Determined to get out of London and enjoy the blue skies of the May bank holiday, my wife and I went somewhere we’d never been before and knew nothing about. We took the train to Sandwich, a little town in Kent, and from there took a boat up the River Stour to the remains of the Roman fort at Richborough, which is where the legions of the emperor Claudius arrived in 43AD to begin the successful conquest of Britain, or at least that part of it to the south of Falkirk.
Everything about our day out was memorable: the blossom on the cherry trees, the knowledgeable boatman, the flint walls of the ancient fort, the daisies and dandelions that flowered on the slopes of its ancient ditches. What most struck us, however, was the town of Sandwich itself. We were completely unprepared for its charm. A five-minute walk from the station and we were in narrow, irregular streets of well-tended houses and medieval churches and pubs.
The streets were quiet at noon on a Sunday – a few tourists and a bearable number of cars – but what their buildings suggested was the busy urban life of the 1950s. The shops included a haberdasher’s (‘Whites of Kent’), an old-fashioned sweetshop, a greengrocer’s, an ironmonger’s, a baker’s, two fish-and-chip shops, and a motor showroom that looked to have been purpose-built in the 1930s. I couldn’t find a Poundland, but I did see a cinema, the Empire, that was open for business; and a hotel, The Bell, that looked as though it still catered for men in plus fours driving Morris Oxfords.
We came across a grand-looking shop with a sign that described it as a ‘tea emporium and general supply stores’, which turned out to be a careful restoration of a licensed grocer that had been there since the 1850s, complete with polished marble counters and decorative wall tiles. Could they make us a sandwich? Well, said a welcoming woman, a sandwich might be difficult even in Sandwich because, this being a Sunday, they’d had no fresh bread delivered that morning. But, wait, they had rolls, brown and white; and she could slice some ham from the bone and mix a salad, would that kind of thing suit? It did. The rolls were delicious. The price of lunch for two, including some flavoured water, came to less than £4.
‘Can you imagine this kind of thing happening in the west of Scotland?’ my wife said as we sat in the sunshine and ate. She meant not just the food but what you might describe as the cheerfulness and can-do spirit of the transaction; and also perhaps the weather.
We spend a couple of months every year in Bute, in a house on the outskirts of Rothesay. In terms of its setting, Sandwich can’t hold a candle to Rothesay, where the views across the bay to Loch Striven and the Cowal hills must be among the finest of any town in Europe. (The sea retreated from Sandwich a few centuries after the Romans, beaching it on a muddy plain; the town has no views to speak of.)
It should also be said that Rothesay has some splendid architecture, good shops and friendly tearooms. Nevertheless, Rothesay has been declining as a tourist destination for nearly 60 years and now faces a crisis over its future. As Walter Humes wrote in the Scottish Review last year, it has a depressing air about it, with many shops, hotels and houses up for sale, several fine old buildings badly needing repair and other modern ugly ones crying out for demolition.
As Professor Humes also noted, there has been no shortage of attempts by Argyll and Bute Council and other well-meaning organisations to improve the place, sometimes backed with budgets that stretch to more than six figures. The Townscape Heritage Initiative, for example, is prepared to spend £2.6m in refurbishment grants, provided property owners themselves are prepared to stump up a proportion of the costs.
Over the past decade, in fact, there have been so many schemes that local people (as well as those of us who can’t be so tightly defined) get confused by which set of acronyms bears responsibility for what. The most prominent and contentious is the BCLC, the Bute Community Land Company, which a few years ago used public money available under Scotland’s ‘community buy-out’ legislation to acquire a stretch of woodland in the north of the island, and was not alone in believing that Bute’s salvation lay in making its countryside more approachable for visitors.
As it happens, I disagree: Bute’s problem is urban not rural, and its northern landscape and wildlife were already well protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The £500,000 in grants would have been better spent renovating the 1930s Pavilion or preventing the slow collapse of the Victorian Royal Hotel, both of them seafront landmarks.
