The town I loved so well (or maybe not)

Two aspects of mythic nostalgia, a combination of ‘young fogey’ attachment to echoes of old styles and the idea that our pursuit of economic betterment came at the cost of solidarity and community

There is a certain sort of slightly maudlin song that harks back to a remembered past, glimpsing it through the rosy spectacles of nostalgia. The song referenced in the headline is one such song, one overlaid with that sentiment for the past that the Irish do so well. 

In my memory, I will always see

The town that I have loved so well

Where our school played ball by the gas yard wall

And they laughed through the smoke and the smell

Going home in the rain, running up the dark lane

Past the jail, and down behind the fountain

Those were happy days in so many, many ways

In the town I loved so well

Phil Coulter wrote the song about his hometown of Derry. Or, if you aren’t a Republican, Londonderry. I don’t plan on getting into the politics of the song (or indeed the names, suffice it to say it is contested) but rather to look at how this sort of maudlin remembrance of a lost past affects our sense of place and our identity with a place. Whether it is the Dubliners singing Pete St John’s song about how the grey unyielding concrete made a city of his town or Bradfordians sharing postcards of Ivegate filled with smartly dressed folk queuing for pies, many places are more imagined than real.

It doesn’t take much effort to find people who will tell you how much better their place was in the old days. Finding someone who will tell you their place is better now are far fewer. In part, certainly for northern towns and cities like Bradford, Oldham and Gateshead, this is a statement of simple truth, these towns are not better than they were in those ‘good old days’. But it also leads to a belief that, if only we rebuilt what was lost, those good times would return.

Although cities like Bradford were once prosperous, this nostalgia for what once was creates a troubling mythology of place. Bradford city centre declined because Stanley Wardley knocked down Swan Arcade and Kirkgate Market and replaced them with that ‘grey unyielding concrete’. In this mythology, therefore, if we rebuild those glorious buildings then the city will once again fill with smartly dressed, well-to-do people going about their work, shopping and business. Council leaders and managers know this isn’t true but, because they too are infected with nostalgia, end up playing games of sympathetic magic with regeneration money.

The other sort of nostalgia, which we see starkly in Phil Coulter’s song, is the idea that there was something more to love about a place of grinding poverty with no male employment, raging sectarianism and incipient violence. There is a lot of myth-making about old times of working class solidarity, Ewan McColl’s ‘Dirty Old Town’ or Kate Rusby singing Iris DeMent’s ‘Our Town’. We remember the past selectively so they were ‘happy days in so many many ways’ because we forget the days with no dinner, the ill health, the cold and the dirt. I remember a conversation with my brothers about Sunday suppers. We waxed lyrical about hostess supper, corn beef hash and bacon flan, only for our Mum to interject with ‘you know what all those meals have in common?’. We enquired and mum said ‘they were cheap and you haven’t mentioned the times when all we had was a head of celery’.

These two aspects of mythic nostalgia have become a recurring theme on the right of politics. There is a combination of a ‘young fogey’ attachment to echoes of old styles and the idea that our pursuit of economic betterment came at the cost of solidarity and community. Free markets, liberalism and globalism all conspired to destroy those working class communities and the institutions that emerged from them. Gung ho modernism gave us Pete St John’s ‘grey unyielding concrete’ because economics is only interested in the cost of things, not their value. Working men’s clubs, bowls teams, brass bands and pub sports withered away because men were too busy about economic betterment to have time for such frivolities. Nobody mentions TV, central heating and the affordability of sofas as factors in this decline because that doesn’t fit with the myth of remembering.

The central problem for conservatives who embrace nostalgia as a policy tool is that those good old days were just as much the creation of market-driven economic betterment as the terrible modernist things they despise. The great buildings of Bradford were there because the city got rich from international trade and commerce, from liberal economics. The City’s Wool Exchange, now a book shop, contains a huge clue as to where Bradford’s great and good saw the source of their wealth, a statue of MP and free trade campaigner, Richard Cobden. Those working class communities full of solidarity, chapels and cricket teams existed because liberal economics and free markets provided stable jobs. You cannot draw artificial lines across the direction of human history simply to validate your mythic nostalgia. Yet that is what too many conservatives want to do.

We hark back to communities that were communities of choice not mere reflections of there being a community in a given place. And we pretend that the process of economic betterment necessarily involves the collapse of community institutions and social capital. Yet there is no lack of communities, just that such voluntary groups are no longer constrained by geography. Opposing ‘globalism’ in the hope that doing so will result in the return of a geographically bounded community seems, in the age of social media and the Internet, a fool’s mission. Especially since this implies rejecting what Richard Cobden campaigned for and what made Bradford rich. The working class men and women of the 1950s weren’t content with their community, they wanted cars, TVs, better clothes and warmer homes. Living in a rented through-by-light terrace with four rooms and an outside midden was not a good life when they could see the manager with his new Austin A30 and hear about his back boiler providing hot water and heated radiators.

Wallowing in an imagined past results in policies that damage the prospects for the very people we want to help, for the left behind, the somewheres. Today the places most rich in community are relatively wealthy places. To some extent this is because such places have a lot of retired and part-retired, time rich people but it is also because the people there have money. If you went to Saltaire 50 years ago knowing the place as it is today, you would be shocked at its poverty and decrepitude. But with its World Heritage Status came investment and the interest of the better off resulting in it becoming a desirable little town filled with community and buzzing with activity. Without the second part of this equation, better off people, there would have been no transformation: successful regeneration requires residents and visitors with money.

Looking more widely, the only way to transform places is through economic betterment. And the best way to get that betterment is with free market, open trade capitalism (or ‘liberalism’ as too many conservatives, adopting a US-style pejorative, call it). We can use regeneration funding to create the illusion of betterment, a new building here, some cobbled streets there, but if the people remain relatively poor then all we have is just that, an illusion. In England very little power rests with communities, with towns and cities - what little devolution we have is mostly fake merely creating overhyped satrapies lorded over by elected mayors making big noises. The old Bradford everyone wants back wasn't made by men in Whitehall let alone by planners, it was made by business, by trade and by capitalism. Perhaps, instead of being nostalgic for lost working class communities and once busy city centres, we should be nostalgic for the opportunities of free markets. Perhaps what conservatives should wish to restore is the free market liberalism that gave us those great communities and bustling towns in the first place?