Where tourists seldom tread, part 10: four more towns with hidden histories

Camborne, Cornwall

Chy? I wasn’t familiar with the Ordnance Survey abbreviation for chimneys until I set off to walk around the ghost mines of Camborne. On every tump stand houses for engines built to raise ore from, and drop men into, the Great Flat Lode – a rock field that coughed up 90,000 tonnes of tin, worth $3 billion at today’s rates. Chimneys. It all went up in smoke.

The Phoenicians sailed to Cornwall to trade for tin. Possibly. The Romans knew about it. It’s not known where the Tin Islands (or Cassiterides) in classical accounts were precisely located. Maybe Camborne or Galicia, or Brittany. Somewhere in the Celtic fringe. In the western outposts, the connections are tenuous.

There’s no bronze age without tin. No pewter, no solder. A soft silvery metal with a bluish tinge, it makes up two parts per million of the earth’s crust, which makes it 500 times more common than gold. When a cold tin bar is bent the atoms cause a crackling sound. This is the tin cry, which, pushed, can lead to a breaking. Warm it and it’s silent.

Just beyond Camborne’s big Tesco – which occupies the former site of Holman No 1 Works, responsible for much mining engineering – was the great mine of Dolcoath. The sett was originally worked for alluvial tin in the 1580s. By the 1720s, copper was the focus. Richard Trevithick, father of the inventor of the steam loco, was chief engineer in the mid-18th century. Copper was worked out by the opening decades of the 19th century and closure threatened until mine captain Charles Thomas deduced that tin would be found deeper down. A mine that had started giving up metal ore at 300ft was eventually drilled down to 10 times that depth. When Dolcoath was stripped and mining operations ceased in 1920, there were 70 miles of underground tunnels and the rock had produced 350,000 tons of copper and 80,000 tons of tin. It’s now owned by a Canadian firm that runs nearby South Crofty.

Camborne’s terraces are grey and squat. Their facades, of snecked rubble, add character and look as you’d expect miners’ houses should look. Civic palazzos, also in stone, hark to times of pride and prosperity. The old library building , built by the locally famous Silvanus Trevail, is a bold beauty. Wetherspoon’s occupies an opulent Italianate former market house . It faces off against two other pubs on the same corner: Tyacks Hotel , owned by the St Austell brewery, and the White Hart , which looks like the football pub and used to be “ notorious ”. The boozers are busy enough, I suppose, though some local lads prefer to buy their beers at Poundland. Tinnies aren’t made of tin, nor is tinfoil. The local bus is called the Tinner. Pied wagtails are called tinners because they nested in mine shafts.

The religious buildings are large; miners and their widows often sought help from above. Two of the Methodist temples still do their original job, the third, an Edwardian Gothic pile on Trelowarren Street, is a branch of Costa. Camborne’s sole Grade I-listed building is the parish church – full name, the church of St Martin and St Meriadocus – which is said to have an impressive marble reredos. It was always locked when I tried the door, morning, afternoon and evening. Its graveyard is old, overgrown and lovely.

The engine houses look as if built for skinny giants and are now surrounded by fields full of horses and cloaked in ivy

The heart of a town is not always, perhaps not usually, its centre. Camborne’s is out in the fields and underground. The Great Flat Lode trail takes three hours and visits a dozen or so mining sites. The engine houses look as if built for skinny giants, and are now surrounded by fields full of horses, cloaked in ivy, and provide roost for corvids. At South Wheal Frances there was a whole mining complex, as evocative as a ruined cathedral. A “wheal” is a “place of work”. The former mining school, which was internationally esteemed, is the King Edward Mining Museum . Here, I picked up a map of the trail and learned about emigration, man machines, that “flat” meant steep because most tin is mined from vertical stopes (seams). I held an ingot of tin rescued from the wreck of the SS Cheerful, which sank off St Ives in 1885.

