Fron Bache

Llangollen in cool rain; a stone and red brick town, squeezed by steep wooded hills, so that the houses seem pushed to the river and the famous bridge seems like an arm from either side stretched across to stabilise the houses. The drizzle of water on old stone.

The first time I have driven here, the steep pull up out of the town to the graveyard at the top of the hill, yet a route familiar, brain-etched from a hundred visits; the English names fading as we turn from the guest houses lining the road to Plas Newydd onto the tiny road of Fron Bache, a sunny silent place of 1930s respectability, pebble-dashing and bay windows, the feeling of an endless afternoon. Dorothy and Gwynneth used to walk up here with the Llangollen family, Auntie Bessie and the boys, Arthur and Ernest and Glynne. The road is rough and feels more like a farm road, a hill-road, a rough Welsh hill man in town for the market; but now the modern houses are creeping up the side, Llangollen’s anywhere suburbs, modern raw houses on what was a shaggy, gloomy playing field, hill-fields, openness; as they were when Dorothy first walked up this lane, this slow spread of the town, a rural speed of encroachment; new houses have even swallowed the kink in the road where the family used to rest on the bench with the view back down the hill, the road lined with poppies and escaped garden flowers.

The cemetery on Fron Bache is on the hillside, the fron bache, corrupted, fading Welsh, next to an allotment, with a tumble of town roofs below it, the pinned curve of the permanent Eisteddfod stage, a harsh redbrick row of houses slammed unsympathetically into the hillside. And a wary ring of more new houses, pebble-dashed and hanging-basketed, a riot of Georgian lamps and security lights; but it is still a place of yews and damp grass, wild flowers and benign neglect. Ilid and Bessie’s gravestone has fallen over or been laid to rest, lead letters scattered, dates difficult to make out. Lost afternoons in the 1960s, family events, funerals, weddings, small parties; why was I here, asks Reg, did I come to… As if the dates only existed to support a funeral, a party, a birth.

Further down the hill, right at the last yew, the path uneven and overgrown, dotted with wildflowers, lie William Eyton Jones and his wife Janet, my grandparents, the Welsh grandfather I never knew; and his parents David and Ann, an English inscription despite their Welsh language, a fading of national identity behind a British mask. A peaceful quiet place, somewhere I have never seen another soul, a place of pheasants, silence, wild flowers, grasses, the distant steam whistle urgent from the railway.

Back in the town, a pattern of streets and awkward conversations with curious bystanders, an occupational hazard. Market Street and West Street, the undiscovered site of Cambrian Cottages; addresses for David Jones, my great-grandfather, this census migration through the town, a journey plotted at ten-yearly intervals. Decades walked through or past, addresses known and unknown; the history of streets, the shifts of buildings. Chapel Street in the 1870s, the tantalising possibility of ‘Oak Street’ in the 1840s; lunch in the Hand to take stock and curb our enthusiasm.

Llangollen Stories

The only certain address was 1 Berwyn Street, David Jones’ home and possibly his greengrocer’s shop. A family memory restored; this shop had been pointed out to Dorothy and Gwynneth long before by William Eyton, after the family had moved on, but the location had been forgotten. The recovery of story, even in some way possession. And still a shop, empty but refurbished, clean of association; impossible to imagine this Welsh family living and working here. Family history as less a journey of names and dates and more a search for houses, graves, commercial premises.

The only other certain address we did not revisit. Pen y Bedw, the house on Birch Street where Arthur Thomas used to live, my mother’s cousin. Even after retirement, Arthur used to cycle down from the house every morning at 4am to work in the newsagent’s shop snuggled into the belly of the Royal Hotel, where Nana Jones and Gwynneth used to stay. It is now a smart coffee shop with lightweight metal chairs outside, the illusion of Italy.

