Kirkenes, Finnmark, Norway, November 2018 - The Norwegian far north

In customary understanding about the Second World War, at least in Britain, the northernmost part of Scandinavia does not feature much, if at all.  In my own family history we do have some recognition of it – an uncle of mine served on the merchant navy vessels making up the convoys supplying the Soviet forces via Murmansk and Arkhangelsk and was, I believe, torpedoed and rescued from the sea.  Those convoys had some of the highest mortality rates for any personnel involved in the war anywhere.

I have just been in Kirkenes, one of the most north-easterly towns of Norway.  Kirkenes suffered the second worst bombardment of any place in Europe, after Malta.  By the end of the war only 13 houses were left intact.  And around Kirkenes, in all the other towns of Finnmark, there were similar levels of destruction – through the initial Nazi occupation in 1941, through shelling and bombing as those occupying forces defended themselves against Allied attacks (from both the Western and the Soviet allies), and as a result of the scorched earth policy whereby as the Nazi occupiers retreated they destroyed all property in sight.  Earlier the sea inlets of this area had been crucial to the Nazis as hiding places for their naval vessels tasked with attacking the Allied convoys – they had sheltered the Tirpitz and the Scharnhorst battleships, for example.  And airfields had been of similar use to the Luftwaffe.  The details of the Lapland War and the Petsamo-Kirkenes Offensive which drove the Nazi forces out of northern Finland and northern Norway are complex, but the liberation of Kirkenes by Soviet forces finally took place in October 1944 after three years of what must have been a local hell.  This morning I visited the Soviet War memorial, in a residential neighbourhood of the town, and found it festooned with large wreaths, presumably placed there on the anniversary last month.

The Soviet War Memorial

But Kirkenes seems to me a fascinating place for more reasons than its wartime history.  I have visited as part of a Hurtigruten coastal voyage – on board the daily ferry that travels up from Bergen and back calling at innumerable small ports on the way.  I talked to a French fellow passenger in the town centre who commented on the ‘atmosphère spéciale’ of the town, and I agree with him.

It has been an overcast morning with solid ice on all of the pavements and on most of the side roads, but grit had been spread on many surfaces to improve walkers’ and vehicles’ grip.  I met an older woman pushing what appeared to be a zimmer frame, with attached basket, in front of her but as she passed I realised that it was actually mounted on skis.  Every occupied house had lights shining in every window, so that whole residential areas twinkled brightly in the gloom of an early November day.   The annual 50 or so days with no sun will start later in the month.   

Norwegian-registered cars slowed to a crawl as they passed pedestrians making their way along the edge of the main road, but some cars carried on at their normal speed and I quickly noticed that these were Russian vehicles that have come through the only land border between Norway and Russia which lies only 15 kilometres or so away to the east.   It is curious to reflect that although Kirkenes was liberated by Soviet forces in 1944, throughout the Cold War it stood as a front-line town where NATO (of which Norway was a founding member) confronted the USSR: if at any time Soviet forces had wished to invade a NATO power the quickest way to have symbolically done so would have been through Kirkenes.  Today, in the post-Cold War era, 10 per cent of the town’s population are Russians.

I went into a busy café where Elvis Presley's In The Ghetto was playing on the radio.  The young woman serving was happy to talk.  She was born in Kirkenes and had never lived anywhere else – and nor did she want to.   Many young adults who move away come back, she said.   Despite the proximity of Russia – and the fact that local Norwegian identity card holders can cross the border without securing a visa first – she had never done so.  A week or two ago I was in Oslo and when the receptionist in my hotel there heard I was going to Kirkenes he sighed and said how much he’d like to go back, having worked there for a year.

So why does Kirkenes have such a special draw, and a distinctive atmosphere?  In part it’s because it’s the last stop in democratic, liberal and modern Norway.  But there are a number of other North Norwegian towns that can similarly claim to be at the end of the road – Hammerfest claims to be the most northerly town in Europe, although vying for that distinction with Honningsvåg (much depends on the definition of a town), Vardø is the most easterly town in Norway: I have visited all these places on my trip.

