Shitty Breaks E-Book

Ben Aitken

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 444

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Not everything that glitters is gold - which is why bestselling travel writer Ben Aitken went to Wolverhampton for the weekend. Over the next year, the author of AChip Shop in Poznań and The Gran Tour visited the least popular places in the UK and Ireland for a city break, as ranked by national tourism boards. The motivation wasn't to take the biscuit or to stick the boot in, but to seek out the good stuff, to uncover the gems, to have a good time. By doing so, he hoped to demonstrate that anywhere - like anyone - can be interesting and nourishing and enjoyable if approached in the right fashion (i.e. with your eyes closed). Ben stayed in a treehouse in Newry, went skydiving in Milton Keynes and suffered jellied eels in Chelmsford. He went curling in Preston, to the football in Wrexham and had far too much craic in Limerick. The result is a celebration of the underdog; a hymn to the wrong direction; and evidence that there's no such thing as a shitty break. What's more, by spreading its attention and affection beyond the usual suspects (which are often overdone and overpriced), Shitty Breaks promotes a less expensive and more sustainable brand of travel and tourism.

Leseprobe

Also by Ben Aitken

Dear Bill Bryson: Footnotes from a Small Island

A Chip Shop in Poznan: My Unlikely Year in Poland

The Gran Tour: Travels with My Elders

The Marmalade Diaries: The True Story of an Odd Couple

Here Comes the Fun: A Journey into the Serious Business of Having a Laugh

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2025 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.com

ISBN: 978-183773-046-9

eBook: 978-183773-047-6

Text copyright © 2025 Ben Aitken

The author has asserted his moral rights.

This is a work of nonfiction, but the names and some identifying details of characters have been changed throughout to respect the privacy of the individuals concerned.

Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make acknowledgement on future editions if notified.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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Contact Details: [email protected], [phone]

For all things unsung. (Including Leslie from Norwich.)

Contents

Preamble

1Sunderland: I could have been in LA

2Chelmsford: Three pies, three mash, and lots of chilli vinegar

3Preston: Nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so

4Wolverhampton: The best thing since avocado

5Wrexham: Too much love can kill a place

6Limerick: A chicken fillet roll from the SPAR near his mammie’s house

7Newry: The kind of landscape that makes you think twice

8Milton Keynes: Radical Optimism

9Bradford: A pair of alpacas called Blur and Oasis

10Newport: You knows it

11Gibraltar: Very strange but very nice

12Dunfermline: The somewhat loveliness of anything and anywhere

Acknowledgements

Preamble

From a young age I’ve always done two things – barked up the wrong tree and backed the underdog. As a kid, I demanded to be bathed in the kitchen sink. I insisted on odd socks and preferred the company of pensioners to the company of my classmates, the latter seeming to me – and I had a good view – to be a few sandwiches short of a picnic. I got into S Club 7 when they were going out of fashion; moved to Poland when the reverse journey was trending; and subscribed to The Oldie at the age of 32. In light of the above, becoming a cheerleader for the likes of Wolverhampton and Preston was perhaps always on the cards.

But what prompted such behaviour? The contrary streak? The wrong trees? The underdogs? It wasn’t an intellectual stance, that’s for sure. Nor was it a moral position. And I didn’t think it made me cool either. Then why? At risk of sounding dramatic, I got bullied a fair bit at school. I was never in a headlock for more than five minutes, and it was never about my race or my faith or where I grew up. Instead it was about my weight, the fact that I got free school dinners, and the fact that I wore corduroy flares on a mufti day once. In any case, all the while this bullying was happening, I remained fairly confident that it wasn’t entirely deserved. For at the same time as I was getting it in the neck, I was also clocking an assortment of wallies and plonkers winning all the attention and esteem and plaudits and prizes and status and popularity and so on. While you couldn’t have called me especially insightful back then, it was nonetheless clear to me that life wasn’t straightforwardly meritocratic. I’m not saying I was an absolute legend and the popular kids were all scumbags and worthless. Not at all. We were all just kids growing up, with braces or glasses or acne or whatnot, and yet, by some peculiar matrix, some were being vaunted and admired and gushed over and fawned upon, while others were being punched and ignored and disregarded and sat upon. That’s what got me. That’s what interested me. That’s what stayed with me. That’s what made me, twenty years later, head to Sunderland for a holiday in October.

I don’t bring up my experience of being on the wrong end of the status quo to win sympathy or curry favour. I bring it up simply because it was telling. It told me that not everything that glitters is gold, that cream isn’t alone in being able to rise to the top (crap can manage it too), and that popularity is by no means a reliable indicator of quality. All of these lessons, incidentally, were later confirmed when, in 2003, Love Actually was a massive hit at the box office. From that day on, I knew for certain that the system couldn’t be trusted. And from that day on, I had an irresistible soft spot for the wrong direction, for the film that tanked, for the actor getting no work, for all the stuff I wasn’t being asked to look at or listen to or value or patronise – like Milton Keynes, for example.

It’s worth saying at this juncture that a thing being unfavoured or unsung or entirely ignored is no guarantee that it will issue a pleasant or meaningful encounter. The biggest lemon I’ve ever met was an historically overlooked fisherman from Grimsby. Nonetheless, it seems to me that there’s something inherently pleasing and important about heading in the wrong direction, about heading outside the box, about looking beyond the pale, in search of joy and beauty and fascination and so on. The world we live in is forever trying to sell us dummies or pull the wool over our eyes, and so doing to render us blind and insensitive to all sorts of wonderful things. More fool us if we keep adoring the emperor’s new clothes – and busting a gut to do so – when there’s so much low-hanging fruit elsewhere, going unpicked, unsampled, unloved. It’s too early for banging drums so I’ll just say this: things in the shade are often most brilliant.