Saltney on the other hand was unknown territory, a land on no known map. A strange turn from a familiar roundabout near Chester and the road ran away with us, through suburbia of expected hotels and giant redbrick houses; but under the railway the land seemed to sink towards the unseen river, a place eternally curving towards the water. A place indeed born from the water, a place of reclaimed land, ground hard-won from marsh and water. A border town, a town not water and not land, a town bilingual in street name, unable to decide whether it was English or Welsh, land or water, or perhaps proud of being both. A poor town of straight roads and decades of Council building from the 1920s onwards, a town without focus, without heart, long streets of hard concrete buildings softened by occupation. Here we rejoined the Lewises, Joseph Lewis being born here in 1815; but there was nothing here from before the twentieth century, and we felt that above ground and in solid buildings the trail was cold.

Underground Walking: Bold Street Journey 2007

Rotting wall, broken glass foot-grill, Bold Street, 2007

An invitation to participate in FACT's Bold Street Project in 2007 resulted in a walk through the street's closed spaces with researcher Laura Yates.

Bold Street in warm sunshine and hard shadows. A piece of found text on my way to the railway station set the tone for the walk; WHAT WAS PAST IS NOW. A touchstone, a mantra, a remembered line for the exploration of dead bank vaults, a burned out church, the dressing rooms of a Georgian concert hall, the soft cellar of a car showroom long concreted into shopped oblivion. Gloomy capitals and refurbished shops, a parade of shops and changing tenants, the gentle subtleties of change over two centuries. I stood in the FACT reception space and looked at old slate roofs, higgledy-piggledy chimneys, windows into empty rooms and attic flats, cool spaces and dead spaces. The newness of street art, Metroscopes; civic furniture, in a new urban space, Ropewalks Square; the pomposity of explanation derided by SK8BD graffiti, club stickers, underground movements, pictures of a leering Tony Benn advertising a Socialist rally, a discussion of democracy or a club night stealing the clothes of revolution.

The journey was to be from top to bottom or bottom to top. The buildings that would give us access to their hidden spaces and unknown floors visited in series as if on a journey, as if paralleling the street we would smash our way from one building to the next through a hundred first floor rooms; empty store room, office, unexpected bedroom, night club, bar, clothes shop, bathroom, brothel, concert room, classroom, hairdressers’; to emerge panting on Berry Street in a cloud of dust and falling brick, still twenty feet above the ground. Walking, the reality is always different. We saw more pigeon-spattered smokers’ haunts than I had expected. Met more people with stories, stoked more interest in unexpected people, broke the work crust to find interest and warmth beneath.

We began in the massive banking hall and redundant vaults of a dead bank that still gets customers; fine wooden doors, rich tiling, high plaster coving. Edwardian dignity broken now into cubicles, workstations, seating areas. Sunlight through dusty glass impossible to clean behind grilles, bars, mesh, the abandoned security apparatus of a building that stored gold bullion. The vaults were heavy, old fashioned, solid solid. Impossibly heavy doors that swung at a finger’s touch and had bolts the thickness of a man’s arm, open now and used for storing files. And behind the vaults, a second skin, brick walls and exposed pipework grimly suggestive of gas chambers. Walls that seemed to grow and shift in their subterranean darkness. They left grey corridors narrowing to nothingness, swallowed brick staircases, made spaces too small for live people and created overlooked rooms full of 1950s accounts, trade descriptions and arrangements with newly free African states; this on a street named after the slave-trading family that owned the land. (Distant earth-memories in damp and gloom, earth-memories of fields and trees and hedge-boundaries, rope walks and country lanes on the edge of the town.) Pale brickwork grey with moss, like a man-made world at the bottom of the sea, a place of endless darkness and soft strange creatures. The first of our ghost stories, a myth sprung to scare the young female office clerks, an erotic frisson connected to darkness and unexpected presence. Or the need to familiarise and populate that dead darkness, those indifferent shifting walls.

