OCCUPIED COUNTRY

I Just Died in your Arms Tonight....

A group of us watched a man die a lingering death on Friday evening.  Given the location I guess we kind of knew that it was a very real possibility but even so it's still a shock when it happens.  Right in front you.  Up close.

Looking back I can recall the exact moment he realised he might not get through and began to do all the things you shouldn't do when you're deep in it.  Shallow breaths, talking too fast, imploring those around to help.  All to no avail.  It was shocking.  

Yes the Frog and Bucket on a Friday night can be an unforgiving place.  Lose the audience and you are Royally fecked and, without a doubt Paul F Taylor was Royally fecked on Friday.

Personally I'm of the view that if you lose a comedy club audience on a regular basis then it's time to consider a different career path.  Comedy club audiences are - on the whole - packed to the rafters with people receptive to comedians.  They want to laugh, that's why they are there.  It should be easy to make them titter.  Even if your material could do with an overhaul, your delivery tightened a little, the crowd are on your side.  Your performance may be a little flat, the laughs a little thin but generally you'll get a clap for trying.

It takes a special skill to get an audience to cheer when you say it's time to go, a very special skill indeed.  He waved as he went.  Or was he drowning?

I've been re-reading Stuart Maconie's excellent 'Pies and Prejudice' recently.  I love his description of his arrival to and investigation of Oldham.  I think he's bang on with his impression of the place - bars, pound shops and very little else; apart from the portable 'field hospital' the Health Authority provides on a Friday and Saturday night to stitch up and placate the local drunks.  It stops them clogging up A&E y'see allowing more serious cases to be dealt with without the ever-present possibility of things turning nasty. 

It's different now though.  You can't get to Oldham by train (I know, incredible isn't it?)  It will eventually become a 'stop' on Manchester's Metrolink tram system by which time it's decline will probably have become irreversible.

I don't often go to Oldham, there's no need.  It has absolutely nothing to offer that can't be found elsewhere.  It used to have a famous market - Tommyfield.  Coach trips used to head to it from as far as Leeds and Bradford.  It's a car park now and, thanks to the Council, the 21st century market consists of a dozen or so portable stalls scattered along the side of a couple of windswept streets.  It has no cinema, no unique shopping, no fabulous eateries.  Nothing.  The only distinctive thing in Oldham is the Coliseum.  But how often do I go to the theatre? 

Dearest works in the centre of Oldham and, it being one of her working Saturdays I got a bus up to meet her for lunch.  We went to the Three Crowns for a helping of their home made meat and potato pie with red cabbage and I have to say it was excellent.  Thick chunks of steak with lovely spuds and gravy all topped off with a thick pastry crust.  It set me up for my trundle round the town.  I was going to try to see it from a tourist's perspective so  I discarded my cynic's specs and donned an eyes-wide-open pair.  First stop:  the Georgian heart of Oldham, Church Lane.

Church Lane Oldham

It's a lovely little lane Church Lane.  It runs all of 100 yards from the Army recruitment centre (I guess Kandahar does have some things Oldham doesn't) to the parish church.  It consists mainly of Georgian terraces enhanced by the period street lamps that some heritage-fixated councillor insisted on back in the day.

A dour Saturday afternoon was perhaps not the best time to be examining it anew for I have seen this place back-lit by an autumn sun and been thrilled at the view.  It has character and it's a pity it's out of the way of the town centre itself.  It seems forgotten somehow.  A fading memory of times past.

Lancashire House, Church Lane Oldham

The lane itself is predominately occupied by the legal profession who, to be honest, must do very well off the local clientele. There's a church run cafe that, so I've heard, produces some fabulous dishes that don't hit the pocket.  Their cooked breakfasts  are 'to die for' apparently.

Most of the buildings are listed and the council  has made it a conservation area which is great but it's only a 100 yard conservation area.  Well, maybe a bit more.

At the top of the lane is Oldham's Gothic parish church.  The current building was erected in 1830 although there have been churches on this spot since 1280.  It was designed by a Manchester-based architect Richard Lane who employed Alfred Waterhouse as an apprentice.  Alfred would go on to design Manchester Town Hall, the Natural History museum in that there London and a whole host of Gothicry all over the place. 