It’ll be clear by now that the aim of this book was to visit (and hopefully celebrate) less popular cities. But how did I decide where to go? Well, I didn’t follow a hunch. Instead, my route was driven by data. In a burst of professionalism that was frankly out of character, I contacted some tourism boards and got hold of some stats, which told me where people were willingly going for a weekend away. When I got hold of that league table, and saw Edinburgh near the top and Leeds in midtable and Portsmouth flirting with danger just above the drop zone, I turned it upside down and went from there. The twelve cities that feature in the pages to come are some of the least visited in the UK and Ireland (or were in 2019 at least).1 I visited them in good faith, with an open mind, and on my own dime. My goal wasn’t to take the piss or stick the boot in, but rather to seek out their assets and virtues. In those instances when neither asset nor virtue were forthcoming, I just sat on a bench, ate two sausage rolls from Greggs, and daydreamed about Rome and Vienna.

I don’t mind offering a gentle spoiler here. I had a flipping good time. I may well be easily pleased (my idea of a peak experience is finding out you’ve got ten minutes more than you thought you did), but still, every single one of the trips I took proved nourishing and enjoyable and full of surprises. Grayson Perry popped up in Chelmsford. I ran into Hockney in Bradford. Beyoncé made an appearance in Sunderland. Epic history reared its head in Preston. Limerick proved the match of Dublin, while the Northern Irish city of Newry delivered a five-star treehouse. Every city left its mark, made its case, put a decent foot forward. And by doing so each city made a slight mockery of the league table, which has them down as more or less pointless. Don’t get me wrong, the destinations weren’t faultless. Some of the places I visited were definitely easier to enjoy than others, and posed tricky social, cultural and political questions that couldn’t, in good conscience, be shied away from. But on the whole, and for the most part, and with the caveat that one person’s cup of tea is another’s idea of hell, my shitty breaks were nothing of the sort. Off we go.

_________________

1 This isn’t necessarily true of Gibraltar, but I went there anyway. Author’s prerogative.

1

Sunderland

I could have been in LA

I didn’t so much arrive in Sunderland as wake up in it. My train got in late, you see, and when I emerged from the station it was raining old ladies and sticks (as they say in Welsh), so I blew a fiver getting cabbed the three miles along the coast up to my digs, The Seaburn Inn, where I fell asleep cradling a cup of tea and watching the first episode of Dinnerladies, which I had wrongly supposed to be set hereabouts.

It wasn’t until the next morning, when I drew the curtains and stepped out onto the balcony, that I got what I was looking for – an eyeful of Sunderland. I was confronted with a massive outdoor swimming pool (known as the North Sea) and a sizable stretch of sandy coastline. People were jogging, lots of them, and one couple was even rollerblading while holding hands. I could have been in LA. I confess it came as a bit of a shock. A gobsmacking beach wasn’t something I associated with Sunderland. I took a deep breath – the prelude to action – and it smelt of bacon, umpteen rashers of said, their collective waft having escaped a beachside kiosk and drifted invitingly towards me.

Ah, Sunderland. Queen of Northumbria, cradle of Alice in Wonderland, former shipbuilding heavyweight … but also routinely denigrated, reflexively shunned, automatically pooh-poohed – and not only by Geordies, that well-meaning tribe who reside ten miles up the coast in a big village called Newcastle. Although by no means a perfect metric, a recent International Passenger Survey revealed that Sunderland was just about the least likely place a passenger arriving in the UK would be heading to. The only places less likely were Douglas and Ayr. In the 850-page Lonely Planet guide to England, meanwhile, Sunderland isn’t mentioned at all – ouch. When I told the lady running the café on the train that I was going on holiday to Sunderland, she stopped what she was doing and asked me two things: 1) was I right in the head, and 2) would I pop into the bookies on Station Street to make sure her mother wasn’t in there? I think it’s fair to deduce that, at the time of my visit, Sunderland wasn’t at the top of many bucket lists.

Nonetheless, up on my balcony, surveying the scene, weighing up the sea, I felt unreasonably excited. It felt good to be abroad, and unmoored, and carefree, and clueless, with nothing more pressing ahead than a stroll and a butcher’s, my ordinary responsibilities hundreds of miles away, minding their own business. Item number one on my agenda: a clueless mooch.

My hotel was enwrapped by Lowry Road. This didn’t take me by surprise – I knew that the painter was fond of this spot. He would come across from Lancashire, from the other side of the Pennines, for a change of scene, for a new shade of grey. Sunderland became a bit of a bolthole for L.S. Lowry; a place where he could escape the pressures of his escalating success. Lowry saw something in Sunderland, something that others didn’t, something worth capturing, something worth getting down. He stayed in the same room at the same hotel on each of his visits, and according to the bloke that served him dinner each evening, Lowry never deviated from a menu of cold roast beef, chips, gravy, orange juice, sliced banana, fresh cream, and coffee. The artist clearly knew a good thing when he saw one.