Underground Walking 2

Staircase squashed by underground rooms

And then chance intervened, or the street decided we should see what we came to see. We took a chance and dived into Bar L1, that used to be Edward’s, that used to be Waterstone’s the bookshop, that used to be Macmillan’s nightclub, that used to be an exclusive clothes shop and a concert room. It was built from the 1770s, the earliest incarnation of the street, and sits on three sides of Bold Street, Concert Street (an unrelated echo of performance, this one commemorating outdoor music for the urban poor) and Wood Street. An iced wedding cake of a building, solid, square, punched windows crusted with sooty plasterwork. I was last in there when it was a bookshop, a quiet set of cream rooms lined with bookcases and collections of chairs, thoughtful emaciated readers and chubby girls in frayed jeans behind the counters. Today it is decorated like a jazzy gentleman’s club, a cross between deep leather elegance and glitter, a long sticky bar of granite resin. Upstairs the second floor of books had tall windows and was flooded with light like a piano nobile, a slower place than the ground floor, a place of reference books and classical music. It has become a 1980s club, a vivid swirl of a nightmare of epileptic glitter balls, electro-posters, drinks promotions, a giant’s causeway of platforms and raised dance floors under massive black walls. It felt as though, with difficulty, I had broken in to something that had slipped away through time, reclaimed a room that was no longer a part of my world, like revisiting the first house I lived in. But the elegant plaster ceiling has survived, painted a deep matt black, and the magnificent sweep of the staircase still takes dancers from the ground floor to the dance floor, as it always has. The tall windows are still there behind thick curtains, and the huge staircase windows, richly-painted rococo gold and orange swirls on great sweeps of leaded glass, have also survived; perhaps as garish to some as the glitter balls and 80s tat is to me. We were guided through a maze of rooms and staircases and corridors, bunches of keys and members of staff coming in the opposite direction. The last of our ghost stories, a woman called Mary alleged to haunt the upper floors; another myth of the upper floors occupied by prostitutes. Upstairs again to a tiny roof space, more pigeons and air-conditioning, and gazed up at walls towering another two floors above us. Hidden windows and unused roofs.

Underground Walking 3

Bank vault by flash, Bold Street

The street seems different once you start seeing its secret places; it feels tilted, insubstantial. Back on Bold Street we found a narrow Georgian corridor, surviving plasterwork and heavily repainted doorframes; a tilt to the building as if the ground had shifted, unsettling staircases and joints, realigning floorboards. A hairdresser’s shop above the street, a great invisible dome of glass leaping out into space above the pedestrians, a woman full of stories and untold ghosts. Yet more support and interest, yet more unexpected enthusiasm. And yet stopping to stare you become an object of curiosity, an oddity. Who stops and stares on city streets? Who examines kerbstones and metal grilles, flagstones and drainpipes? Mad men and poets, thieves, drunks, charlatans. Who stops and stares at those already stopped? Bored secretaries, office staff, lonely men in dark flats, invisible yet aware of our presence, our analysis, our disruption of the street’s lack of self-knowledge or awareness.

The magnificence of the Oxfam building, built as a car showroom with a gigantic lift that took cars from ground floor to basement and back up to showroom. The slow soft bounce of rubber on smooth concrete, the smell of upholstery and leather, walnut and teak, the gentle purr of gigantic engines. An incarnation of the street as a place of commerce, a place to sell; in this instance luxury cars. Impossible to imagine the gleam of Armstrong-Siddeleys and Bentleys and Rolls-Royces in these tight, functional underground rooms, cluttered with boxes of books and rails of clothes. Only the brightness and sense of purpose survive, the hard work, the invisible energies. And yet the new electricity substation, installed this year by hacking a hole in the floor above – how useful the old lift would have been – is one of a series on the street whose smooth energy flow seems constantly disrupted, by power cuts, unexpected fusings, the sudden plunge into darkness. Stories of hidden rivers, lost power sources, perhaps of the street’s energy lines, the pull from top to bottom. As if the installation of underground boxes to channel electricity had jolted older power lines out of synchronicity, out of balance, and the power cuts were a result of this; or even as if the street itself, woken Quatermass-like by the digging, resented the intrusion. But these bright functional cellars held no stories, no mystery.