At the top of the lane we turn right onto a flagged walkway which takes us past the west side of the church down to the cenotaph by the Greaves Arms and opposite the original town hall.  It was on these very steps that the new MP for Oldham - a certain W Churchill gave his first speech as Oldham's Tory MP.  The town hall is a Grade II listed Georgian neo-classical construction built in 1841

Oldham's original neo-classical town hall

Turning left we leave the town's civic heart and amble down Yorkshire Street.  We could have turned right and ambled up Yorkshire Street to the Spindle's shopping centre but there's only so much a man can handle on his day off.  

This was the street Maconie walked up from the now redundant train station.  It's no wonder his impression of Oldham was bleak.  You could successfully argue that Yorkshire Street is Oldham's premier street.  It's only rival is Union street which runs parallel on the Glodwick side of town.  Apart from the Oldham Coliseum, you won't find any culture hereabouts.  This part of the street resembles the Wild West at weekend.  It's here where the Triage tent is erected every Friday and it's not hard to see why.

 






 





Drink offers.  2 for 1 kebabs and curries.  Poundland, betting shops, Poundworld, clubs for drinking, clubs for lapdancing, Poundstyle (honestly), bars, chain pubs, 'It's all a pound!'  Cash converters, 'Don't ask the price it's a pound', 'We'll sub you 'till payday' finance operations, KFC, MacDonald's, Chinese, Primark, Discount shoe shops and all the other tell-tale signs of a town on the skids.


Where the historically authentic, we-know-our-heritage cobblestones have gone missing (thrown in a riot after closing time perhaps?), the powers that be have replaced them with dollops of tar.  Dollops of tar!  Dollops.  Of.  Tar!  I think that tells you all you need to know Oldham's  aspirations. 





The really sad thing about the place is that it could rebrand itself because it does have a lot to offer.  It lies snuggled at the foot of the Pennines.  Within it's Metropolitan Borough walls it has an absolute gem in Saddleworth.  The Peak National park is 20 minutes away at Dovestones Reservoir and the whole of the bleakly beautiful 'backbone of Britain' is on it's doorstep.  Get a grip Oldham.


I carried on my walk down to the Mumps area of the town - doesn't sound very inviting does it?  Maconie describes it thus:-


"I disemabarked from the Manchester train at Oldham Mumps Station.  Perhaps I'm overly delicate but for me it doesn't bode well when the town's main station shares its name with a uniquely unpleasant childhood glandular disease that wreaks havoc with the testicles"



This is the Mumps area of the town.  Lovely eh?  The street on the right is Yorkshire Street.  On the left is Union Street.  Union Street is a hopeless mish-mash of fast food emporia and taxi firms at one end, with the offices of the Oldham Evening Chronicle at the other.  There used to be a railway bridge at the Mumps end of town that rather like the 'Welcome to Bronte Country' signs near Howarth had painted on it: 'Welcome to Oldham.  Home of the Tubular Bandage'.  It's gone now.  It had to make way for the coming Metrolink.    Here's a lovely time-lapse video of its end.





As I trundled up Union street I was beginning to lose the will to live.  There is honestly nothing about this place that - at present - attracts me.  To use a phrase from the lips of the fictitious Malcolm Tucker, Oldham is an omnishambles.


Union Street has less to offer than Yorkshire Street and yet, come the tram, will be the place most folk see when they emerge from Mumps Station.  A lot needs doing before then most definitely.


There is talk of making this Oldham's 'cultural quarter'.  We'll see.  At present it is still home to the library which has recently moved into a state of the art building that also houses an art gallery and various function rooms. 


The Local Studies Library I know very well.  My dissertation was on the Mule Spinners of Oldham during the turbulent years leading up to the Brooklands Agreement in 1893.  There's many a Saturday afternoon I spent here trawling through uncatalogued minutes and correspondence of the various Trade Union bodies, Cotton Master's stuff, old newspapers and other historical paraphernalia.  It were bliss.  'Appen.


The library itself is also a stark reminder of the aspirations of the Victorian age.  Not everyone I know but can you imagine a public-subscription (with or without the help of Carnegie) library being built in this day and age? 




 


I retired to one of the many pubs doing a desultory trade on a Saturday afternoon and reflected on my experience.


It might be a while before I'm back.


Now, where did I put my cynic's glasses?