I drove home via the coast. It seemed rude to ignore the popular beauty. Hell’s Mouth beach was heavenly on a sunny morning. Emerald sea. Glowing gorse. I sat around, walked a bit, watched the fulmars. Looking inland, I could see the TV mast above Camborne and Redruth and the hills that held the tin. You could, walking the national trail, be blithely unaware of mining history and work and woes. But if you stare hard, you might spot the Chys.
Things to see: Portreath beach, Kresen Kernow , Mineral Tramways

Stockport, Greater Manchester

The last leg of my train journey took me away from Manchester on an empty London-bound Avanti, past the twin colossi of the stillborn Coop Live and Man City’s moodless arena, through scruffy greenish belt, and into Stockport – or on to Stockport, as arrival is by means of its mighty viaduct.

Towns close to large cities can seem invisible, lost, swamped. Almost 300,000 people call Stockport home, but for the unhappy drivers on the M60 ring road, only the viaduct, overhead, declares something significant thereabouts. Built with 11m bricks at the dawn of the railway age, it’s long and sturdy rather than beautiful, but it adds a dash of drama across the gaping canyon of the Mersey. When you’re on it, everything else looks shabby and unplanned, as if the town ran out of ideas after all the bricklaying. When you’re off it and down below, it’s the thing you most want to look at – but it teases and frustrates, as you never get to see all the span-arches, can’t walk the length of it, and Stockport council has allowed a firm called Capital & Centric to develop Weir Mill , which actually means: erect a 14-storey tower violating the view of the viaduct for everyone else.

LS Lowry’s Viaduct painting once belonged to Sir Alec Guinness, and was stolen to be used as currency in drug deals

LS Lowry drew and painted it several times. An undated, atypical oil, The Viaduct , features the structure low down in the background and two rows of terraced cottages and, centre and much larger, a pub, towards which three men are resolutely walking. The earth is off-white, frozen-looking, as so often in Lowry’s works. Three options face the three men: home, escape, alcohol. Alert to the fact it’s impossible to take it in at a sweep, Lowry used it as a backdrop for his 1955 high-angled composite Industrial Landscape . The Viaduct once belonged to Alec Guinness, and was stolen to be used as currency in drug deals; it was later recovered. Industrial Landscape was bought in 1959 by the Lefevre Gallery for 295 guineas and sold in 2012 by Christie’s for £1,273,250. The viaduct, along with the elegiac sound of whistling trains, had a brief but central role in Tony Richardson’s 1961 film of A Taste of Honey. Jo (Rita Tushingham) tells Geoff (Murray Melvin) she is pregnant. He tells her you can get rid of babies and lots of other unwanted advice about the right thing to do and how she’ll be judged by others. She bridles, declaring, “I am an extraordinary person.” Geoff is won around and they run through an arch, as he shouts, “We’re unique, unrivalled, we’re bloody marvellous!” The scene is now available as a Taste of Honey postcard.

I take a roundabout route to the town centre. Stockport’s architecture is a muddle of grand redbrick and pale stone buildings and newer municipal bits and pieces. Stopford House, built in 1975, is clad in deep-grey aggregate precast panels of varying coarseness. It’s a slab of a building. Is this cool brutalism? Or thug-ism? It was the police station in Life on Mars . A sign on the A6 sign reminds me I’m six and a half miles from Manchester and 182.5 miles from London. Buxton and Chester are also marked. Stockport tilts towards its Roman past and rural environs. New signage points one way towards the courts, council and police, and in the other for the town centre shops. I only get my first glimpse of the viaduct after 15 minutes.

Look at first and second floors in Stockport and you see some signs of Victorian attention to detail. It was a textile town, with specialist mills for hats and silk-throwing, some of which survive. The most arresting building is the Plaza , an art deco theatre designed by William Thornley in 1929 and built in 1932-3. The faience-tiled facade is high and flat, echoing the cliff face to which the structure is bolted; two fluted pilasters shoot towards the sky. Inside, they’re playing jazz and old time showtunes. The teashop-cum-restaurant on the first floor has period decor, gold and green. I am taken aback by the genteel atmosphere and standard of conservation. Originally built as a Super Cinema, the Plaza was a bingo hall for a spell, and closed completely in 1998. A charitable trust and army of volunteers raised £3m to set in motion a recovery plan.

