David Mckie Takes a Look at Northampton

Tessa Jowell thinks that we need more casinos. She wants to see the gambling industry catching up with the 21st century. As the Guardian reported the other day, several towns, worried about the decline of their leisure attractions, are eager to take up the challenge. One is Blackpool; another, Northampton. Blackpool I can understand; but Northampton? It has rarely been thought of before as the Blackpool of the East Midlands. Councillors may enthuse at the thought of new jobs and new money, but others are not so sure. "I think everyone has gone potty," one cafe owner told our reporter Hugh Muir.

But then there have always been those in Northampton who shook their heads over the schemes embraced in the name of progress. When the town became one of parliament's strongholds in the conflict with Charles I (an allegiance all the stronger because Northampton made most of the boots for parliamentarian soldiers), there must have been curmudgeons who warned this alignment would end in tears. "Told you so," they no doubt observed when, after the restoration, Charles II destroyed most of Northampton castle and rescinded its borough charter. When a few years later fire destroyed much of the town they probably called it God's vengeance.

There was certainly fierce resistance when in the 1850s one of the town's most progressive shoe manufacturers introduced a factory full of modern machinery into a trade where most until then had been able to work at home, setting off a bitter strike which ended in victory for the employers. Not that working at home had been exactly idyllic. An official inspector was struck by how many people in Northampton seemed to have only one eye. That, he was told, was because so many homeworker children had stabbed themselves with their awls.

Many, too, must have rued the loss of their ancient town hall when in the 1860s prosperous Northampton built the present Guildhall: a riot of Gothic, festooned with statues and stone evocations of great days in Northampton history, wildly and wonderfully over the top. There may, too, have been malcontents who moaned about the loss of that part of their castle left standing by Charles II to build a railway station. But again such doubts were bulldozed out of the way when progress was on the march.

The same spirit of public improvement drastically changed the face of Northampton through the 1960s and 1970s, most grievously in the marketplace, where much of one side was erased to make room for a new shopping mall. I remember seeing the great topographer Ian Nairn on television one evening almost in tears at the threat to the 1901 Emporium Arcade. "Protest now," he demanded. But the programme was a repeat, and a caption which came up as he spoke revealed that the deed had already been done.

Today, the town is a curious blend of the rather good and the bloody awful, with a fine if much knocked-about church, All Saints, at the heart of it; a still enjoyable Victorian quarter to the south of the centre; and a handsome Georgian sequence in Sheep Street sandwiched between the job centre and the church of the Holy Sepulchre, where one could go and admire the unusual circular nave if only it wasn't locked.

Northampton has another distinction: it has consistently chosen unusual MPs. True, Spencer Perceval is remembered today mainly for being shot dead in the House of Commons in his third year as prime minister. But through the 1880s, stroppy, dissident, progressive Northampton returned two stroppy, dissident figures in Henry Labouchere, whom Victoria wouldn't let Gladstone put in the cabinet, and the militant atheist Charles Bradlaugh, expelled because he declined to swear the oath of allegiance. To its eternal credit, Northampton three times re-elected him.

Bradlaugh is commemorated today in a pub on a horrible inner ring road, part of a building which was once the headquarters of the British United Shoe Machinery Company. There is also a statue on the edge of the town centre, with the traffic flowing around him. He stands with one arm extended, one finger pointing, as if in mid-denunciation. "A sincere friend of the people," it says on the plaque, "his life was devoted to progress, liberty and justice." On his right are the Penny Whistle bar and Guy Salmon Motors; on his left are Woodlows, your local family furnishers, and a sturdy Victorian building bearing the legend Abington Square Mission, complete with a replica of the foundation stone laid in 1878 by the Rev ET Prust. Today, I see, it's the Urban Tiger gentlemen's club. Some would call that progress too, I suppose.