To work up an appetite for such a feast, Lowry would walk south along the promenade, down to the river and the shipyards (of which there were hundreds), where he’d watch all the workers spilling out, heading for home, dashing for the tram or the bus, pulling their collars up against a crisp northeasterly and thanking their lucky stars it was that time of day again. My dad used to work in the shipyard at Portsmouth. He said that come knocking-off time, thousands of men could be seen streaming out of the shipyard’s gate on bicycles. My dad didn’t think anything of it – it was too normal to be interesting – but Lowry obviously did. As chance would have it, Lowry spotted a young girl sketching the workers once, as they spilled and headed, and dashed and pulled, and he made a point of saying: ‘Nee lass, that’s not how you do it; that’s not how you do men in a hurry; give it ’ere.’

To my mind, Lowry distinguished himself as a painter by shining light where it wasn’t customarily shone; by highlighting shady spots and overshadowed slices of life and showing them to be beautiful – if only in a quiet way, a humble way, an accidental way. As I stood on the promenade, facing the sea, polishing off my morning bap (or is it a cob around here?), it wasn’t hard to see why Lowry held this bit of the world in such high regard. I’m not much of an aesthete, but it seemed to me that the palette was a winner: the steely sea and sky above roughly golden sand. Lowry’s 1966 painting The North Sea – a large seascape that captures exactly this palette – went for a million quid not long ago. Just think how much sliced banana and cream he could’ve got for that. Interestingly, I’m told there’s one of Lowry’s paintings in the Morrisons supermarket just along from my hotel, hanging proudly, and mostly ignored, above the hot sausage rolls. There’s something fitting, and lovely, and very Sunderland about that. At least I think there is.

Also lovely was the pair of chaps in front of me now, who were painting the railing that runs the length of the promenade, rolling black over green. On the face of it, one was getting paid by the hour and the other by the job. The former was being fabulously creative in finding ways not to crack on. They had one of those industrial-sized radios, the type that could survive a nuclear disaster. It was playing The Beautiful South.

Just along from the painters, a woman was walking her dog on the beach. She was on the phone and playing fetch at once – you know, getting things done, being proactive – but then somehow got her wires crossed and instead of chucking the tennis ball threw her phone. I enjoyed the woman’s reaction to her mistake, which was dramatic and panicked and instinctive at first, but then muted and measured, as if trying to give the impression that she did this sort of thing all the time. Saving face, I guess. I had a good view of the balls up, for the land had climbed by this point, up to Roker Cliff Park, which offers a decent vantage point. The elevation belittled the beach, squashed the sea, conjured a new frame entirely, as contours are wont to do. It suits me fine when the lie of the land is all over the show.

The park is dominated by a lighthouse. I gleaned from an info panel that said lighthouse had recently upped sticks; that it used to be down there by the harbour, rather than up here not by the harbour. I like the idea that lighthouses can move, that their lanterns can shift, that the focus and scope of their light can alter. It bodes well for places in the dark. They call this coastal stretch the Roker Riviera, I’m told, with Roker being this part of Sunderland, and Riviera being something else entirely. It’s a tongue-in-cheek appellation, but it holds up under scrutiny (just). The three-mile stretch is no one-trick pony: it’s got flat stretches, rocky outcrops, sheer drops, idiosyncratic geology. The pier down at this end of things, Roker Pier, is an accidental beauty. Its graceful brick curve was, of course, a purposeful construction – to enclose, to shelter – but there’s no doubt that beauty was a byproduct of its overarching intent. A beauty in the making, if you will.

The pier was finished in 1903, having been designed by Henry Hay Wake, who oversaw its construction from a nice semi-detached gaff up on the cliff. I fancy Henry headed down periodically, to say to some bricky or another, ‘Nee lad, that’s not how you build a pier in a hurry!’ There’s a little plaque outside Henry’s old house, giving away his deed. I love such plaques, such small displays of public affection, such quiet calls for attention, for an engineer or a poet, or a pair of local sisters who smuggled 29 Jewish families out of Germany and Austria in the 1930s (that one’s on Croft Avenue, near a pub called Chesters), though I do fancy that such plaques could be a bit more down-to-earth sometimes, remembering an Alan who stubbed his toe on this spot in an otherwise unremarkable decade, or a Shelia who had eleven children at this address, not one of them thanking her for it. If only for a giggle, you understand, to lighten the mood of those going about town, and to show that all sorts go into the making of a place. I reckon plenty of local treasure would be uncovered. Tall orders and small miracles, feats of courage and genius and kindness by everyday folk, to complement the do-gooding of the illustrious.

One thing that could be remembered hereabouts is the time the current captain of Sunderland AFC saved a labrador from drowning. I was told the story by a fella turning an old tram shelter into a café, just along from the pier. I asked him for the time initially, as a way into some chitchat, but he said he didn’t know because his phone was in the van. Then I told him I was on holiday, and in thanks he told me that the Sunderland captain saved a labrador from drowning just over there, saw it struggling in the surf then stripped off and did a proper Baywatch job. Apparently the Sunderland supporters now sing about the episode when they concede a goal and have nothing else to be happy about. There’s a lighthouse at the end of Henry’s pier, for the record, and unlike the one up the road, this one is wearing a Sunderland strip – red and white stripes. There must have been a few times when, short of bright ideas, and losing 3–1 at home, the Mackem fans would have happily seen the lighthouse relocated and stuck up front.2

At this end of the promenade, down by the mouth of the Wear, the railing’s fresh black paint, I couldn’t help but notice, was starting to flake. The green was already coming through again. Which means that as soon as that duo in the overalls were finished up at the northern end, they’d be back down here to start all over again. They had a job for life. I’d love to see a Lowry painting of those two, eternally applying a fresh lick of paint, for no better reason than to make the experience of walking Sunderland’s prom that little bit nicer. A proper pair of Mackems.3