But to its geographical distinction Kirkenes adds the special Norwegian flavour of a thriving and supported settlement, despite its small size and its isolation.  Serving a town population of around 4,000, and a wider local area of at most 10,000 souls, are a modern public library, sports pitches and indoor gymnasia and a sports centre, a swimming pool, schools for all levels, a hospital, a theatre and cinema.  As I explored the town, public buses were strongly in evidence, traversing small back roads amongst the wooden-framed houses, all of them rebuilt since the destruction of the town during the war.   The population remaining by 1946 had been largely evacuated to Harstad, much further south in the Vesterålen Islands, for two years while their town was rebuilt: ironically they were housed there in a former Nazi prisoner-of-war camp for Soviet captives.  

Housing in Kirkenes

I was amazed not just at the number of shops but also at their quality – clothes shops that would grace any middle-class high street, shoe shops with a massive range of merchandise (although majoring on boots at this time of the year), a bookshop and stationers, two indoor shopping malls, motor dealers (with snowmobiles as their principal offering at the moment).  There seemed to be more wool on sale than in most places (a possible occupation through the winter months?), and as throughout Northern Norwegian towns there seemed an over-provision of hairdressers that I find difficult to explain. The range of retailing (market driven) and of public facilities in Kirkenes puts to shame what is available in many other places five times its size in other parts of Europe.  So, why is the town (and others like it in the area) so vibrant?

High class shopping

Since 1990 the Norwegian county of Finnmark has been given special tax status with lower rates for residents – such that a four person household might benefit to the tune of 100,000 krone per year (or about 9,000 UK pounds) over residents of other parts of the country.  That clearly helps household expenditure levels, and from the estate agencies windows (most housed within savings banks) I looked at in Kirkenes, housing costs are not particularly high.  But on the public sector side, Norway takes both an egalitarian and a social democratic view – that it is the state’s responsibility to ensure that inequalities within the country are reduced, including inequalities between regions, and that the provision of many basic services should be determined by the state and not by the market.  Two Americans on the boat were arguing with one of the crew last night when they heard about this – accusing Norway in no uncertain terms of being ‘socialist’ or even, in one heated moment, ‘Marxist’.  But this has been the Scandinavian way ever since the Second World War.  The aim to reduce disparities, and to do so through government intervention, is at the heart of much Scandinavian political ideology.  And it is worth pointing out that Norway is one of the richest countries in Europe – 3^rdafter Luxembourg and Switzerland in GDP per capita in 2017.  OECD data for the same year show that Norway, along with Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Finland all have much lower levels of income inequality than countries with lower levels of public expenditure such as Germany, the UK or the USA – or than the other two wealthiest European states, Luxembourg and Switzerland.

Norway has made very sensible use of its oil and gas income (which amount in the average year to around one-sixth of the economy) by creating a sovereign wealth fund.  And this enables that egalitarian ideology to extend to accessibility – in a country made up of mountains, high plateaux, and innumerable inhabited islands.  Amazing numbers of bridges, and even undersea tunnels, have been created in recent years to link even small settlements into the national communications system.  I have seen major new bridges reaching out to islands with only 200 people.

So the atmosphere of Kirkenes is inflected by a number of influences, both geographical (its position near the Russian border) and through Norwegian public policies.  Even isolated towns in the far north can offer a high standard of living to their inhabitants, and can retain young people who in other countries and other situations would almost certainly have headed for the bright(er) lights of a big city.  It truly is a rather special place, one of the northernmost towns on this planet, with a distinct and tragic history – but with a future that looks sustainable and, as long as Norway’s social democratic ideology remains in place, well assured.

Belleville, Paris, France, September 2018 - The old, the memories, and the new

There is a little bit of Belleville in many people’s image of traditional Paris – even for those who have never been there or even heard of this district in the eastern part of the French capital.  The songs of Edith Piaf and Maurice Chevalier, the close-knit community life of a working-class French neighbourhood, the black and white photographs of many of the most respected French photographers of the past, the alleys and stairways that form the setting for Albert Lamorisse’s well-known film ‘The Red Balloon’(Le Ballon Rouge) – all of these contribute to the image of a traditional Parisian quartier of labourers and artisans.  And there is much truth in these elements.  Legend says that Piaf was born on the pavement of the rue de Belleville; Chevalier originated from the next-door district of Ménilmontant; the photographers Atget and Ronis made many prints of Belleville scenes; and in ‘The Red Balloon’ the eponymous object is first found tied to railings on the steps of rue Vilin, linking lower with upper Belleville.  In many censuses over a long period of time Belleville was, of all the 80 quartiers of Paris, the one in which the greatest proportion of the residents had been born within the capital city: it was the most Parisian of Paris districts.