I am taken aback by the genteel atmosphere and standard of conservation in the Plaza's teashop-cum-restaurant

Brenda, a waitress, tells me, “If it wasn’t for the volunteers, it wouldn’t be like this. It would be a Wetherspoon’s probably. I’ve been here 20-odd years since it reopened and I started out pulling six-inch nails out of the wall. We’ve torn up carpets. You name it, we’ve done it.”

It was 11.40am, so I deferred on the champagne celebration tea and opted for leaf tea (with a strainer, milk, no silly lemon) and smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. It was fully booked for lunch. Another friendly volunteer, Tommy, showed me the auditorium and the Mighty Compton Organ , with its glass panels depicting a stylised sunburst.

The sun was out so I skirted the shopping centre. The Underbank area, the smart retail area during the 19th century, feels slightly medieval; it has the shadows, textures and human scale lacking in 20th- and 21st-century Stockport. It’s a little ghetto of hip, cool and independent: a bakery, coffee, barbers, a speakeasy owned by a minor rock star. Stairways connect it to the Market Place above. Overlooming is Robinsons Brewery on Lower Hillgate, a handsome fortress of ale-making decorated with a unicorn for the Unicorn Inn that William Robinson bought in 1838 . The plant is being wound up. Cranes hover. Expect a co-work space, apartments, offices or a mix of these. Nearby another stairway creeps. Coopers Brow. I take it.

The stairways have made me think of another painting and nearby I found Crowther Street, where the steps tempted Lowry – whose natural tendency was receding flat planes and marionette people in profile – to depict a curving perspective . Though, even on that painting no one is really looking at us or each other. I photographed the steps and ascended to make my way slowly back to the station.

In 1983, Frankie Vaughan released a single titled Stockport in response to a newspaper competition. It’s a well-crafted if silly effort (all proceeds went to a charity), with a sub-Sinatra refrain: “I’m going back to Stockport/ There’s nowhere that can beat it/ That’s right, I tell you, Stockport/ You want me to repeat it/ Well, it’s S.T.O.C.K.P.O.R.T/ Stockport, Stockport that’s the place for me.”

The song was recorded at the Plaza by a mobile unit from the local recording studio, Strawberry, owned by 10cc. The same engineers worked with Joy Division and Happy Mondays. A deep sense of place seeped into both bands’ music. The former channelled the viaduct and Lowry’s white wastelands. The latter’s songs evoke the clutter of the town under the hesitant, cloud-chased sun. Manchester is fatigued and fat on Factory-themed nostalgia, gastro-hedonism and mega-venues. Perhaps Stopfordians can stop Fordism mass production and Stockport can put on its felt hats and silk gloves once again.
Things to see: Staircase House , Hat Works Museum , Stockport air raid shelters , St George’s Church, Rare Mags

Gillingham, Kent

The river shimmers, shifts, suggests, rises and slips away. Dickens, in The Uncommercial Traveller, notes the effect this has on him: “There are small out of the way landing-places on the Thames and the Medway, where I do much of my summer idling. Running water is favourable to daydreams. And a strong tidal river is the best of running water for mine.”

The intrusion of the Medway, a large, unruly estuary mirroring the larger Thames estuary to the north, seems excessive of nature. The name derives from Vaga and Med – meaning “wandering” (related to “vague” and “vagabond”) and “middle”, which, run together, are slippery. History ebbs and flows inland. This is the last post before London on the journey from the continent. The Britons followed a grass track to Canterbury. The route features in the Antonine Itinerary, the Romans’ A-Z: a fast lane from their pontoon across the Thames to three Kentish ports. It was part of the Saxon Wæcelinga Stræt or Watling Street, the southern border of the Danelaw. Chaucer’s pilgrims tramped along it. The Old Dover Road became the A2; an arrow of history beside the meandering modern M2.