I continued past the North Dock and picked up the north bank of the river. It was fairly quiet, tranquil even, but that’s a new thing, because for hundreds of years this part of Sunderland would have been hectic with effort and toil, enterprise and endeavour. Shipbuilding was Sunderland’s thing – from wood through iron to steel – and its associated industries – rope, masts, blocks, sails – added further ballast to the local economy. By the early twentieth century, Sunderland’s shipbuilding was second to none, with scores of yards knocking out hulls and decking and rigging and rivets, left, right and centre. But, as sure as eggs is eggs, things changed. The inter-war depression, plus foreign competition, sent the UK’s shipbuilding industry into a gradual decline, which had a devastating social impact in Sunderland. And it wasn’t just shipbuilding that was floundering. The local coal trade was going up in smoke, too, with Sunderland’s last pit closing in 1993. If the Japanese car manufacturer Nissan hadn’t pitched up in the 1980s, and enlisted thousands to start putting together Bluebirds, the mood locally might have soured to the point of rebellion, and a march on London – like the one from Jarrow in 1926 – would have been a distinct possibility. Make no mistake, Lowry would have had much to sketch down on the banks of the Wear, not all of it bonny.

Another of Sunderland’s old industries that waxed and waned and eventually disappeared was glass. The city was well placed to knock out windows. Trading ships, having dumped their loads in Europe, would return carrying the perfect sand as ballast, which, along with local limestone and coal, facilitated the glassmaking industry. I came to the National Glass Centre now. Opened in 1998, the centre is dedicated to promoting glass in all its forms. As diverting as trying to absorb hundreds of years of industrial history can be, it was the glassblowing demonstration that truly got me going. For about half an hour, I enjoyed the spectacle of a young blower (one of the uni students, though presumably not a fresher) turning a portion of molten glass into a vessel fit for tulips or pasta.

First the student (let’s call them Tim) fished out a dollop of molten glass from a furnace that had been burning for years at over a thousand degrees. He then rolled this red-hot dollop across a bed of metal oxide crystals, as if dipping whipped ice-cream into crushed nuts (it is these crystals that give the glass colour). Tim then returned the nutty blob to the furnace until the crystals had been incorporated and the glass was once again malleable, at which point he injected some volume into his budding bowl or vase with a few puffs on his blower. He repeated this process a few times, the vivid orange balloon growing with each fresh bellow.

As impressive as all that was, it wasn’t until Tim began shaping the scorching glass with his hand that I was persuaded of the man’s brilliance. As his left hand spun the glass, his right hand, covered with a damp mitten made of the Daily Telegraph, shaped it. Now and again he would blow into his pipe or get up and start swinging the whole thing about like a lanky sabre (don’t try this at home). Taken together – the blowing, the swinging, the spinning, the shaping – it was a somehow-musical thing of ambidextrous beauty. When the vase was reckoned done – its bottom sealed, its top curved just so – it was left to cool in the oven, which hardly sounds right but there you go.

It was a beguiling half-hour. Not just the sight of the glassblowing, but the very fact of it also. I marvelled at what this one demonstration pointed to, what it contained, what it depended on. The millennia of gradual advance. The centuries of accumulated knack. The amount of trial and error. The volume of brilliance and endeavour required to push the technology on, to improve the gizmos, to refine the science – until it was at a point where a wee slip of a lad, with a bandaged arm and eyes that hinted at too many pints in The Peacock, could turn a cup of sand into a vase of flowers, in front of an audience of four and in a matter of minutes, by recourse to a range of ancient paddles and tweezers, jacks and puffers, and with the help of a steaming mitten made out of yesterday’s news, as though there were truly nothing to it. I’ll never look through a window the same way again. I raise my glass.

Around the corner from the National Glass Centre was St Peter’s Church, which used to be an Anglo-Saxon monastery and seat of learning, and a rather important one, too. Said seat was sat on by none other than the Venerable Bede – who was a monk-scholar from the age of seven, if you’ll credit that. Back in the late 600s, and while resident at St Peter’s, Bede completed the pithily titled Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People), a feat which earned him the title ‘The Father of English History’, and made him, technically, somewhat responsible for such things as corned beef, Nigel Farage, and Gareth Southgate’s penalty miss against Germany. Bede wasn’t just into history, though. When he wasn’t bowling around Monkwearmouth (as this part of Sunderland was then known), he was swatting up on this, that and the other. His scholarship covered a wide range of subjects, including astronomy, theology, science, music and language. If the Venerable Bede was on Mastermind, his specialist subject would have to be his own flipping brilliance.

‘Venerable Bede. How clever are you?’

‘Exceptionally.’

‘Incorrect.’

‘Uniquely?’

‘Wrong.’

‘Unconscionably?’

‘Afraid not.’

‘Fuck it, I pass.’

‘You’re off the chart clever.’

‘Ah, yeah. That’s right. Silly me.’

I spent a happy ten minutes exploring the church and its grounds. I was pleased to learn that bits of the original monastery remain intact, notably most of the west wall and the porch. The guy who had the church erected in the first place – one Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian nobleman – spared no expense. He even had cutting-edge glassmakers over from France to do the windows. Sounds like the sort of bloke who’d want you to take your shoes off when you come in. Which isn’t what the Vikings did, I’m afraid to report, when that mob shipped up a couple of hundred years later, full of goodwill and hygge. They didn’t think much of St Peter’s. Didn’t care for the fancy illustrated bibles, or the nice windows. Torched the lot.