I first got to know Belleville in the 1980s.  In the 1990s I supervised an outstanding PhD thesis by Juliet Carpenter on this (and one other) district.  And more recently I have examined doctoral theses on the neighbourhood for two different Paris universities.  I have lost count of the number of times I have strolled through the district.  I last visited two years ago, and I have just been back again.

When I first visited Belleville it was in the throes of upheaval.  The nineteenth century tenement and cottage properties had been poorly maintained and the district had some of the poorest housing conditions in the city.  Major plans were being put into place for large-scale urban renewal, involving the demolition of vast swathes of sub-standard housing and its replacement by various forms of tower blocks.  Some were already in place by the time of my first visit, but the dominant impression I have from the mid 1980s is of a level of dereliction and slum clearance that I have scarcely ever witnessed elsewhere.

I find considerable interest in the pattern of redevelopment in Belleville over a 40 year period.  In my own home city of Sheffield streets and slum houses were cleared away to create the Hyde Park and Park Hill estates on completely new patterns of ground occupancy.  In Newcastle the little terrace houses running down to the Tyne that I remember as a child were bulldozed to create the Byker Wall, reorientating the street pattern completely.  Many residential areas of the East End of London were similarly reorientated during reconstruction after wartime bombing: the same was true in Le Havre in France (although less so in the equally-badly-destroyed Rotterdam in the Netherlands).  But the Belleville street pattern today is in many respects identical to that shown in my late 1960s Paris street directory.  By and large, reconstruction has occurred within the street blocks that were first created in the mid nineteenth century.

But redevelopment is not just about street patterns and buildings.  It is also about the people who occupy the properties.  Have the original residents all been displaced, with newcomers of a different social class replacing them?  Certainly in the 1980s the worst housing in Belleville was occupied by the poorest Parisians: has reconstruction changed that?  And from the 1960s onwards Belleville became an immigrant area – is that still true?

One of the most dramatic changes in the neighbourhood was the creation of a park on the steepest slopes where previously lay the steps of rue Vilin made famous in Le Ballon Rouge.  The park was being created by the time I first visited Belleville and it was formally opened in 1987 and has been extended since then.  But, and here is a first indicator of sympathetic improvement, rue Vilin’s steps and cobbles have been replaced by a staircase running up the park on exactly the same line.  At the top, instead of emerging onto rue Piat between two dismal houses, there is now a fine viewpoint over the terraced grass and the trees and beyond to much of the rest of Paris.  The Eiffel Tower, the Montparnasse Tower, and most of the major tourist sights of the city are visible – but there are no tourists enjoying the view.  This is not a neighbourhood that is on the tourist map.

The Parc de Belleville: the steps follow the line of rue Vilin (see text)

My purpose in visiting Belleville today has been to compare some photographs I took with a colleague here in the mind 1980s with the same scenes today.  And I am with the same colleague.  The changes have been profound in many areas – but elements of the old Belleville are still recognisable.  The new housing is not entirely out of scale with what it replaced, and some of it is social housing so it is still available for the less well-off in society.  We show some pictures to two teachers outside the infants school that has replaced a row of small shops and they are fascinated by the images of what was there before – but the street pattern is still recognisable and a small public square has been created opposite their school.  But we also observe that a 40-year process of urban renewal is not yet complete, and that even today some buildings are boarded up waiting for action, and a map consulted during a later visit to the planning archive shows that the greatest concentration of renewal projects in the whole of Paris still occurs in Belleville.

