Merlin Betts
Second night in the Piero Lounge. Now the confirmed refuge for any wary (or weary) stranger when dusk falls grey and harsh over Nuneaton – if that stranger is sober and needs to charge multiple electrical devices. Doubtful that it’ll last with so few covers on Friday and Saturday night, but the place presents a rare calm in the surrounding storm. Cozy lighting, dark wood, flowery beige wallpaper and many pictures. It reminds you vaguely of everything before 1950, the time when this town believed it had a future.
The choice of décor feels more postmodern jukebox, electroswing and Prohibition than it does Edwardian muted grandeur, but even so the black and white pictures next to me: a wedding scene circa 1955, the top half of a bathing man in front of a pier (not portly but clearly not made in a gym), and a young boy in suspenders blowing bubbles from a pipe. Rumours of what might be the local past.
Nuneaton’s a wasteland. An Edwardian boom town that rose with the house of cards that was the British Empire at its ‘peak,’ paying for the local coalfields to be thoroughly raped. But the town crashed with everything else. Stuck out of time. The red dead Debenhams building forms a huge complex spanning multiple streets and a filthy river – constructed as the beating heart of the town centre and now noticeably stopped. Replaced by two plastic shopping malls. Misery permeates everything, except maybe the migrant population, which seems to have its own tempered sense (senses) of optimism and community. The elderly and disabled flocking into Spoons at all hours have something too – perhaps a halfway cheery desire to grasp onto life and play out its routines. They remember worse things as well as better.
I like this lounge because of the name and because it was quieter and had more of a young, family vibe than whatever else I’d passed. My only other choices were a range of Nepalese restaurants and a series of Turkish barbers – all looking welcoming and reliable enough, but not keen on serving me coffee just so I could sit and drain their power, and speculate on their role in town society. If you wanted pubs, music, serious drinking, pool – there were endless venues, some sawdust, some carpet, some grey paint and varnish.
It took a while to realise that the Nepalese connection is to the Queens Gurkha Signals based nearby. If you know how the Gurkhas have been treated by Britain, you can guess how their presence fits into the general atmosphere, but they seem to be a well-liked and accepted part of town society. The council gave their regiment (30 Signals) its highest accolade, the Freedom of the Borough, back in 2002. The towns worst hit by imperialism tend to be the most proud – what other choice do they have?
Last night it smelt of strong piss by the bar at the Piero, a waft every 20mins or so, and I’m still not sure why. Behind the scenes strange rumblings. Cold food emanating from the kitchen. Chain ownership, maybe Heineken. The staff are sad but no more than in other places. Perhaps the facade conceals just another failed promise of the good life, the life less miserable.
I wandered town earlier before the nightmarish dusk. Street upon street, straight, preened, working class terraced houses from 1890-1905. Money was spent – extravagantly it seems, by today’s standards – housing the coal miners and railway workers that’d make Nuneaton’s industrial identity. At least, I assume so. Hard to dig up facts here. No-one seems to care much whether Stanley Brothers Ltd built houses as well as owning pits. All anyone wants to know now is where to spend – cheapest place? Swankiest place? All united by one motive. We’ve apparently forgotten the lesson that a community functions better than dispossessed wage-slaves and consumers, whether that community works for itself or a capitalist overlord.
There’s a rough mess of bricks in the town centre where several Edwardian buildings used to be. Things that said “co-operative” and “social” in large friendly letters on the municipal but decorative facade. Tinged with the hope of the early Labour movement. Loosely and randomly torn down, many others ripped but still standing, still hosting homes and businesses. One battered structure remaining in the eye of the crater, somehow saved the executioner’s axe, but mortally wounded, ready to collapse. It all seems to mean nothing, no plan, no crews. Probably a development is trying to sprout but instead it acts like a cancer, sucking out the life around it. Or maybe I’m still too sentimental about the bad old days. No, the town centre shopping malls probably did much the same as they were being built after the war.
You see a lot of aerosol artwork around, a multi-coloured light display outside a recently polished town hall, and the occasional public sculpture (including a water fountain that could cause a hosepipe ban). Someone gave the council an arts budget, but it wasn’t enough for the task at hand. You don’t have the obvious galleries, studios and workshops of a town like Hastings – and even there who can say if it really helps the vast majority of locals in hillside bungalows and housing association council estates?
There is a Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery I missed, looking stately and obsessed with the memory of George Eliot; and a £750,000 grant was recently announced for a Creative Explorers project. But money trickles fast, sprayed walls fade or get painted over, sculptures break or get removed.
It’s a sad place. Really no hope at all, just an empty vessel once filled by proud, careless aspiration – a gold and black liquid, a poison of its own. Glorious top funny man Norman Wisdom used to lease some of the old pithead buildings here, which makes you hope for something. But he turned them into a concrete block manufacturing works which ran until the 70s, and I’m not sure how much that helps.
Before the modern industry there might’ve been something else. Nuneaton effectively means ‘nunnery by the water’, so imagine a small medieval settlement, a village with a priory nearby. Some notable quirks – the priory was held by an order of Benedictines in which only females held spiritual positions. The men there were secular staff and so perhaps could be considered inferior to the nuns, and in particular their Abbess.
The nearby settlement expanded steadily alongside the priory, gaining the right to hold a regular market and an annual fair, which in turn attracted specialists – craftsmen, merchants. By the time Henry VIII got rid of the priory, the town was capable enough to stand up on its own. It had a school, ironworking industry, early coal mining, and silk weavers. At this point you’re looking at a population of about 2,000 people, which was big at the time.
In the late 1800s, industrialisation and railways stripped most of that out, replacing the village crafts atmosphere with factories, train yards, bulk homes for an influx of thousands of workers. Just before the influx started (we’re talking the 1870s, perhaps at the height of the town’s pre-industrial success) the old priory was restored. A bare ruin thoroughly scavenged for stone, refreshed, redeemed, ‘heralding the new era’.
And suddenly we’re back, more or less, at today. I look about the Abbey Church grounds, sipping a bottle of strong cider, contemplating the shrine in the ruins where ashes are scattered. I look at the new stonework, recently and fancily repointed it seems. I search for the doors. Locked. Wistfully recall those lost country churches whose doors are always open, to friend or foe. Sanctuary! Sanctuary!
Is there a lesson to be learned here? I’d say it’s pretty clear: you have an industry based on extraction of wealth (or wealthy minerals); so wealth is going to be extracted. And when it’s all been pulled out, you’re left with what remains: the ghosts of those who worked for it, and their homes; the pomp of those who got it, and their faraway manors.
Thanks to Rubbish Computer on Wikimedia Commons for “Nuneaton old co-op demolition”.