If you arrive as a stranger in most British towns, you have no real way of getting to know them. You can get some feel for their character from the architecture and the shops, but nothing for the characters that move around them. This is mainly to do with the difficulty of starting a conversation that isn’t about the weather.
The thought of talking to strangers seems to fill British people with horror. A horror that isn’t entirely unreasonable given the quality of conversation that you tend to get from those few eccentrics that do tend to embark on social intercourse with the people they meet on the street… Everything I know about what it’s like to have been one of Millwall football club’s infamous casuals in the 1980s (when they spent most of their time hurling inanimate objects – like Tottenham fans- at members of the constabulary) and everything I know about what bastards the Prots are, I have learned from people I had never met before.
Even should the stranger turn out to be pleasant and entertaining, he or she probably woudn’t be the right kind of person to speak to as far as my mission to take the pulse of British town’s goes. The kind of person likely to speak to you out of the blue isn’t a representative kind of person at all. Especially somewhere like Chipping Norton. From what I could make out in Chippy, people who know each other barely even converse, so outsiders like me don’t stand a hope.
All of which is a long way into explaining why this post is mainly going to consist of observations on shops and architecture.
The first thing you notice driving through Chipping Norton is that it’s really quite pretty:
There’s a lot of honeyed stone, some admirably solid looking Georgian buildings, a red telephone box (always a sign that time hasn’t destroyed too much in a place) and a marked absence of concrete monstrosities.
The next thing you notice is that it’s really quite small, and that you’ve driven through without seeing anything of interest at all. So I doubled back, parked up and decided to stroll around on foot. Elly, meanwhile, decided to stay in the car.
“Don’t you want to look around?” I asked.
“Why would I want to look around Chipping Norton?”
It was a question I couldn’t honestly answer. I went out onto the streets alone, while she did whatever it was that seemed more appealing, like staring at the rain sliding down the front window of the dadmobile. It didn’t take long for me to realise she had made the right choice.
There was nothing actually wrong with the place, there was nothing much to remark on at all, in fact. It is one of those quiet, private English towns where whatever action there is goes on behind closed doors, in private houses. There was no street life. I didn’t even see any pigeons.
And so, the list of shops:
There’s a Boots and a Sainsbury’s and the usual high street banks, but Chipping Norton seems to have largely escaped the bland brand makeover that has wrecked so many British towns. Things here were a bit more individual. There are a lot of antique shops and antiquarian book shops. There’s a flowery looking restaurant called “Wild Thyme”. . There are a great many local estate agents (A two bed terrace costs £200,000.) There’s a pleasingly old fashioned hardware shops. There’s a wedding dress shop. There’s a deli and cheese shop. There was also a good looking butcher’s shop, and a chip shop. Can you guess what they call the chip shop in Chipping Norton?
Nope. Good try though. It was actually:
I’m undecided about this one. Points for the literary reference. Commiserations for failing to spell “moveable”* correctly on a gigantic sign that is likely to be there for years to come…
The local bookshop gave off similarly mixed signals. On the one hand, it was a small independent with a respectable fiction section. On the other, the first book I saw when I walked in was a biography of the former Conservative Prime Minister Anthony Eden. The next was a rightwing book about empire by Niall Ferguson. There’s also a book called “What Darwin Got Wrong”, a surprisingly large Mind, Body And Spirit section and an unsurprisingly large section dedicated to Royal Wedding Books… Not exactly a liberal paradise, but a bustling little shop, nonetheless.
Elsewhere Chipping Norton remained silent and grey. It was Sunday, after all. The closest thing to excitement was the horrible renting noise when someone drove past me with – I presume – the handbreak still engaged. The back wheels of the car weren’t moving at all and they made a really astonishing racket. Not that the driver seemed to care. He was smiling rather blissfully. He was, I was surprised to realise, completely off his gourd – in no state to be driving at all, even with the breaks on. He was quite an anomaly on those quiet streets. Had he been partying all night? I couldn’t imagine that nightlife in Chipping Norton was particularly kicking. It looked like no one had had a good time there since at least the 19th century. But then again, there was this place:
Here’s a close up of the sign over the door:
Rocking! Clearly, with all that PUBLIC MUSIC and DANCING there is a lot of fun to be had in Chippy.
At this point – and especially given my opening complaint about how hard it is to meet people in British cities - you might be thinking that the diligent thing for me to do would be to stick around and sample the local nightlife. In a sense, I suppose, you might be right. But there’s only so much suffering you can do for art. Besides I’d actually already gone one better. A number of years ago, I went to a house party near Chipping Norton and met quite a few locals. These were all rich young men and they all used to spend most of their summers locating disused quarries, dragging sound systems to them and getting their friends to dance in them all night long – not unlike the Conservative political blogger Guido Fawkes and his unnamed friend a few years before them.
