On small town life

In 2003 The Idler penned a book called Crap Towns. Its mission to seek out
and destroy by the medium of satirical prose such bastions of banality,
mundanity, misery and execrable architecture as Basingstoke, Morecambe,
Hull, and Milton Keynes. Somehow they missed the particular Crap Town that
figured in my life for 18 years, that still lurks at the edge of my solar system
occupying an orbit which boomerangs it back at me at least once a year
(typically at Christmas).
Newtown sounds innocuous enough, with that Ronseal ring. But of course its
not actually new anymore. Nor does its name enable you to categorically
pinpoint it on a map. Wikipedia lists 19 Newtowns in the UK give or take a
couple of double-barrelled cousins. To be specific Im talking about Y
Drenewydd, thats Welsh for Newtown since Newtown is Saesneg.
Yet it hardly matters where you stick the pin: Newtown is just like any other
small town a place where the unremarkable nature of it all is exactly whats
wrong.
The new-town name may be ill-fitting but its strangely apt a badge to a lost
past; a historical marker, with increasingly sarcastic undertones, pointing to
Newtowns inner disconnect: its abject failure to begin again, to rekindle the
newness where it all apparently began.
The Official Newtown website claims its market-town pedigree stretches back
to 1279 commerce the gathered knot pulling in a diaspora of sheep farmers
as a weaver draws thread. A cottage industry of wool weavers begat woollen
mills which dipped their wheels in the River Severn industrious jewels in the
crown of the town that carried local folk through the winter months when land
lay locked up under an icy floor.
Now theres a Chippy at the top of town. Beyond it the narrow mill workers
cottages still stand, cheek-by-jowl, creeping Sisyphus-like up the hill home
to college students, hopefully just passing through, or first-time buyers doing
time on the bottom rung. Three floors high, barely a room apiece, their first
ever residents must have lodged right on top of each other like knots on a
string.
Newtowns newer additions a constellation of housing estates spreading
over the hills which encircle the market-street, river-threaded heart of the
place have the prerequisite hangdog, jobless air. Garth Owen,
Maesyrhandir, Maesydail, Treowen, Trehafren, Vaynor. 1940s and 60s
council houses grouped like prison blocks into numbered units their tiny
square windows either netted or blank as a stare.
Yes there are some modern new builds too: identikit red-brick boxes in
compact cul-de-sacs, all prefabricated porches and decorative white wooden
trim; built new, yes, but still born old. Their white-lined windows look inwards,
setting brick backs to the horizon shouldering small-town life by walling off
the possibility of something more.
Its difficult to pinpoint exactly where the despair resides. Its not just the
unloved and unlovely council houses, the cramped terraces, the starter
homes, the joblessness, the factory workers in boiler suits clocking on and
clocking off. Not just the concentric streets that converge at and always seem
to bring you back to the same T-junction, the shops that havent changed in
20 years, the countless pubs so many, more even than the bafflingly
innumerable denominations of churches, nor just the daytime drunks, boy
racers and small-town pierced & tattooed punks, the underage drinkers, the
oh-so familiar faces & places, the inexorable late night trips to Spar.
Its the long slow descent of it all that installs yesterdays High School
teenager behind Perspex at the Post Office counter, ensures the local paper
writes up the arrival of McDonalds and Tesco for years and years before. Its
death by a thousand cuts and knowing its happening; knowing you can no
more stop it than you can stop the river pulling its endless thread of silver on
and on, through and through, every day drawing it imperceptibly that little bit
tighter, forever and ever, Amen.
More than 700 years have drained down the river since Newtown got its shiny
new name, shifting the weavers and their looms into the past. Ironys last
laugh? The proximity of a Laura Ashley clothes-picking factory to this modern-
day small town clothes and textiles, made anywhere but there, picked off
shelves by the children of weavers, packed in plastic, sent on somewhere.