Underground Walking 4

Bank vaults, Bold Street, Liverpool

The street after such encounters seemed bright, temporary and fragile, a plane between worlds; the reaching walls and the attics and the gloom beneath the flags, the hopeless glass blocks, windows in the pavement, to allow some light into vault and cellar, as if they could stem the darkness, civilise the sheer underneathness. Another bank, large windows and tall iron columns hammered into a showroom for cheap furniture; stern glances and the lemon faces – Laura’s phrase – of disapproval. The street seemed warmer after that chilly room.

The unexpected pleasure of St Luke’s church, the crowning glory of Bold Street, visible the entire length. I have written about the church and explored its history but have never been inside. On this sunny day it was opened to the public by an alternative dance and workshop group, who had researched old photographs and commissioned new artwork. These stood at the base of the walls like abandoned placards from a demonstration. The open space, once aisle and chancel and organ loft, dominated still by the soaring reach of the Gothic tower. The walls were tall, proud, naked; amalgams of brick and stone and charred wood, the occasional tablet still smoke-blackened after fifty years of city rain, the occasional piece of stained glass that survived the bombing, as if the only glass to survive had been that which crept into the smallest niches. And an angel, a rare clear image, a face unaware of the incendiary device, a face still singing praises to God, a face alone in the walls of glass and colour; perhaps the second of our ghosts. A strangely unLiverpool experience, the inside of the bombed-out church. More European, or a London thing; in either it would have been celebrated many years ago, opened to the public, planted as a garden, a celebration of peace; here it has been shut away for half a century as if we are ashamed of this event, this scar on our history, shut away like the mad child in the attic. On this mild and sunny day the ground was covered with slow wild flowers and creeping plants but the crunch of glass and dust beneath, the iron window frames kicked up easily by our boots, they seemed to suggest that the building was only just safe to revisit, safe to walk in again, that the ground had only just cooled and that the charred wood was still dangerous, that walls might still fall.

The Footsteps of Sarah Murphy

Old routes into Ormskirk from Birkdale, familial Norse settlements; routes across the old Moss, old Catholic trails marked by sandstone crosses; places of weeping and pilgrimage, modern bus routes. Winter trees, thin sunlight, low skies. The four streets of the old town, four cardinal points marking the junction of roads to Burscough, Wigan, Preston and Southport. Buried Catholic histories – the Thursday market charter was granted by Edward I to the monks of Burscough Priory in 1256, who also approved a great yearly market of five days, beginning on the Vigil for the Feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist; invented stories, the turnings of the Church year. The Priory fell and was pillaged for its stone at the Reformation and is now just two lumpen pillars in a field, the remains of a cross-arch, an inner junction of walls, of rooms. An echo of Ozymandias, and a further Ormskirk story; Sean was given a volume of Shelley and Keats that had belonged to a girl called Alice Hurst in the 1920s, who lived on a farm outside Aughton; there were Hursts at farms in the library’s Ormskirk censuses from 1851 and 1890, but Alice would be too young, time jumps too quickly, she was buried too deeply in the archives; we ran out of research-time.

Ormskirk is a Norse name, the church of Orme, a semi-mythical Norse settler of the tenth century; imagined farms, possible histories. Orm’s Kirk. The market cross stands at a cross-roads, a meeting of hearts, a place for trade. This was a walking-day of hidden Irish stories, of the Gael settling into the British mentality, names softening into the present day; Hegarty and Kennedy, the names of women running bars in the town, an Irish lament being played on a penny whistle at the crossroads, even the curl of silver of a broken chain found and placed with reverence on a broken wall, its soft coils resembling an illustration from the Book of Kells. And in the library the names of the market traders a century ago were all Irish; Coyne, Hanlon, O’Dowd.

Sean is a good friend and an artist; photographer, writer, performer, raconteur. Sarah Murphy was Sean’s great-grandmother. He has memories of her from his childhood, when she visited the house in Ackers Road in Woodchurch. He has heard stories of her visiting the large houses in Oxton to buy or ask for old clothes, unwanted cloth; these she took apart, collecting stays and buttons, and recycled them into children’s clothes, which she sold at the market; Birkenhead, perhaps Liverpool, Ormskirk.