 

The same scene in 1984 and 2018 - Impasse des Gênes

 

1984 (left) and 2018 (right).  The building on the left in 2018 is an infants school

Renovation still taking place

But what of the people living here?  The Ashkenazi synagogue in rue Pali-Kao is still there – although the detachment of machine-gun-toting military police guarding it is off-putting.  We are actually here on Yom Kippur (the Jewish New Year festival) and Jewish sites in Paris have been subject to attack in recent years.  And as in the 1980s, there is still a visible Jewish presence in the streets but combined with the North African community that arrived in the post-war period. There seem to be fewer Asian shops and restaurants on rue de Belleville than I recall, but they are still certainly present.  Juliet Carpenter characterised Belleville as in part an immigrant space, and that is still true.  And when I was here in 2016, during a hot day in August, the hundreds of people sun-bathing or resting in the park were a cross-section of the multicultural populations of Paris – but including more well-dressed, apparently middle-class, white Parisians than I would have expected thirty years ago. The park may not be on tourist maps but it certainly features strongly in the lives of local people. 

Apart from the park, and the replacement housing and public facilities, the other new elements in the Belleville landscape since the 1980s are artists’ studios.  Potters, sculptors, artists in various materials, and others in what are often termed the ‘creative industries’ are important elements in urban change everywhere today.  But I also know from Juliet Carpenter’s thesis about the role that such people have played in leading resistance to the city’s more grandiose plans for total reconstruction in the neighbourhood.   The city scaled back a number of its plans and the result is a more human-scale environment.

The market along the central traffic intersection of the boulevard de Belleville is in full swing, and the same sorts of stalls are present as years ago, with fruit and vegetables predominant alongside clothing, other foodstuffs, and hardware of various household kinds.  But next to Belleville metro we come across petty street trading with individual sellers offering odd shoes, a few wrapped pizzas in a box, old radios and clocks and other miscellaneous items.   Languages other than French are predominant, and the poverty of both the sellers and those interested in purchasing indicates that the poor have not been driven out of Belleville completely by redevelopment.

Petty street trading on boulevard de Belleville

After our exploration of new Belleville we enter a small café looking out on the market.  It is dark inside and above the bar a sign proclaims ‘Cocktail of the week: Bellini’ as it probably has for several years.  We are served by a friendly man, probably of French West Indian origin. At the next table are a middle-aged white couple who leave soon after we arrive.  Near the bar a couple of men are reading newspapers.  Opposite us is a fluid group of older men, clearly daily visitors, of a variety of different ethnic origins: arrivals and departures are frequent. They banter with the waiter, and with a young woman in a striking blue dress who comes in to deliver a box of patisseries to a man at the counter who takes it through to a back room.  This is clearly a café des habitués,but the waiter has made us welcome despite our outsider status.

And then a strange thing happens.  One of the old men starts distractedly humming to himself the tune and then the words of Piaf’s ‘Je ne regrette rien’ but substituting the normal rhyme for that line with something I can’t quite catch but which involves eating a banana ( … mange une banane).  Such an adaptation of one of the most famous French songs, forever associated with Piaf and Belleville, seems appropriate for the evolution of the district: a history that has been transformed but not erased.

Brienz, Switzerland, August 2018 - Before and after the 2005 disaster, and Al Gore's views

Some years ago I was privileged to attend one of Al Gore’s ‘presentations’ of his film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.  It was a great occasion.  He started with a number of sharp jokes about his failure to become US President in the year of the ‘hanging chad’ election, but then went on to outline his powerful case about climate change with the aid of a multimedia extravaganza with pictures, graphics, video, sound and everything that modern technology could offer at the time. (The film was made in 2006 before virtual and augmented reality came into use).  Part way through the film I was amazed to see footage of a devastating flood in a Swiss village that I know well – Brienz – which had clearly not been reported in the UK press.

I am in Brienz now, on holiday, and today is the 13^th anniversary of that event on 22 August 2005.  On that day a massive rainfall event in the Bernese Oberland created huge surges of water laden with rocks and tree trunks on the two mountain streams that disgorge into Lake Brienz via the village – the Trachtbach and the Glyssibach.  Houses were destroyed, two people were drowned, and the main streets of the village were rendered impassable because of mud.  The volume of water flowing down the streams emptying into Lake Brienz  resulted in the lake level rising; and with high winds whipping up waves, the lake-front promenade was destroyed.  At the other end of the lake Interlaken Ost station – one the major rail interchanges of Switzerland – was flooded up to platform level.

