On small town life

In 2003 The Idler penned a book called Crap Towns. Its mission to seek out and destroy – by the medium of satirical prose – such bastions of banality, mundanity, misery and execrable architecture as Basingstoke, Morecambe, Hull, and Milton Keynes. Somehow they missed the particular Crap Town that figured in my life for 18 years, that still lurks at the edge of my solar system – occupying an orbit which boomerangs it back at me at least once a year (typically at Christmas).

Newtown sounds innocuous enough, with that Ronseal ring. But of course it’s not actually new anymore. Nor does its name enable you to categorically pinpoint it on a map. Wikipedia lists 19 Newtowns in the UK – give or take a couple of double-barrelled cousins. To be specific I’m talking about Y Drenewydd, that’s Welsh for Newtown – since Newtown is ‘Saesneg’.

Yet it hardly matters where you stick the pin: Newtown is just like any other small town – a place where the unremarkable nature of it all is exactly what’s wrong.

The new-town name may be ill-fitting but it’s strangely apt – a badge to a lost past; a historical marker, with increasingly sarcastic undertones, pointing to Newtown’s inner disconnect: its abject failure to begin again, to rekindle the newness where it all apparently began.

The Official Newtown website claims its market-town pedigree stretches back to 1279 – commerce the gathered knot pulling in a diaspora of sheep farmers as a weaver draws thread. A cottage industry of wool weavers begat woollen mills which dipped their wheels in the River Severn – industrious jewels in the crown of the town that carried local folk through the winter months when land lay locked up under an icy floor.

Now there’s a Chippy at the top of town. Beyond it the narrow mill workers’ cottages still stand, cheek-by-jowl, creeping Sisyphus-like up the hill – home to college students, hopefully just passing through, or first-time buyers doing time on the bottom rung. Three floors high, barely a room apiece, their first ever residents must have lodged right on top of each other like knots on a string.

Newtown’s newer additions – a constellation of housing estates spreading over the hills which encircle the market-street, river-threaded heart of the place – have the prerequisite hangdog, jobless air. Garth Owen, Maesyrhandir, Maesydail, Treowen, Trehafren, Vaynor. 1940s and 60s council houses grouped like prison blocks into numbered units – their tiny square windows either netted or blank as a stare.

Yes there are some modern ‘new builds’ too: identikit red-brick boxes in compact cul-de-sacs, all prefabricated porches and decorative white wooden trim; built new, yes, but still born old. Their white-lined windows look inwards,

setting brick backs to the horizon – shouldering small-town life by walling off the possibility of something more.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly where the despair resides. It’s not just the unloved and unlovely council houses, the cramped terraces, the ‘starter homes’, the joblessness, the factory workers in boiler suits clocking on and clocking off. Not just the concentric streets that converge at and always seem to bring you back to the same T-junction, the shops that haven’t changed in 20 years, the countless pubs – so many, more even than the bafflingly innumerable denominations of churches, nor just the daytime drunks, boy racers and small-town pierced & tattooed punks, the underage drinkers, the oh-so familiar faces & places, the inexorable late night trips to Spar.

It’s the long slow descent of it all – that installs yesterday’s High School teenager behind Perspex at the Post Office counter, ensures the local paper writes up the arrival of McDonald’s and Tesco for years and years before. It’s death by a thousand cuts – and knowing it’s happening; knowing you can no more stop it than you can stop the river pulling its endless thread of silver on and on, through and through, every day drawing it imperceptibly that little bit tighter, forever and ever, Amen.

More than 700 years have drained down the river since Newtown got its shiny new name, shifting the weavers and their looms into the past. Irony’s last laugh? The proximity of a Laura Ashley clothes-picking factory to this modern-day small town – clothes and textiles, made anywhere but there, picked off shelves by the children of weavers, packed in plastic, sent on somewhere.