Arguably, though, it’s less the building itself that is of interest here, and more what that building stood for – learning, knowledge, enlightenment. Along with the affiliated monastery at Jarrow, this place was essentially Oxford and Cambridge plus Harvard under one roof and on steroids. In short, what was done here was groundbreaking, was genuinely world-leading, and for the second time in an hour, I was forced to reckon with some big questions, about knowledge and existence and how slight and puny and pathetic my contribution to the human race is destined to be when compared to the pioneering people who rolled this whole circus forward; to reckon with the fact that, next to the likes of that lot, whose brain and brawn and bravery contributed to the betterment of mankind, I’m the sort that just watches them do it and scratches their head, or weighs up the fruits of their brilliance and toil and cunning and graft – a simple bowl, say – and can do nothing better in the face of it than pour in some Shreddies.

I came to Wearmouth Bridge, a good-looking green sweep, its appeal heightened by its purpose and point – to join, to connect, to overcome. When it was first built, back in 1796, it connected the two halves of the emerging town, and helped forge a shared identity, a kilometre zero from which Sunderland spoked and sprawled and sparked. Halfway across the bridge, I paused to read an embellished section of the railing. ‘NIL DESPERANDUM AUSPICE DEO’ was spelt out in wrought iron – none will be desperate under the guidance of God. Try sharing that sentiment with the umpteen who have called it a day here. Pinned to the D of ‘DEO’ was a handwritten note: ‘You are worth more than you think.’ Hear, hear.

It was about time I ate something, so I popped into Dickson’s on the high street.

‘Cheesy chips pie, please,’ I said.

‘Cheesy chips pie?’

‘Yeah, someone told me about it.’

‘Someone’s having you on. You not from round here?’

‘No, I’m on holiday.’

‘I’ve just got back from holiday.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Went to Greece. Husband got arrested for driving a moped into a supermarket.’

‘Crikey.’

‘It’s the ouzo.’

‘I see.’

‘No, I’m only kidding.’

‘Ah.’

‘He was as sober as a judge. Have you tried pease pudding?’

I hadn’t, and then I had, and then I wished I hadn’t. Yellow split peas, water, salt, spices – a soup that is left to cool and harden, then slapped into a bap as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Soup in a roll! When the lady asked if I’d ever had a saveloy dip, I said I wasn’t that way inclined and scrammed.

I wandered around the centre for half an hour and reached the conclusion that you couldn’t, with a straight face, call it conventionally good-looking. The city has known too much grief and strife for that to be the case; it’s done too many days’ hard work, and copped too many bombs, for it to be winning any beauty pageants. But a city is more than how it appears – much more. Just because a place is 90% neoclassical, doesn’t mean you’re going to have a laugh there, doesn’t mean it’s going to put a spring in your step. Besides, if it’s buildings that get you going, then Sunderland’s got the lot. Baroque. Gothic. Arts and Crafts. Modern. More Modern. Even More Modern. Detached piles, towering flats, terraces of one-storey redbrick cottages. And besides, value comes with scarcity, meaning the flashes of architectural splendour in Sunderland are better for being seldom.

I’d like to introduce you, at this stage, to something rather odd. The stottie. It’s essentially a bread roll on an industrial scale – you’d need a tectonic plate to serve one on. I got my first look of a stottie in the window of a bakery in The Bridges shopping centre, and it held my attention for at least a minute. The lady working in the bakery spotted me eyeing up her massive baps and rightly called me in to discuss the matter. I shared my opinion that one of the reasons the local football team hasn’t won a trophy since 1973 might be these rolls. She said I ought to invest in a pair.

‘I’m a bit intimidated by their girth, to be honest.’

‘Eeeeeee, you’ll be fine.’

‘You could ferry coal on these things down the Wear.’

‘You can only get ’em round ’ere.’

‘Yeah. I’m not surprised.’

‘You not from round ’ere?’

‘No, I’m on holiday.’

‘Then take some home with yer. Yer family will be proud.’4

I know what you’re thinking – it’s about time he went skiing. And you’re right. It was about time. So I took the 33 bus out to the big Sainsbury’s in Silksworth, a couple of miles west of the city centre, then cut through the carpark and made my way towards the North East’s premier ski facility – 160 metres of potential catastrophe.

The first thing that occurred to me on seeing the slope at close quarters was that there wasn’t a flake of snow on the thing. They’re taking the piste, I thought. The slope, I quickly learned, is basically an old slag heap that’s been covered in a very abrasive material. There are some that lament the demise of British industry but if skiing is the result of post-industrialisation, then count me in. I paid my fifteen quid, got kitted out with boots and poles and gloves and helmet, proceeded to the foot of the slope in a fashion that couldn’t be described as elegant, then returned to the main building because I’d forgotten my skis.

Finally good to go, I went nowhere at all – preferring to tarry at the bottom considering the task ahead of me. No matter which way I looked at it, the task was anything but appealing: the quality of some things can’t be altered by perspective. It was the prospect of getting the button lift up to the top that bothered me most. I’ve been skiing half a dozen times, mostly when I lived in Poland where it was affordable, and I’ve always found getting up the slope more parlous than getting down it. Over the years, I’ve been able to refine my approach. I grab the pole, stick it between my legs, close my eyes and then hope for the best. The routine has only failed on two occasions, and I’ve come to believe that ‘grab, stick, close and hope’ is a mantra that can be profitably applied to other areas of life. On this occasion, things went quite well, until the pole yanked of a sudden and the button all but disappeared up my arse, causing my composure to plummet and my skis to squirt off in opposing directions, one towards Durham and the other towards Glasgow.

