May 31st – There’s lots of places that have a ring of
tarnished hope about them. When I was working for The Game Conservancy, back in
the 70’s, I lived in Milton Keynes … All of the
propaganda and hype surrounding it was so far from the actuality it may as well
have been describing an off-earth colony that no one would ever quite see.
Galley Hill (a corruption of Gallows Hill…say no more) was a new-build of mono-pitch dwellings that the song Little Boxes was written for. Mind you,
at least where we lived the houses were just semis. Up on Stantonbury they
built terraced blocks a quarter of a mile long; if you came home pissed you could
be trying the lock on every one else’s house...for hours. I’ll tell one day of
my visit to one of these houses for dinner and of my trip to their toilet; not
a pretty story that should serve as a warning to all.
One of the initiatives the Milton
Keynes council came up with (in league with a desperate government of the
time...and probably a pact with the Devil too) was to uproot and ship out 400
problem families from the East End of London and dump them on the Galley Hill
Estate. Excellent. Well thought out demographics there. So, you get these folk
from the 24 hour capitol of entertainment (in all its guises) and you dump them
in a place where the only entertainment is watching the squirrels watching the
house builders fell their woodland only interrupted by the odd hedgehog
disagreement. There was no cinema, bowling alley, pub (!) club, youth club,
night club…in fact the only club was an increase in membership of the pudding
club, there being an awful lot of time on people's hands (and other members);
that and the opportunity to haunt the myriad underpasses that served as safe
access to the bright lights of Stony Stratford…which reminds me, that’s where I
first discovered my love of wine; in an hotel restaurant in Stony Stratford,
may even have been called the White Hart…?
We had lunch there and I, in my wish to impress, ordered a bottle of 1970 Nuit St.
Anyhow,Milton Keynes .
Anyhow,
I think we were there for about a
year before we moved out to Gayhurst (stop it…stop) in a farm cottage…wait a
minute; I believe that was the place where one of the Guy Fawkes conspirators
was captured as he tried to get a boat along the Ouse. He was harboured at
Gayhurst House (I think Prince Gallitzin owned it when we were living there)
and the tunnel that leads under the old Gayhurst Road, at the mouth of which
the would-be assassin was captured, is still plainly visible as it leads onto
the river…sorry, Milton Keynes…OK, well it’s not a place to plan your
retirement…or anyone else’s...apart from a sworn enemy; and that’s how I feel
about Redditch.
I can hear the roar of anger from
here. Like Milton Keynes , I don’t say it’s a
bad place to live, I just think the eventuality never quite lived up to the
promise. I have several friends who either live or lived there and I have
family that way too so my visits were, at one time back in the 70’s and 80’s,
frequent. Never took to the place at all. An expanded conglomerate of housing
designed by an architect who you just knew buggered off to his neo-classic pile
in the Shires after his day was done. The housing boom of the 60’s/70’s has a
lot to answer for…take a look at the Council HQ in Truro then try to tell me
that’s architecture.
So,Redditch held
no thrills for me…until I discovered that, on this day in 1948, John Bonham was
born there! Oh, right; John Bonham – Led Zepplin. Why didn't you say so?
Right. So, where was I…oh, yes, So,
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