When Professor Humes wrote that what Bute needed was ‘a sensitive and creative response at local level’ to co-ordinate outside interventions, and that voices representing architecture and urban aesthetics needed to be heard more clearly for the sake of all Scotland’s small towns and not just Rothesay, well, I couldn’t have agreed more. But will that be enough? Can you make a Sandwich, as it were, out of Rothesay, or Millport, or Dunoon?
Public money alone won’t do it. A lot of Sandwich’s charm is owed to the wealth of South East England – private money spent on wine, wisteria, Farrow & Ball paint and repointed brickwork. Behind this money stands a middle class that extends far back into English history and forever expands. Writing in 1943 about a very different part of Britain, the naturalist Frank Fraser Darling remarked that the Highlands had never had what he called a ‘considerable’ middle class: ‘The middle class to which most of us belong; which most of us deride in all sorts of disparaging remarks, but which, at bottom, we know to have an invaluable influence in civilising human communities’. It meant, Darling wrote, that too few people were there to bridge the sharp division between the gentry and the crofter, and that ‘the common folk of the Highlands’ therefore lacked initiative and leadership.
Perhaps Darling went too far; I don’t know. More certain is that Scotland has a prosperous middle class just as England does – but to find it go east. Go to small towns such as St Andrews and Dunkeld or the cities of Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen. Do not go to Dumbarton, Paisley, Greenock and Kilmarnock. Do not go to large parts of Glasgow. The whirring industrialism of these places created a middle class as well as a working class – witness Greenock’s grand western esplanade if you have any doubts – and many of them once migrated every summer to Rothesay’s genteel coastal suburbs, that is to Port Bannatyne, Ardbeg, Craigmore and Ascog, while their poorer cousins packed the tenements and boarding houses of the town itself. No more. Industrial Scotland has since had the guts knocked out of it, but Rothesay remains as arguably its most beautiful memorial.
People in western Scotland smile with a faint incredulity when we tell them we spend our summers in Rothesay: they think of it as the place their granny took them in 1957. They say, ‘I didn’t think folk still went there’. And of course very few do. Even on a fine August day, the promenade is near empty and there are rarely queues at the putting green.
The laconic fatalism of western Scotland, determined never to be impressed by the visitor or vigorous in its response to him, murmurs in the pubs and the cafes. ‘On ye go, pal…aye, nae bother …d’ye want any chips wi’ that?’ What’s needed here is private as well as public money, some gifted entrepreneurship that might open a nicely furnished hotel and a restaurant worth a detour, or a sailing school with boats for hire, or (don’t smirk) a literary festival to partner the jazz festival that already exists.
The politics of Scotland as well as the nation’s holiday-going habits have not been kind to Rothesay. When Bute vanished as a separate county and Rothesay’s provost became no more than an armorial gas lamp, a decay set in – a kind of institutional hollowing out – as important functions were transferred elsewhere. Localism is a chimera; the present struggle is to prevent the transfer of court proceedings to Greenock – accused, lawyers, victims, witnesses, all on the same boat to Wemyss Bay and all to save £6,000 a year.
Perhaps the surprise is that so much civic-mindedness remains, as manifested by the film society, the fuchsia society, the natural history society, the cricket, shinty and football sides, the three golf clubs, the annual shows for the island’s artists, gardeners and farmers, and the shoppers who, despite Tesco over the water, still frequent two wet fish shops, two butchers, a hardware store, several drapers, a bike hire store, a bakery and a greengrocer. It has two marinas and two working boatyards. Not least, in the tabloid shape of the Buteman, it still has a decent weekly newspaper.
Rothesay could never be taken seriously as the Madeira of the North, despite its cabbage palms. The Sandwich of the North, the Caledonian Southwold, the Clyde’s Whitstable: these are more realisable propositions. It’s lovelier than any of them. What it needs is the loving care and attention – and of course the money – of visitors from an imaginative middle class.
Ian Jack is a former editor of the Independent on Sunday and of Granta magazine and now writes regularly for the Guardian