I hesitated at the top – but only because of the view, you understand. I could see a fair bit: the tall towers of downtown Sunderland, the long, winding Wear, the nascent ascent of a supermoon, and the outline of Hilton Castle, which is said to be haunted by the ghost of a lad who was murdered after trying it on with Baron Hilton’s daughter. Whether this was last year or many moons ago, I can’t say.

Another thing I could see from the summit was the Penshaw Monument, a Victorian folly based on a Greek temple that sits proud and daft atop Penshaw Hill. The folly is topless and listed and cut from a type of sandstone that started bright but has darkened with time, a progression many of us can relate to. At the bottom of Penshaw Hill – if I looked very hard and fantasised wildly – I could just about make out the fabled Lambton Worm. That’s a local legend and a half. In short, a lad goes fishing, catches a worm, tosses it in a well, and then sods off on a crusade. In the lad’s absence, the worm grows to a monstrous extent and then starts eating the local sheep and children. When the lad comes home from the crusade, and sees the havoc being wreaked by the giant worm, he does what all heroes would do in the same situation, which is to consult a woman from Durham, who says that the lad must 1) kill the worm in the River Wear, and then 2) kill the first living thing he encounters after doing the deed. If he doesn’t do the second bit (the woman from Durham is at pains to stress), the lad’s family will be forever cursed.

The lad and his dad hatch a plan: when the lad has killed the worm he will sound his horn, at which point the dad will release the family pet, Bruno, a French Bulldog who presumably consented to playing the role of sacrificial lamb. On paper it’s the perfect plan, but unfortunately something goes wrong during its execution, i.e. upon hearing the horn, instead of releasing the dog, the dad legs it down to the river to congratulate his son, who’s like, ‘Fuck’s sake, Dad’. The dad says, ‘Ah, shit’, runs back to get the dog, but of course it’s too late and the family is cursed. And that’s pretty much it. There are other versions of the story, but to be honest they’re a bit far-fetched by comparison. I’m pleased (and amazed) to report that an opera was written about the legend. The Lambton Worm (1978) was conceived by the composer Robert Sherlaw Johnson, with a libretto by the poet Anne Ridler.

When I finally took the plunge and began my descent down the bristly honeycomb, I skied like a wobbly, foulmouthed snail. So gradual was my descent, it must have appeared that I was trying to return to the top. I was well and truly out of my comfort zone – supposedly a good place to be, though I can’t say I thought much of it. The anticipated endorphins didn’t turn up, and the adrenaline that comes with panic failed to have a positive effect. When I bumped into an instructor halfway down, I was grateful for the respite. When she enquired what I was up to and I said I was on holiday, she wasn’t having any of it and radioed through to reception to do a background check. It was only when I started banging on about Roker Pier and the Lowry in the Morrisons that she accepted I was legit. When I asked whether she liked living in Sunderland, she said that she did, very much. When I asked why, she cited the city’s proximity to Newcastle and Durham, which is a bit like saying that you like England because it’s close to Wales. I managed three descents in my allotted two hours, then called it a day.

I took the bus back into town. After resisting The Blandford on Maritime Street (£2.80 a pint, bingo daily, free shot if you sing a song), and Speedy Turkish Barber on Holmeside (I’d rather my barber wasn’t in a rush), I proceeded to Mexico 70 on High Street West for some much-needed hand-pressed experimental tacos, having been tipped off by the driver of the 33 bus. The menu at Mexico 70 is about as posh as the people of Sunderland will tolerate, I fancy. My tacos were filled with Vietnamese beef shin, torched sweet peppers, agave syrup, watercress crema and Pico de Galla, who I thought played for Leeds. Eating my progressive concoctions perched on a stool in the front window, watching a Friday evening getting into its stride, I felt unquestionably happy. Some readers might not care for such brazen outbursts of feeling, but there it is. It was the being away, and the wet streets, and the fact that I’d survived the skiing, and the glistening Empire Theatre across the street, looking gorgeous and full of promise – that’s what did it, that’s what conjured the mood.

The Empire is an august establishment, its pale round tower beautified with pink bulbs and a green copper dome, the latter topped with a statue of Terpsichore, that Greek goddess of having a laugh, of cutting loose, of throwing some shapes. There’s a showbiz adage that says that ‘everybody dies in Sunderland’, hinting at an unforgiving local audience. It would appear there’s a speck of truth in the notion, for, back in 1976, when Sunderland was a town with a polytechnic and a river as busy as the Suez Canal, Carry On actor Sid James actually kicked the bucket at the Empire during a matinee of The Mating Game.

I know who wouldn’t have struggled to win applause at the Empire. A local boy called Len Gibson, who passed away in 2021, having just reached his century. I read about Len in a brilliant book about Sunderland by Marie Gardiner, a few weeks after my trip to the city. In short, Len was a local lad who found himself, aged 21, in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp during the Second World War, tasked with building the Burma railway. A keen banjoist, Len used his musical leanings to lift the morale of his campmates. He fashioned a guitar out of scrap wood, costumes out of mosquito netting, and then put on shows for the imprisoned. Even the Japanese officers would get in on the act, sitting cross-legged in the front row, dressed in their finest. For the length of the show, an illusion of peace prevailed, with sworn enemies laughing at the same daft capers. Len Gibson did three and a half years in that camp, catching malaria on twenty occasions and typhus whenever he had the time. One afternoon, after a shift on the railway, Len walked past the Japanese officers’ hut and saw a couple of bigshots burning documents. Len feared the worst: he knew his captors were under orders to kill all prisoners in the event of a Japanese defeat. An hour later, one of the officers approached Len and told him the war was over and he should get back to Sunderland ASAP. I like to think the clemency those prisoners were afforded had something to do with Len’s amateur dramatics, and the shared humanity they hinted at.

