeated here.  Where Napier now has its uniform art deco style, Christchurch already has a patchwork of new building in the city centre in a variety of styles.  To me one of the most memorable buildings is actually the Transitional Cathedral, designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, built in cardboard, wood and glass and opened in 2013.  In my view it should be retained as a permanent feature of the city.  And it sits close to the site of the building where the greatest number of fatalities occurred in 2011, and near a (so far unofficial) monument consisting of one white chair for every person who died across the whole city.  This I found very poignant and moving.

So in what way is Christchurch’s experience of earthquakes comparable to a typhoon in Hong Kong?  For a start, the typhoon brought the city to a standstill.  But a typhoon can be forecast when an earthquake can’t be (at present).  Everything was ordered, with a warning the evening before and the confirmation of a complete shut down shortly after 6 the following morning.  Hong Kongers know what to do – to stay indoors, not to go out driving, and to keep in touch via radio and television.  I was staying in a hotel opening into a shopping mall where every shop bar one remained closed all day (although a Starbucks did open) and from where I could walk on enclosed walkway-bridges across roads and into other malls which were equally deserted. 

One of the most amazing things was to see Queensway, normally thronged with buses, cars and trams at almost any time of day, completely deserted at noon.

Ultimately the typhoon – one of the latest in the year to be experienced for over 30 years – passed some was to the east of the city.  But trees were uprooted and 1 person died when they were swept into the sea by a giant wave.  There was little damage.

But the cost of lost business that single day was being estimated the following morning by a local economist as HKD 5 billion, or over £530 million.  That is probably an under-estimate.

Sophisticated and modern metropolises can still be at the mercy of various forces of nature. Steps can be taken to reduce risk – such as building codes to strengthen properties.  But in the most severe instances there is little that can be done to protect human life or activities.

While I was writing this news came in of the earthquake in Norcia, in Umbria in Italy, which has destroyed the basilica of San Benedetto – the patron saint of Europe. (I hope there is nothing too symbolic in that.)  I know Norcia well, having visited the town twice on holiday. Last time I was there, a couple of years ago, I sat opposite that basilica eating an evening meal outside on a warm summer’s evening while a group of children on a summer camp were taken through a series of competitive activities by helpers, the children skidding across the polished marble paving of the square.  One of yesterday’s television images of a narrow alleyway strewn with stone that had fallen from the surrounding buildings was filmed from the spot where I once sat and painted a watercolour.  I guess the fountain where I washed my brushes has not survived.

Visiting Christchurch and Hong Kong over the last few weeks (and remembering my visits to Norcia), I am struck by the thought that human societies are not really as powerful as they think they are.  Nature can still take us by surprise and do so very strongly.

Balmain, Sydney, Australia, September 2016 - ANZAC memorials

Halfway between the park and the Town Hall in the Sydney suburb of Balmain there is a rough stone monument bearing the word ‘Gallipoli’.  On each of its faces there are names, not in the most formal of lettering, but obviously heartfelt.  This is probably the oldest ANZAC memorial in Australia - erected as a result of public subscription and private philanthropy and unveiled on 23 April 2016, two days before what would have been the first anniversary of the invasion at the Dardanelles in Turkey.  ANZAC (Australia and New Zealand Army Corps) Day is celebrated on 25^th April, commemorating the intial landing of 100 years ago this year.  ANZAC Day and the Dardanelles invasion is to Australia and New Zealand what the first day of the Somme battle (1^st July 1916) is in Britain.

Balmain in 1916 was a working class suburb of Sydney, with many of its men employed in port industries.  Yet the numbers who volunteered to sign up were considerable, probably several hundred out of an eligible male population of no more than 5000, and the number who never returned must have tragically changed the atmosphere of community life.  Today’s Balmain is gentrified, with rows of cafés, with boutique shops and wine merchants, and with the houses on the way up from the Balmain East ferry terminal providing a substantial cross-section of historic housing from the late Victorian period.  It is hard today to connect the district with the Turkish campaign of the First World War.

But that is true throughout Australia and New Zealand, where I have spent the last month.  Memorials seem more plentiful and more visible here than they are in many parts of the UK.  They are in very public places where they will be seen by everyone, and they are well maintained.  In Akiroa on the Banks Peninsula near Christchurch in New Zealand one of the most substantial restoration tasks undertaken after the 2011 earthquake was of the cenotaph – itself a mini version of the Scott Memorial in Edinburgh’s Princes Street.  And in Queenstown, New Zealand, the Dardanelles memorial is a gateway on the lake shore that everyone taking a walk would normally pass through – and this is unusual in bearing the names of those who went off to fight and came back as well as those who did not.

Serving in a war has been a defining moment in the lives of many people – men and women – who were called up.  It certainly was for my father who spent three years on the Japanese front in India and Burma.  And it was for my next door neighbour as a child – an Englishman who had served at the Dardanelles and who still bore the mental scars.  But historians tell us that the First World War was a defining moment in wider national consciousness in Australia and New Zealand – perhaps particularly in Australia which had only become a single united country within the lifetimes of those who made the long sea journey to Europe to fight.

What did those men think they were fighting for?  Gallipoli and the Dardanelles campaign were always a sideshow to the main western and eastern fronts, and a sideshow that resulted in the evacuation of those fighting the Turks who themselves were in the process of national reaffirmation leading to the ending of the Ottoman Empire and who were victorious against the Australian, New Zealand, British and other forces.  Why travel half way round the world from the shipyards of Balmain, the sheep farms of Akiroa, the small-town trades of Queenstown to fight in a campaign that few could explain and that was essentially futile in hindsight?

But the memory is not of why the men went, but of the fact that they went at all – and that many never returned from an invasion that had one of the highest casualty rates of the war.  There is surely much greater clarity about what Australian and New Zealand men and women were fighting for in the Second World War – both in the Pacific and in Europe – but it is the First War that counts more in public consciousness.

On Armistice Day – 11 November – last year I also happened to be in Australia, travelling the ‘Great Ocean Road’ between Adelaide and Melbourne.  As 11 o’clock approached I was at the ‘Twelve Apostles’ lookout over the series of rock stacks that are one of the most photographed features of the route.  A big group of teenagers with their teachers was also visiting.  And at 11, under the uncomprehending and un-noticing gaze of a wealth of tourists of all nationalities, they stood absolutely still and observed the two minutes silence.  It was an emotional moment, watching them.  I wasn’t there, but I guess there was a similar ceremony going on in Balmain, in Akiroa, in Queenstown, in Woodville, in Russell and in all the other places where I have seen memorials on my recent trip.