Delight in Decline: The Beautiful Decay of the Northern Powerhouse

I should preface this blog post by clarifying that these observations by no means apply to all of the North, nor is this post written without a tremendous amount of bias, but it is written from the heart as something of a love letter to the tremendous beauty of the mundane that exists in certain sections of the North West in particular.

While there is a sense of universality to most of this, I can only bring my own personal lens to this - namely a lens that has been focussed on the former salt mining town of Northwich. A town I called home for some 18 years, I could not have been happier to escape as soon as I could. I had always felt like it was somewhere that had failed to move forward with the times, and was glad to be out into the wild world of 4G (and eventually 5G) internet, of 24-hour convenience shops, and of people who say bath with an R in it and had been to places like Oxford for anything other than a football away day. A town that had felt so static for the 18 years I had been there, I noticed that almost as soon as I left - things began to change.

With the "funding" coming from the "Northern Powerhouse project" and its eventual replacement the "Levelling Up agenda" - Northwich was ready to be gentrified as though it were the heartlands of Hackney. Only there was no demand to live here, and enough space not to have to demolish the affordable housing that already existed to make way for pricier flats. Instead what Northwich had was an abundance of "re-naturalised" (read dilapidated and neglected) land on the banks of the river and the world's least cost-effective branch of M&S. So along came the multi-million-pound re-developments and erected a series of empty glass shop units and a cinema that would surely be enough to rival, I don't know, Finsbury Park. Well, just like the development in Finsbury Park, this was a soulless development that left much to be desired - the only difference? Well, Finsbury Park has the footfall to make a success in spite of its obvious failings, Northwich doesn't.

So with every one of the sporadic visits I have made to the town since leaving, I find another behemoth made of the clearest of glass laid down to spruce up the edges of this old mining town. But stray beyond its polished exterior and you will notice many of the same failings as before. The people are still without the chance of valuable employment, job prospects capped for those who cannot afford the inhibitive cost of daily rail travel to Liverpool or Manchester. The young people who aren't as academic have had the opportunity of any form of vocational education ripped away from them at the hands of greedy developers. The percentage shops in the town centre that live behind boards is higher than the percentage of surety I feel when asked to state my own name.

Cosy indeed.

To quote a Salfordian singer-songwriter "sometimes the people digging in the dirt, they find gold in that grime" - peel back these layers of failing re-development and Westminster schemes, and there are glimmers of beauty. This is a town built on stilts in order to stop it from subsiding after all the salt had been mined from underneath it, forever proud to show off the scars of its industrial past.

The North didn't need a facelift to become a powerhouse, beyond the glass skirt the town now wears is a beautiful sense of symmetry within the Tudor and Tudor Revivalist facades that front its empty shops. And it is not through the efforts of a government-backed agenda that the town's art deco cinema was revived to its former glory. No, it was through the people, the people who really make a town like this beautiful (albeit beauty of spirit rather than aesthetic at times).

There is plenty to scoff at too: plenty of decay setting in across these fine structures, and a handful of ugly buildings from the mid-century to sit alongside them. But in and amongst this dirt is a sense of beauty in the mundanity and ordinariness of the life that has remained broadly unchanged in these parts for so long.

I might not live here anymore, but from a stone's throw away, I have a newfound appreciation of it. Long live the towns where you can walk into a charity shop and they think they might feasibly sell a copy of FIFA 2003 for £1 some 20 years past its sell-by date. Long live the beauty of the ordinary.