I was briefly in Brienz in the late summer of 2006, by which time the reconstruction of the promenade along the lake was well under way, but I was unaware of why there had been a need for such work.  I was here again in 2015.  But it has been on my current visit that I have been most impressed by the Swiss engineering response to the 2005 events.  The main road bridge over the Trachtbach used to lie low over the stream, and it was the restricted flow under this bridge that caused it to act as a dam with water, rocks and tree trunks flowing over it and into the houses and roads on either side.  The replacement bridge is an ingenious affair sitting on concrete pillars that project 20 metres lake-wards: if a torrent threatens then the whole bridge can be shifted sideways towards the lake, opening up a larger void underneath.  At the same time a 2 metre high concrete barrier has been built on both sides of the Trachtbach gulley to channel the flow. Other major works have been carried out at the bridge crossing the Glyssibach, including similar 2-metre walls, but here a large holding reservoir has also been created upstream to manage the flow.  Properties damaged or destroyed in the 2005 flood have been reconstructed: the Steinbock hotel next to the Trachtbach bridge displays both its original construction date of 1787 and a prominent message celebrating its reconstruction in 2006 ‘after the storm of 22 August 2005’ (my translation).

Concrete 'slider' for the Trachtbach bridge

The Steinbock hotel, rebuilt after the 2005 flood

I first visited Brienz in 1986 and I have come back many times since, staying in at least three of the village’s hotels and also renting chalets.  It is not one of Switzerland’s most renowned holiday destinations but I like it more than any other.  With a population of around 3000, it is not entirely dependent on tourism: it is also the centre of the Swiss wood-carving industry, with a major training school and a number of craftsmen producing the most intricate, and expensive, carvings imaginable of everything from Christmas cribs to traditional chalets, local animals to avant garde abstracts.  In 2016 I told a Maori craftsman in Rotorua in New Zealand that I knew the main village in Switzerland for woodcarving and without hearing more he held up his tools and said ‘We get these from Brienz’.  The village is twinned with the main woodcarving centre in Bulgaria.  Several shops along Brienz’s village street are dedicated to local wooden products. 

But the biggest of these was severely damaged in the 2005 flood, losing all its stock.  I talked yesterday to the woman who now runs the coffee bar that serves the small museum and showroom that has replaced it, with a bank now taking up the largest part of the original building.  She said that after the flood the carvers who had worked in the premises set up workshops in their own homes.  And during the period when the village was recovering the coaches that used to call for tourists to buy carvings and souvenirs stopped coming.  (I suspect that the opening of a new fast road on the other side of the lake may also have contributed to the change in coach routings).  To my respondent, the village now felt a very different place. And I noticed that a couple of erstwhile souvenir shops on the other side of the road are now closed.  It could be argued that the severe storm of 2005 continues to have a negative effect on Brienz.

So why do I still like the village so much?  Well, it has almost the same accessibility to great local scenic attractions as Interlaken at the other end of the lake, but is still a village rather than a major urban place. It is the meeting point for lake steamers, the railway from Interlaken to Luzern, buses to various outlying villages and the Swiss Open-Air Museum (consisting of historic farmhouses moved here from all over the country), and the old steam-powered rack railway up the Brienzer Rothorn.  There is a free ‘animal park’, created in the late nineteenth century to provide live models for the woodcarvers to work from.  And there are footpaths in the fields above the village as well as a reconstructed lakeshore promenade bedecked with wood-carvings and children’s amusements.   The tourist clientele has changed somewhat since I first came. Fifteen or so years ago the Hotel Bären in the centre of the village was rebranded as an ‘Ayuvedra’ centre offering Indian therapies and treatments, and it now also has a ‘Ganesha’ shop selling Indian goods.  When I first came to this area in the 1980s I was surprised to see how prevalent Japanese visitors were in some parts of the Bernese Oberland, particularly in Grindelwald where many menus had been translated into their language.  More recently (in May 2015) I blogged about Indian visitors in the area, and they have certainly been encouraged by developments such as those at the Hotel Bären.  So change in Brienz has partly come about through globalising trends in tourist markets and not just through the 2005 disaster.