Garrisons and ports are full of escapists and individualists. In a lot of the music a Medway angst is hitched to a Medway nostalgia

A quarter of a million people live in the five Medway towns. They have been amassing here for centuries for trade, for war, to ready ships. Gillingham, with a population of 108,000, is the largest. The others are Chatham, Rainham, Strood and Rochester. The latter, with its cathedral, castle and Dickens connections, draws visitors. Strood has a manor house where the Knights Templar rested. Rainham leans towards Kent but can’t quite free itself. Chatham is shipbuilding and naval power; records of the royal fleet being moored here date from the mid-16th century. The royal dockyard extended into Gillingham. A portion of the town – the manor of Grange – was a dependency of Hastings, one of the Cinque Ports that made up a powerful medieval maritime federation . It’s the birthplace of the Elizabethan seafarer William Adams, who starred pseudonymously in James Clavell’s 1975 novel Shogun. He is often described as the first Englishman to set foot in Japan.

Historians and localists love salience, but the towns have merged like silty water, like the millions of tons of portland cement made on the banks. This is the Garden of England’s hardstanding, a linear suburb that exploded with the train. Life is deeply built-up, all link roads, bridges, tunnels, sheds and slipways. These are conduits too.

Confluences are innately creative. In the 60s, the five towns produced Beat bands with names like the Strangers, the Strollers, the Teenbeats, the Tupelos, the Classmates . From the early 80s, dozens of new wave bands emerged, many fronted or fused by Billy Childish. Locally based musician, writer and anthropologist Chris de Coulon Berthoud , who’s constructing a musical archive, says the term “ Medway scene ” properly applies to “the music of the Milkshakes and the Prisoners, and the sound that emerged in the period after punk. A charity shop-clad melding of punk and the beat and psych music of the 60s on labels like [Childish’s] Hangman Records, Empire Records etc, led to their being a “Medway scene” section in record shops across the world from Tokyo to Tallahassee.” Young soldiers and sailors were a captive market and shipped in new ideas and sounds. Garrisons and ports are rough but full of escapists and individualists. In a lot of the music, a Medway angst is hitched to a Medway nostalgia. Kevin Younger’s project the High Span evokes flux, wistfulness, loss, remoteness. The only door in the future looks to the past.

Medway’s art scene, the Stuckists, was founded in 1999 by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish and describes itself as a radical, amateur, post-postmodernist, pro-paint, anti-gallery art movement “opposed to the current pretensions of so-called Brit Art, Performance Art, Installation Art, Video Art, Conceptual Art, Minimal Art, Body Art, Digital Art and anything claiming to be art which incorporates dead animals or beds”. Stuck in the past, or the Medway mud, it has won admirers and has spawned international sub-sects. Vague and vagabond, but not quite mainstream.
Things to see : Royal Engineers Museum , Chatham, Chattenden Woods, Isle of Grain

East Kilbride, South Lanarkshire

What does a new town sound like? Wind whipping across flagstones? Showers on pre-cast concrete? Footsteps echoing around a piazza? I always thought the Jesus and Mary Chain sounded like the Beach Boys minus the beach (and the jazz chords), fuzzboxing the world because clarity was unbearable. Psychocandy was conceived in an East Kilbride bedroom by brothers William and Jim Reid, whose family had moved there in 1966. On a Radio 4 documentary , Jim told David Scott that “the isolation and the sense of not being part of … the music scene is kind of important to how we developed. It made us have an outsider’s mentality, which continues, I suppose, to this day.” He adds that East Kilbride was a “Shangri-La” for those relocating from Parkhead, Glasgow. “It was neat and tidy and clean, and we all had bathrooms and indoor toilets. As a kid, it seemed like the best place on earth to be.”