Like many posh young men, the Chipping Norton crowd were very very keen on reggae. One of them was that night in a state of considerable excitement because he’d just posted his latest homemade roots compilation to the queen, to mark her birthday. He explained to me that in previous years he’d always sent a C90 tape of his current reggae listening to the Queen Mother on her birthday, since he felt sure that she’d love a bit of herb music, but since her sad passing he had focussed attention on the queen instead. He reasoned that even if the queen didn’t appreciate the reggae, Prince Phillip or Prince Harry almost certainly would . “So it won’t be wasted.”
I couldn’t argue with that logic, and anyway, he quickly lost interest in talking to me, preferring to stick to his own friends. Later on though, he did capture the attention of the room by warning the man next to him never to turn into a lady. “I mean, if you did, it would be awful,” he said. “You couldn’t come to the golf club since you’ve got to wear trousers on the green and you certainly couldn’t come to school re-unions.”
“Yah,” said his friend.
It was like listening to a modern day Bertie Wooster – although with a lot more weed and a lot less brains. The thing that especially struck me was how happy their world was. It was a place where the Queen Mother wasn’t a sour old Nazi, where every club is open to you, where the summer is one long party… Like Daylesford, it seemed to me to be a rather happy world to live in. Just one that was far removed from the reality of most people’s lives. One that also seemes very distant from any middle class life that I can recognise. David Cameron may claim to be from the “sharp-elbowed middle”, but on the evidence of Chipping Norton, he actually exists pretty near the plummy nosed top.
*PEDANTRY UPDATE – I have since realised that you can spell “Moveable” without and ‘e’ too. Damn!
*STOP PRESS*
Someone on twitter has just alerted me to this wonderful picture of the Chipping Norton pub cricket team. I rest my case.
Brilliant.
Lovely Smiths reference.
It’s extraordinary how much comfort and happiness vast quantities of privilege and money can bring.
Thanks Guy – and good spotting MaxC.
And yes, money does seem to buy a certain amount of happiness after all. Even if a certain amount of ignorance appears to be the trade off…
As the person who nominated Chipping Norton as a candidate for most middle class place in Britain, I can’t help but feel responsible for Sam and Elly’s disappointing trip. I now concede that CN is not a middle class town (ahem… see the photo of the cricket team above). However, Sam has asked me to defend my choice and, despite the fact that I thought I hated the place, I’ve kind of found myself wanting to. So here are some insights:
1. The locals, once you get to know them – which granted could take anywhere up to twelve years – are some of the nicest and most welcoming people you will ever meet. They may appear aloof, but I’m convinced it’s because CN’s residents are well-practised at pretending they didn’t just see the prime minister squeezing a melon, Alex James buying a roll of sellotape or Captain Jean-Luc Picard trying to manoeuvre a super-wide vintage Jaguar into a parking space no wider than a motorbike.
2. Like you said, it’s a fairly clique-y place. But that does mean that making friends with one person is like making friends with twenty.
3. It’s the highest point in the Cotswolds (on a par with the Ural mountains in Russia) so the views are spectacular. But it’s fricking freezing in winter and walking about town for any length of time will murder your shins.
4. For a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, it’s remarkably well served. You can get pretty much anything you want (as long as you don’t want it after 5pm or on a Sunday).
5. Unless what you want is cocaine, which you can get anywhere, any time…
6. In the summer, it’s crawling with tourists (though this is less the case since Ronnie Barker died), although it’s also not really that far from London so escape is only an hour’s train ride away.
Some other (ridiculous) highlights:
The opening of the refurbished swimming pool – http://bit.ly/hP0fGt
When they found a bomb buried under the golf course – http://bit.ly/mNqf2q
The planned mass evacuation exercise – http://bit.ly/ghrlE9
The Rollright Stones – http://bit.ly/4R3L5
Even people’s dinner parties make the news – http://bit.ly/jspJaG
Thank you! Thank you! Brilliant.
My wife would have probably stayed in the car too – she regards my desire to explore as a futile pursuit, but tolerates it as long as I’m back within half an hour. The end result is that I whizz around the town like a contestant in ‘Treasure Hunt’. I’ve learned to avoid churches, as there’s always one old codger who wants to give me a blow by blow account of the progress of the recent restoration work.
These days, if we go anywhere that looks intriguing, I make a return visit on my own.