The village of Brienz from the train to the Brienzer Rothorn

The evidence of climatic change is incontrovertible.  But I’m not sure that Al Gore’s use of the Brienz flood of 2005 as an example is justified as showing something entirely new.  This alpine area is one that has always experienced extreme events and continues to do so.  On 26 December 1999 storm ‘Lothar’ brought down vast numbers of trees in the region - particularly on the slopes above Wilderswil.  In July of the same year a flash flood in the Saxeten Gorge south of Interlaken swept away  and drowned 21 young holidaymakers who had been canyoning there.  But these are not new and unique disasters.  Today, on the wall of the Weisses Kreuz hotel in Brienz, I came across an old plaque commemorating the disaster caused by a previous flooding of the Trachtbach stream – in 1870.  

Vienna, Austria, August 2018 - From backwater to world city

I first came to Vienna in September 1984 as part of a conference that had started in Munich and moved on to the Austrian capital for a second set of papers.  In those Cold War days Austria was still neutral, its independence from international alliances still guaranteed by the four post-war occupying powers – the USSR, the United States, France and the United Kingdom – despite the fact that the Russians had unexpectedly pulled out of the country in 1955 and allowed it to be reunited as a single and independent state. West Germany was, of course, a crucial bastion for the ‘Free World’ against the ‘Communist East’.  To the 25 or so conference participants in Munich were added a further 15 when we got to Vienna – academics from East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and so on who were not allowed by their governments to travel to West Germany but for whom Austria was an acceptable academic destination.

Vienna in 1984 was a very strange city.  Its population within the city boundaries was 1.5 millions at the time of the 1981 census, and 2 millions lived within the wider Viennese urban region.  Austria as a whole counted 7.6 million inhabitants, so over a quarter of its population lived in the capital city region.  And that 2 million total had remained static since 1951.  In the other city region of our conference – Munich – the population had more than doubled between 1951 and 1981 from 1.1 millions to 2.3 millions. One of the reasons I was invited to the conference was to translate into English a chapter written by the two organisers, comparing the two cities.

Vienna was a city cut off from its hinterland.  This had been partly so since the dismemberment of the Austro- Hungarian Empire after the First World War.  But isolation was hugely enhanced with the creation of the Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe in the later 1940s which meant that the eastern regions of Austria formed a bulge of 180 miles into the Iron Curtain.  Vienna lay 25 miles from the edge of Czechoslovakia and 35 miles from Hungary.  Borders were fortified and defended from the eastern side.  The only land routes into Vienna were via the rest of Austria lying well to the west of the city.

In 1984 the city seemed almost dead after dark.  One night several of us from the conference went out to a heuriger wine house in a village on the outskirts and had to get a taxi back because public transport ceased at 11. On Kärtnerstraße, in some ways the main street of the city, there was only one café open after 9.  Tourists were few in number.  Vienna was a city that had little of the animation of a capital – although its cultural symbols such as the Opera House were being kept going with major state subsidies.  The big popular music hit in Austria that summer was a song attacking Vienna and praising life in the Austrian countryside.

My next visits to Vienna were in 1992 and 1994 – the first for a conference and the second as part of a family holiday.  The city had already been transformed.  Czechoslovakians (this was before the ‘Velvet Divorce’), Hungarians, Bulgarians, Poles and even Russians made up large numbers at the 1992 conference on mass migration in the ‘New Europe’ (as it was then being called).  The Iron Curtain had gone, to be replaced by much freer movement.  Vienna had regained its role as a capital – perhaps the capital – of Central Europe.  The official language of that 1992 conference was supposed to be English – the unifying language for this new world. But I wondered for a while whether we would actually see German supplant English as the new lingua franca: many more of our new colleagues from the former Communist world spoke German at that time than spoke English.  However, that moment passed as schools in the East took up English teaching as the first foreign language.

By 1994 Vienna was back on the tourist map of Europe.  Cafés and bars were open until late; the wide street bearing the name ‘Graben’ was lined with restaurants and tourist shops; Café Central, the premier old-style coffee-house of the city, was being frequented by tourists (although not without disapproving looks from long-standing customers). I particularly recall large groups of Italian visitors, noisily following their guides, who seemed to dominate the new arrivals.

Twenty-four years passed before my current visit to Vienna. Again this has primarily been for work – to meet a colleague to discuss a book proposal.  The population of the urban region has grown once more – to 2.6 millions – after that long period of stagnation.  This actually now amounts to 30 per cent of Austria’s population – but the old feeling that here was a head that was too big for its body has gone.  Vienna is now in some ways back at the centre of its old world – of the cities of Central and Eastern Europe only Warsaw is bigger.  But Vienna has extended its reach much more: it is now a world city (with its United Nations functions and those of the Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries: OPEC), and it is a world tourist destination.