Across from the theatre is The Fire Station, a new venue for gigs and shows and whatnot, and next door to that is The Engine Room, a bar and restaurant in the habit of putting out beef cheeks and ceviche. The pair were opened in 2012. Wills and Kate popped up for the occasion. They weren’t the first royals to visit Sunderland. When QEII came up in 1946 to visit a shipyard and launch a new tanker, she opted to have lunch in the shipyard’s canteen. According to the Sunderland Echo, it ‘was the first time a royal had sat down at a staff canteen anywhere’, which goes to show how simple it is to distinguish yourself in that family. Prince Charles visited Sunderland with Diana in the eighties, and not to everyone’s delight. A local lad chose to don a pair of massive plastic lugholes for the occasion, and duly got arrested. You’d have thought the copper would have just had a quiet word in his ear. Looking at The Fire Station, it occurred to me that I had already, in less than a day, seen a fair bit of this sort of thing – of Sunderland making sound use of old rope. There’s the slag heap turned ski slope, the tram shelter on its way to becoming a café, and the old storage building in Seaburn that’s now a seafood joint called North, where you have to book a month ahead. What’s more, there’s a big hole just along the street, where the ice rink used to be, and I’d bet good money that it’s not being turned into a carpark.5

I went looking for a nightcap. There wasn’t a shortage of options. Cleo’s was a pink wonderland, Closet Bar wasn’t keeping anything under wraps, Life of Riley looked a bit much for me, and I didn’t think I’d last a minute in Infinity. Hundreds were pouring into The Point – though for what reason, I can’t say. In the end I plumped for a pub – The Ship Isis, a nice old boozer with a fetching façade and bygone aesthetic. It was only after being told that the pub is haunted by the ghost of a serial killer who dumped her victims in the Wear that the barman asked what I fancied.

‘I’ll have a non-alcoholic beer, please.’

‘Are you not from around here?’

‘No, I’m on holiday.’ (Yes, I know I say that a lot.)

‘On holiday where?’

‘Here.’

‘Yeah, but where? Ultimately, I mean? Like Durham or something?’

‘I’m on holiday here. In Sunderland. Nowhere else.’

‘Fuck me, that’s niche.’

There was a gig in train upstairs. I nipped up. The band was called Red Remedy. A fairly youthful outfit: the drummer kept being told to put his top back on by his mum. I nestled at the back, against a Victorian mantlepiece, where I chatted with the sound technician between songs. Yes, he was a Wearsider. Yes, he goes to the football. Yes, he’s had the beef shin tacos at Mexico 70.

‘Beyoncé played at the stadium a few months back,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know she was a footballer.’

‘It was £200 a ticket.’

‘Bit steep.’

‘That’s ten games of football.’

‘You’re right.’

‘It might be a load of rubbish, but the football gives you a reason, a target, a light at the end of the tunnel. It gives you something to moan about – again and again and again. I’ve got nothing against Beyoncé. I’m sure she’s a canny lass. But she’s got nothing on the football.’

On leaving the pub, I noticed an artwork on the side of a building around the corner. It said ‘Eeeeeee!’ in red neon. That was the extent of it. I’d heard the exclamation before, but didn’t know what it meant or conveyed, so buttonholed a passerby who duly spilt the beans – or tried to. They said you say it when something’s gone wrong. Or gone well. Or just gone – if someone has nicked your bike, for example. ‘You might say it when you see a new bairn,’ they said, ‘Or when you burn your toast. Or when Boris Johnson comes on the telly. You can say it when you like, I suppose.’ That cleared that up, then.

The artwork is called The Mackem Shibboleth (2023), which I dare say won’t mean much to people outside of the region. And that’s kind of the point. A shibboleth is basically something that’s particular to a certain group of people. It can be a phrase, or an exclamation, or a principle or a belief – anything that serves to identify a person or a people. The use of shibboleths is mostly harmless these days, but in the past, they could be a matter of life or death. In medieval Sicily, for example, local partisans were in the habit of killing anyone that couldn’t correctly pronounce the Sicilian word for chickpeas – cìciri. The Spanish did something similar with parsley, the Dutch with a seaside town called Scheveningen, and the Poles used lentils as a means of separating insider from outsider. The upshot of all this, as far as I can tell, is that you’d better know about eeeeeee! before you embark on a city break to Sunderland, in case you burn your toast or your bike gets nicked.

I made the mistake of getting a taxi. The cabbie was a Geordie, and was determined to share every thought he’d ever had. It wasn’t the accent that gave him away – I can’t tell them apart – but the nature of the op-ed that came at me with gusto. In short, Newcastle had been class all season. The Portuguese fella in midfield had been class, the manager had been class, the goalkeeper had been class, Ant and Dec had been class, and so had the supporters – the best in the country. He told me that while his mates worship the likes of Beardsley and Shearer and Ginola and Gascoigne, he’s always preferred the players nobody else makes a fuss about, the ones who do a lot of good stuff but get very little credit, which is why his dog’s called Barry Venison. (Me neither.)