Great post, by the way. I was surprised by the reggae conection, but I suppose there are a lot of Trustafarians in the Cotswolds and the music seems to be popular right across the middle classes. My neighbour – not far off her 60th birthday and one of the few people in Lewes to say ‘Yah’ – likes nothing better than lying in her garden smoking dope, blasting a bit of Bob out into the world (her speakers are so powerful that I’m sure she’s caused structural damage to our walls). Whenever I pop in for a ‘few minutes’, I know that the next day’s going to be a write-off.
I look forward to the next post about middle class towns.
I had no idea you rushed Steerfoth. The Age of Uncertainty always makes me feel like you’ve spent a long time ambling around and musing over things… An illusion shattered!
Your neightbour sounds like entertaining company. How has she taken Lewes council’s swing to the dark side? How have you taken it?!
The half hour ‘recces’ just give me enough time to decide whether a place is worth returning to or not. I always make sure that my following visits are long and muse-filled!
I’m trying not to think about the election.
I would just like to defend myself a little here, and say that I’ve ‘seen’ Chipping Norton many, many times… Normally I’m more than happy to wonder around the Godforsaken places Mr J likes to take us to (remember Kettering, Sam? And Morecambe? And Luton?) – but – it was a grey day, Polly was as determined as hell that she wasn’t going to leave her car seat, there was an Observer waiting to be read… etc, etc, etc. All in all, the car seemed a better prospect.
(Plus, I was recovering from my sighting of Samantha Cameron…)
I think, all in all, you made the right decision. That’s not to say that Kettering wasn’t fun though!
chippy isn’t a middle class town. It is, well maybe was a working class town which has been invaded, by the wealthy, middle class types, desperate to escape, their overwhelmingly depressing concrete jungles. Bliss Mill is a good example of Chipping Nortons working class heritage, although having said that, it’s now been converted into flats, sorry I mean fancy apartments, in-habited by many of the local middle classes (Can’t have them mixing with the underprivileged people can we?!)
(You may note from my inferior use of the English language that I am merely a peasant dweller of Chipping Norton, rather than one of the cuckoo like, middle class invaders, who have set up residence due to Chipping Norton having excellent transport options into the ‘big smoke’)
Had you stuck around for a weekend evening you would have seen the local youth, congregating around the town hall, listening to illegally downloaded Dizzie Rascal on their mobile phone speakers, as you venture down to one of the local pubs (and I don’t refer to any of the fancy wine bars or pseudo ‘ye olde pubs’) you would be in no doubt, that Chipping Norton is a million miles away from being ‘posh’ or ‘middle class’.
Yes it has some very, very posh people; it also has its fair share of scag-heads, wasters and scallywags. There are also plenty of average working class people too (White people, Black people, Asian, even mixed race people too, but then I guess this demographic is true of most towns, throughout the UK.)
As for the shops, they are pretty diverse, you can get almost anything you want, albeit at a premium, when compared to the prices you would pay in the doldrums, of near-by large town Banbury. Speaking of premiums, this brings me onto house prices. Yes, the prices are sky high, but that’s the price you pay for appealing to the more well-heeled individuals in society (the ones who aren’t quite affluent enough to live in the more scenic Cotswold locations of Burford, Stow on the Wold, Bourton on the water or Bibury)
I do hope you have enjoyed my tongue in cheek reply as much as I have enjoyed reading your blog on Chippy and Daylesford farm shop, even if some of your observations on Chippy were a little off the mark in my opinion. Daylesford was spot on, mind :-p
I did enjoy them! Thanks… And they’re a very useful corrective. Much appreciated. Obviously, there’s plenty more to Chippy than meets the eye. It’s an interesting thing about the Cotswolds in general that until relatively recently they weren’t posh at all… and now…
Movable/moveable, who cares? But “plummy-nosed”????? My dear young man, don’t you know toffee-nosed people have plummy voices?
I live in the neighbouring Cotswold market town Moreton-In-Marsh (which is 8 miles from Chipping Norton) so know the area quite well.
To outsiders West Oxfordshire and the Gloucestershire Cotswolds are basically a tourist destination, however living here is another matter. Your description of Daylesford was spot on. I’ve been twice and spent £13.00 on a 100gram bar of chocolate and a packet of 8 biscuits!! but made sure I wore designer clothes otherwise you really do feel out of place.
I’ve never really liked Chipping Norton, find the people very aloof, the shops are rubbish & overpriced and the place is too hilly, it’s OK to look at, but is the ugly duckling compared to some of the other nearby Cotswold towns say like it’s Chipping sister – Chipping Campden which is stunningly beautiful.
Most people in the Cotswolds are posh (some very nice, some not) really the same whatever class you are.