The station was much the same, although now is not as important; no lines any more to Southport or even Burscough. How did she get here? Changing at Liverpool Exchange for the Ormskirk line? Did she carry her wares with her, a tight roll of new-old children’s clothes, tiny coats, waistcoats for Sundays, short tweed trousers? Perhaps she rented a part of a barrow, a fifth of a stall, perhaps she had a lock-up nearby or rented an attic in the town to store her clothes. These details, this history, is lost; only the folk-memory remains of Sarah Murphy working at remodelling cloth and selling clothes on Ormskirk Market.

Sarah Murphy's Ormskirk

And yet there are echoes of past lives that we can still hear, still see. Sarah would have known the clocktower, erected in 1876 perhaps to replace a lost Market cross. There were buildings and narrow cobbled places that she would have known, tiny private streets become alleyways, become unexpectedly sunny on this bright winter day, unexpectedly sunny with the demolition of yards and houses, tanners’ yards and breweries behind the Four Streets, the medieval streetscape swept away with the need for bigger wagons and then motor vehicles. Roads disappear, alleyways become carparks, maps become false; but a thread of cobble remains across the tarmac, an unexpected heavy curve of dark wood still supports a medieval arch between a shoe shop and a place selling sandwiches. A drifting, hacked roasting meat smell rolls through the town; a suggestion of rendering or cooking on a vast scale, it followed us down to the old town boundary and stayed in our nostrils like smoke, an old smell, a violent, earthy smell. Sarah would have known the chimes of the bells in the ancient parish church, perhaps the market itself ran to the bells from the church; perhaps that was why the court leet of the Earl of Derby erected a clock tower, some thirty, forty years before she first walked up from the station with a bundle of clothes.

Her great-grandson and I trailed down Aughton Street, with its vast flower-bins illustrated with bulls’ heads, tanners’ knives, pelts, market symbols. A quote from Nathanial Hawthorne; ‘I found a throng of men and women, it being market day; wares of various kinds, tin, earthen and cloth, set out on the pavement; droves of pigs, ducks and fowls; baskets of eggs, and a man selling quack medicines.’ (Hawthorne was too early to see Sarah Murphy, but Ormskirk legend has it that Beecham once sold his pills on the market.) Aughton Street has old inns, Georgian barns converted to old people’s homes; the brook that once formed the boundary of the civic authority, a tiny grand Roman bridge half buried in bushes and mud. Along Dyers’ Lane, once home perhaps to the dying industry with its need for vast quantities of water; underneath the railway line through a brick tube and the tiny settlement of Elm Place, still a street, names chipped into hard terracotta capstones, forgotten initials of grandparents loitering on streetcorners and whistling at girls.

Dyers’ Lane becomes Brook Lane and the boundary curves uphill, a false boundary now as the town has expanded and the old maps only show what has been buried in modernity; farm tracks, field boundaries, cottages. The noise of the St Helens Road and the neat topiary and idleness of a triangular park, with a war memorial to the local dead of the Boer War; a death by drowning whilst on patrol, a soldier killed at the Spion Kop; echoes of Afrikaans names and everyday Imperial history. And a local soldier named as ‘one of the Six Hundred’; a hussar, who charged with the Light Brigade in the Crimea in 1854 yet survived the Russian guns and returned to Ormskirk, dying over fifty years later in 1905.

The noise of traffic and roads carved through the urban fabric to take pressure from narrow streets, a river of cars and unceasing noise. An afternoon of exploring histories; the cottage hospital now part of Ormskirk College, a huddle of buildings designed to resemble a line of houses; reassuring perhaps to the sick, an urban map-ghost laid for Sean. A school building now used as a timber yard, high rooms and steep roofs, the ornate cross-plates of lost door-handles still in place. Green Street, the street to the green in front of the church, one side thunderingly busy, the road polished by the rubber tyres and glinting in the low light, a soft burnish to the camber as we risk life and limb to cross into the churchyard. Local placenames as family names, Halsall, Aughton, Scarisbrick, the halves of stories and lives, the richness of lives reduced to dates and places and the accident of names. Crisp initials, low sunlight, intense cold.