Scotland’s first new town, designated in 1947 and built from 1950, was an amalgamation of the low-density housing and zonal planning espoused by Garden City visionary Ebenezer Howard, Le Corbusier’s “automotive city”, the pedestrian-centred ideals of Patrick Geddes and the anti-revivalist architectural fashions of the day. Just four miles from Glasgow, it was a rejection of the city’s uncontrolled sprawl and congested centre, which had evolved over centuries and been recently torn apart by the Luftwaffe and slum clearances.

Easily accessed public areas would be clean, rational, airy spaces. Footways, bridges and underpasses linked residential quarters with shops, recreational parks and workplaces. Light industry lay on the outskirts of the town, accessed via straight roads with roundabouts – an estimated 600 of these (including minis), leading to the nickname of Polo Mint City; the whistle of clutch and grind of gears are part of the local soundtrack.

A cross between a ribcage and a giant crab from horror sci-fi, the Aqua Centre is extraordinary

The shopping centre was the focus, as in traditional towns. This now seems quaint, and a sharp warning to would-be futurists that no one knows what will happen next. I use the past tense because plans are afoot to demolish part of the shopping centre, which had 48 empty units last year. A public consultation is out on demolishing a third of East Kilbride town centre. Will the glories survive? Before the cranes arrive, you should go to admire the Dollan Baths (now Aqua Centre) – which opened in 1968 and was the first Olympic-sized swimming pool to be built in Scotland. Designer Alexander Buchanan Campbell said he had been influenced by the architecture of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and the work of Kenzō Tange. A cross between a ribcage and a giant crab from horror sci-fi, the building is extraordinary.

St Bride’s Roman Catholic church is one of the most acclaimed modern ecclesiastical buildings in Britain. It is pure mass, as solid as religion is fluffy, prayer-space as factory, built by Izi Metzstein and Andy MacMillan of architecture firm Gillespie, Kidd & Coia. They used bricks repurposed from Victorian sewerage systems, a decision based on postwar material shortages rather than artistic intentions, and one which has led to structural issues that still cause grief – including a leaky roof and heating problems. A 90ft bell tower was added because a bishop thought the project lacked ecclesiastical character; it was felled in 1983 due to damage, which is a pity as it made the church even more eccentric and dramatic. The interior is uplifting in the way the Tate Modern Turbine Hall is; you realise life is empty.

There are secondary stand-outs. East Kilbride civic centre is a Bauhaus-esque chunk of concrete. The boxy terraces and low-slung blocks of flats riff on Glasgow’s tenements. Stanley Bonner’s elephant sculptures add whimsy. The star-shaped South Parish church is eye-catching, but was recently condemned . Fixtures, like a spiral ramp, have scooped awards. I saw one piece of public art by Jim Barclay, and then found more on a Facebook page, Lost East Kilbride .

New towns celebrate urbanisation. This one has, at its edge, the National Museum of Rural Life – which is on the still working Wester Kittochside farm but looks like an industrial unit. East Kilbride once was little more than a few primitive dwellings and a sacred well dedicated to the Celtic goddess Brigid, reframed as St Bride of Kildare. In the 18th century, it was given the status of burgh of barony, allowing it to hold weekly markets and four annual fairs. An Open Cattle Show Society was formed in 1772 which, by the late 1940s, was reportedly “the largest one-day cattle show in Scotland”.

The old part of town, known as the Village, still looks the part. In 2018, the film Nae Pasaran had its local premiere at the Village Theatre . After the Chilean coup of 1973, workers at East Kilbride’s Rolls-Royce plant downed tools, refusing to service and repair engines for the Chilean air force’s Hawker Hunters. Nae Pasaran told their story, leading to three Scotsmen receiving the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins, Chile’s highest honour. Currently, the theatre’s roster lists the Springsteen Sessions, the Absolute Elvis Show, Nearly Elton and MacFloyd. Exactly when provincial Britain succumbed to the hegemony of cover-band tribute gigs is probably unknowable, but perhaps that’s the sound of the once pioneering, no longer new, part-condemned newtown. Fuzzboxes should be obligatory.
Things to see: James Hamilton Heritage Park , Hunter House Coffee Shop , Langlands Moss Nature Reserve