As we approached my destination, and in an attempt to change the subject, I asked him what he thought about the city of Sunderland. At first he pretended he’d never heard of the place, before giving in to temptation and reciting what I reckon is probably his favourite monologue. ‘Hadaway it’s a city. It’s a carpark, man. If you’re in Sunderland, and you’re looking at something, chances are it’s a carpark. And the football team are a disgrace. Mind yer divvent get recruited. Them Mackems will ’ave anything wi’ two legs. Aw’ve a good mind te stay here and wait for ye – it won’t take yer long te come te yer senses. That’ll be eight quid, by the way.’ The fare had gone up since he pulled over. I addressed the fact. ‘Aye, it’s goon up. You’ve been chewing me ear off, man.’

Heading to the hotel, something stopped me in my tracks – the din coming from the neighbouring establishment, a load of stacked-up shipping containers called Stack. I went in to investigate. It was absolute bedlam – but in a nice way. A group karaoke session was in full flow. The glad rags were out, and half off in places. About a thousand revellers were singing along to pop songs, following the words on a big screen. I can’t say crowd karaoke is my thing, but with this lot it was irresistible. The choir was so unabashed, so happily unhinged, with each chorister wielding an inflatable oversize microphone. It was some spectacle, and it reached a crescendo during a recital of ‘Hopelessly Devoted to You’, with plenty of the singers giving every impression that they were anything but. It was a communal release, I guess, a collective end-of-week outpouring, a united kneading of that great knot of niggly emotion that builds up from Monday to Friday and needs somewhere to go. But I’m being presumptuous – they might all work Monday to Wednesday.

I made a peppermint tea and took it out onto the balcony, and there enjoyed the effect of a full moon on a dark sea as a mercifully subdued version of ‘Angels’ drifted across from the containers. I stared at the calm pane of dark glass, sturdy and ceaseless, bearing a path of moonlight which tapered on its way to Denmark and Holland. It had something of Sunderland about it, that moon over water. It was the scale of it, the wonder of it, the majesty of it, the play of dark and light – and the lack of people appreciating the damn thing.

Some of The Stack crowd had spilled out onto the promenade. I watched a squabble turn into an embrace, and then a pair of lads decide on a whim that they wanted to swap shoes. I’m not so naive as to think that such an early hours scene can’t have an uglier side, a regrettable element, when it topples over from joie de vivre into fisticuffs and nonsense. But nor am I so cynical to think that such a scene can’t be life-affirming and quietly glorious. A case in point: a canny lass just stripped down to her undies and made a beeline for the North Sea, while singing the chorus of ‘Angels’.

Sunderland reminds me of home, in a way. Of Portsmouth. The sea, the history, the industry, the loss of it, the football, the war damage, the housing estates, the streets in the sky, the terraces, the flashes of architectural dash that are better for being uncommon. And the people. I can’t claim to have met them all, but the ones I have met have been down to earth, willing to natter, self-deprecating, not indifferent to the occasional shandy, and as likely to save your dog as pinch your foldaway bike. Eeeeeee, I reckon I could live in the place.

The next morning, I took a bus into town. It dropped me on Bridge Street, outside the Fat Unicorn, an appealing peddler of cheese. I popped in for a sliver of something regional and was told by the cheesemonger that, looked at in a certain way, a rhinoceros is just a fat unicorn. Armed with that insight, I did a left onto High Street East. It was lower here. Closer to the riverside. Back in the day – the shipyards buzzing, women and girls wading waist-deep for small coals floating on the waves – conditions weren’t exactly palatial in this neck of the woods. Things were tight. Things were dense. Things were thick and packed. Three, four, five to a room. As the job market mushroomed, so did the population. Hopeful immigrants from Scotland and Ireland and Sunderland’s hinterland. With an effective sewage system still a long way off, the drinking water was nothing of the sort. As late as 1911, infant mortality was at 25% in Sunderland’s East End.

Needing a boost, I entered Pop Recs, a venue, hub, forum, gallery and, happily for me, a café knocking out insane focaccia as though it were a given. I ate one of the best sandwiches of my life while reading some poems on the wall – it didn’t take me long to decide that Pop Recs was my cup of tea. The community interest company was co-founded by Dave Harper, the drummer from local indie-rock outfit Frankie and the Heartstrings. Dave died in 2021 at the age of just 43. Pop Recs is a fine legacy. Finishing my sandwich, I clocked a sign saying that Pop Recs is no place for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny and disablism. Gutted, I made a swift exit.

I popped into the museum, a Victorian whopper at the bottom of town. As well as a Nissan Bluebird and the fossil of a flying reptile, there were some paintings that Lowry did of Sunderland. Lowry had a major exhibition here in 1942 – the deliverymen dodging the bombs as they unloaded the frames – and another big one twenty years later, not long after he’d started ordering his roast beef and orange juice up the road in Seaburn. When I went upstairs to have a look at the Lowry stuff, I overheard a girl, no older than seven, sharing her thoughts. She didn’t think much of them. Reckons the ‘council are having a laugh’. Adjoining the museum is Mowbray Park, wherein I found a gorgeous walrus posing by the lake and the Winter Gardens. The walrus honours that poem of Lewis Carroll, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’, thought to have been conceived and composed around these parts. In fact, it is believed that Lewis Carroll got thinking about Alice’s rabbit hole while walking along Roker Beach, when he clocked a young girl emerging from a tunnel. I should mention at this juncture a wonderful graphic novel by Bryan Talbot called Alice in Sunderland (2007), which tells the history of the city (if not Britain) in a delightfully idiosyncratic and bravura fashion. It really is something else. Well worth a look.