I have heard languages from all parts of the globe here, and many I can’t place.  Chinese tourists seem to have become the dominant groups – often looking with interest at my colleague who, I joke, seems to be the only Chinese person travelling independently. But there are also many groups of women from the Middle East dressed in chadors or at the least with hijabs.  Café Central has a long queue of what would previously have been seen as inappropriately-dressed tourists waiting outside on a Sunday afternoon.  Kärnterstraße is thronged with people at all hours of day and night.  Much of the area inside the Ringstraße is now given over to a combination of high status retail and everyday tourism.  The museums and palaces are thronged with people, with queuing systems set up.  There seem to be many more horse-drawn vehicles (Fiaker) for sightseeing excursions than twenty years ago, and the smell of horses permeates the streets around the Hofburg.

But beyond the Ringstraße, out towards Heiligenstadt to the north, or in the Landstraße district to the south-east (except around the Hundertwasserhaus which has become a major attraction) the side streets still seem as sleepy as they did in 1984.  Ordinary Vienna is still there: it has just been overlaid with world city functions once again.

On Saturday my colleague and I took a crowded train for the hour’s journey to Bratislava – another city that has been transformed, this time into a capital city.  Like Vienna, the town centre was busy with tourists and leisure activities.  Our train crossed the Morava River, now a site for fishing but once a defended frontier with gun emplacements and barbed wire.  We returned to Vienna from a smaller Bratislava station on the southern side of the Danube – Petržalka – along a line that once constituted the border between Western and Eastern Europe and which was consequently torn up during the period of the Iron Curtain.  Neither my Chinese colleague nor I could have crossed these borders when I first came to Vienna in 1984.  She has benefited from the opening up of China under Deng Xiaoping.  We have both also benefited from the end of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain in Europe – and so has Vienna.

Whitby, North Yorkshire, May 2018 - From fish to Goths

The following two sentences caught my eye in a recent (18 April 2018) review by James Hall in the Times Literary Supplement:

        

         “We all make our mental maps in which the continents of our own cultural interests expand and contract, surface and sink over the course of our lives. For porcelain lovers, China may loom largest; for film buffs, Hollywood; for mountaineers, the Himalayas; for shoe fetishists, Milan; for whisky drinkers, Scotland; for carpet dealers, Persia; for Goths, Whitby.” [emphasis added by me]

I have known Whitby since I was tiny.  An aunt and her husband lived there with their three sons, my cousins, who were quite close to me in age.  As they grew up they all married local girls and settled in Whitby or nearby.  My uncle had an extended family in the town, and through repeated visits over many summers I knew them well too.  I have been in Whitby in all seasons of the year: at regatta time in the summer when the town pulsed with the rivalry of the two rowing clubs – the Friendship  (of which one of my cousins, to my great pride, was stroke in the winning boat) and the Fisherlads; in September, when the herring boats from every port down the east coast used to moor three deep along the quay; in April, when the seagulls’ cries seem particularly mournful over the quiet streets with the smoke of the coal fires gently descending as the town waits for its first summer visitors; and even between Christmas and 1 January – the dog days of the year when I drove over the moors on a bleak day with a fierce east wind blowing to attend my aunt’s funeral.

My first memories of Whitby are of the prefab bungalow my aunt and her family lived in, having moved back in from Runswick Bay where they had lived during the war as a result of bomb damage in Whitby.  When I was about 6 they moved into a narrow Victorian house close to the garage owned by my uncle and his father.  We spent family holidays there, and later, as a student, I would hitch-hike up from London to sketch or to walk the moors and the cliff paths. Later we brought our own children here, renting a little house on the East Cliff, a few yards from Fortune’s kippering shed where, if my aunt’s name was mentioned, especially large fish were found and sold at the standard price.  I still go back to Whitby from time to time, even though my aunt, uncle and two of my cousins are no longer alive and the third cousin lives ‘out of town’ in Sleights, up river.