After warming in the library – surprised by the bustle, the warmth, our voices oddly loud as if we are too used to speaking against the traffic – we retraced Sarah’s walk down to the Market cross for the last time, a route she could have walked from the station, the steepness of the old road up the gentle hill towards Burscough. Walks need an end, a formality; so we officially finished at the Buck i’the Vine, an old coaching inn, a loose connection with Shakespeare and further buried Catholic rebellion. (And earlier we had seen an ornamental plate for sale, Shakespeare as the Official English Great Artist, the Swan of Avon, staring mutely from the ceramic towards the wall of the barn where his makeshift company may have performed. Paths cross and recross in a small town, backtracking and sidestepping; urban exploration.)

And finally the route to the station as Sarah would have walked to catch the train, as her great grandson did, past the gentle coil of silver Kells chain on the wall, still unclaimed, unrecognised. In dark and cold we separated.

Hliterland

Litherland mural, painted by Steve des Landes, 2005

I wrote this in response to the landscapes of Litherland on Merseyside, a modern suburb with Norse roots. I ran a series of workshops to come up with ideas for the mural.

What is here today? A grey winter landscape, a tenacious urban suburb clinging to the swell of the docks, the thunder of road traffic, lorries, vans, a London landscape. Dusty concrete, litter, amputated and terraced streets, unexpected avenues of semis. Yet from the train there are trees and woods – overgrown nature parks, flooded allotments – abandoned attempts at leisure woodland, wild green space. And in the abandonment grand ideas are fulfilled; left alone nature creates a grey wooded landscape that cannot be radically dissimilar to the one that the Vikings saw from the river.

The Norse called it Hliterland, this fall of land from Hatton Hill. Did it then have an older name, a Gaelic name, unrecorded, forgotten? Were they watched from the trees, the newcomers with their dragon-ships – a grey morning, a sunny afternoon – when the Norse arrived for the first time and waded ashore, beaching the longboats for repairs? Unanswerable questions. Hliterland, the sloping place; the slope cut now, built over and sliced by docks, road, railway, canal, a crust of brick and concrete; but walkable still, this muscle-pulling hillside, up from the docks, the station, the lost shoreline. The road long-lost, if there ever was a path through trees to the hilltop. Today the path must be recut across tarmac and isolated cobbles, through an underpass, past too much dead land, land with no value. Tattersall and Seymour Streets, forgotten dignitaries with the names of disgraced conjurors. The Victorian suburb has in turn been hacked into chunks by roads for lorries heading for the docks; the walker comes across becalmed, silting stretches of respectable terraced housing, isolated from other streets by 1960s concrete. The unexpected majesty of the Red Lion public house, like a liner run ashore, well-maintained plaster ornament, crisp detail. The graffiti and indefinable menace of the canal. The ceaseless thunder of the road, like a mechanised Niagara.

Until the canal and the railway this was farming country, and after a thousand years the farms and cottages survived to be photographed on Moss Lane before falling, gently useless, to Victorian progress. Stone walls and stables survive on Field Lane, a path through the trees into Hatton Hill Park and the view back downhill to the river, a horizon of grain towers, cranes, wind turbines, tower blocks. The village survives in an echo, a row of shops on Sefton Street. And in place names; Field Lane, Wilson’s Lane, memories of fields and farms - and Moss Lane, the lane to the moss, the vast expanse of mere and fen covering much of southern Lancashire. A pattern of Norse settlers desperate for land, a pattern of villages that survives. Birkdale, Ormskirk, Toxteth. Are they here still? Are there sifts of Norse blood in these paint-spattered anxious children with their Irish names – Kara, Brendan, Caitlin, Kyle?

A different route down the hillside to the station, different cobbles, different tarmac. A small cluster of rusted street signs - Beach, Marina, Ocean – a yearning for the sea; as if the beaching of the dragon-ship was a regretted thing, that what should have been temporary became wrongly permanent, sea-warriors become farmers, settlers. A scattering of shell-names if this buried Norse village has been ashore too long, and longs once again for the open sea.