What images does Whitby conjure in my mind?  I have already mentioned the herring fleet, and I guess that in the fifties and sixties a significant proportion of the population was dependent, directly or indirectly, on the fishing industry.  That has now dwindled to no more than a dozen boats, several suitable for nothing more than in-shore fishing.  There were a number of garages in and around the town and my uncle, owner of one of them, seemed to make a good existence out of rescuing cars that had failed to get up Lythe Bank or Blue Bank – 1 in 4 hills a little out of town that once caused radiators to boil.  Today that trade has gone – in a modern car I can drive up Lythe Bank in third gear.  A number of those in the extended family worked in shops, but many of these seem now to have become cafés or fish and chip shops (I am always amazed at holidaymakers’ propensities to eat fish and chips at any conceivable time of day – 10 in the morning, 3 in the afternoon, 11 at night).  And today the big supermarkets are there on the edge of town, near the bypass that crosses the Esk Valley on a high bridge and does away with the long queues of traffic there used to be to cross the swing bridge that links the two halves of the town.  Local people now complain about the difficulty of finding anywhere to park in the town because of the throng of visitors in season.

What else does Whitby conjure up to me?  Coach trips arriving from Newcastle, Sunderland and Tees-side; steam trains pulling in to Whitby Town station; me racing round the town with a cousin in regatta week trying to match the number in our programme with a number in a window display and thus win a prize (we never did); donkeys on the beach; the fog horn (known colloquially as the ‘Hawsker Bull’); the 199 steps leading up to the church and the abbey; the bustle of the fish quay in the mornings, with lorries waiting to take the catch away to Tyneside or the West Riding or even further south; the distinctive Whitby accent – a trace of Scandinavian intonation that I later came across when I first went to Denmark; cakes from Botham’s in Skinner Street where a cousin’s wife worked; and the pubs – seemingly dozens of them.  A local resident told me there were more pubs per head in Whitby than anywhere else in England – but I suspect that claim has been made for many places. Oh – and the fashions and taste of the young people: I once came on a geography field trip from London and my fellow sixth formers were amazed that people of our age seemed to be dressed in the styles of five years beforehand, and the juke boxes majored on songs from the same past period. I was used to it from my frequent visits.

But Whitby as a place for Goths?  Never.  It wasn’t until the early 1980s, in my recollection, that Whitby started to recognise and celebrate its role in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as the place where the creature first arrived from a shipwreck in the harbour, bounding up the 199 steps in the shape of a huge dog.  The Dracula Experience opened on the quayside where previously all the commerce had related to fishing.  Ghost tours were started – with a need to invent ghost stories as well since here, as in most places offering such experiences, there was nothing authentic to offer.  And then progressively, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one caught a glimpse of people dressed completely in black walking through the streets of the town.  I suppose this was the start of the Goth interest. 

Now, twice a year, Whitby hosts a ‘Goth Weekend’ (‘WGW’) – in April and October.  Its history goes back to a first event in 1994.  Whitby was felt to be a place that was accommodating to strange happenings.  And after a little further research, brought on by the quotation from the TLS that I started this blog with, I realise there are intersections between Gothic Whitby and my family.  (Is ‘Gothic’ an appropriate adjective here?  Surely it normally applies to architecture?)  My aunt occasionally helped out in the local pub when there was a rush on – she lived only two doors away and they would send for her.  She never admitted her role to her teetotal mother (my grandmother): she would say she was serving lemonade.  Two of my cousins did oil painting as a hobby – one while he was not on the bridge of the ocean-going ship of which he was the captain.  Some of their paintings hung in the pub where my aunt helped out.  That pub was the Elsinore, where the first Whitby Goth Weekends took place and which is apparently still the centre of the action: my aunt may have served the first revellers – she didn’t die until 1997. My surviving sea-captain cousin is now married to one of the daughters of the landlady of that period.  Just along Silver Street from the pub, the showroom of my uncle’s garage is now ‘The Great Goth’  - a clothing store for the well-dressed Goth (presumably, like Henry Ford’s choice of cars, in any shade as long as it’s black).

Many small fishing ports around the coasts of England have had to reinvent themselves or face decline.  Some have succeeded, others haven’t.  Wikipedia claims that Whitby Goth Weekend contributes £1.1 million to the town’s economy.  I hadn’t previously realised how significant has been Whitby’s reinvention as the capital of ‘Goth-dom’.