Diagonal Walking Read online

  Nick Corble has written over twenty-five books as well as over a hundred articles for the national and local press. Subjects have ranged from walking guides to the history of the English fairground, but he is perhaps best known for his works on the UK’s inland waterways system. These include titles such as The Narrowboat Story, Britain’s Canals: A Handbook and, with Allan Ford, a guide to living on the canals called, appropriately, A Beginner’s Guide to Living on the Waterways.

  His very first book, Walking on Water, published in 2000, covered a trip down the inland waterways system on a battered ex-hire narrowboat from the northern tip of the canal system down to the south. This not only described the highs and lows of the journey itself, but also attempted to gauge the mood of the nation on the eve of the millennium. Diagonal Walking replicates this approach, slicing through the nation, and trying to find out what makes it tick, this time on the eve of perhaps the most momentous event in its modern history.

  This is not a book about Brexit, though: rather some reflections on England gathered through the long hot summer of 2018, during which Brexit dominated the headlines, providing the rumble of distant thunder the weather seemed reluctant to deliver. It is a look at England through the eyes of an ordinary man, as confused as everyone else. Neither a political commentator nor a professional pundit, and about to enter a fresh stage of his own life, Nick chose to re-engage with his country, to get out there and talk to people. To reconnect.

  This is the story of what he discovered.

  Copyright © 2019 Nick Corble

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

  Matador

  9 Priory Business Park,

  Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,

  Leicestershire. LE8 0RX

  Tel: 0116 279 2299

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador

  Twitter: @matadorbooks

  ISBN 978 1838599 003

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  For walkers everywhere, but especially

  to all my diagonal walkers

  Contents

  Introduction

  Stage 1

  Formby to Alsager

  1.Staring Out to Sea

  2.Beating the Beatles

  3.Water, Water

  Stage 2

  Alsager to Alrewas

  4.Pot Luck

  5.Ambulatories Non Gratae

  Stage 3

  Alrewas to Newport Pagnell

  6.Out of the Woods?

  7.Searching for Middle England

  8.Shoetown, on a Cloudy Day

  9.Progress

  Stage 4

  Newport Pagnell to Dagenham

  10.Hot in Beds

  11.Herts is Where The Home is

  12.Higham Dry

  Stage 5

  Dagenham to New Romney

  13.Gateway to the South (East)

  14.From Bean to Fruit

  15.Back to the Sea

  Afterword

  Finally …

  Notes

  Introduction

  This book is a record of my diagonal walk through the centre of England during the summer of 2018. Immediately, that sentence carries with it three caveats.

  First, it was my walk not anyone else’s, and as such what you are about to read is inevitably biased rather than objective, a record of a trek seen through my eyes alone. Second, it was conducted at a particular point in time, as it happens a particularly interesting point in time, when the country was teetering on the edge of potentially its biggest challenge for a generation.

  This was no coincidence. There’s no getting away from it, the result of the Brexit referendum in 2016 acted as a powerful motivation to undertake my walk. I had done something similar twenty years before when my children were still young, when my intention had been to try to get a handle on what sort of country they were going to grow up in. With the referendum result I was no longer sure that the picture I’d formed then still held. It was time to take the nation’s temperature once more.

  The third and final caveat tucked away in that opening sentence is the word ‘diagonal’. The route I took was unique. To my knowledge no one has undertaken it before. Again, this was deliberate. I wanted my walk to be a one-off, following my set of rules. I also wanted to create something greater than simply a walk, to give birth to the notion of Diagonal Walking, not just a diagonal walk: to make it both multi-dimensional and multi-media. In particular, I wanted to use as many of the different channels now available on the internet as I could master in order to broaden the project’s participation and ownership.

  As I approached my sixtieth birthday I also wanted an adventure, to challenge some of my own preconceptions and to place myself outside my comfort zones. Finally, I wanted to write a travelogue about my experiences. Travelogues are funny things. There’s a long and distinguished history of them, not just in the UK but all over the world. Explorers like to share what happens to them and the thoughts they collect along the way, while the public also appear to like reading about them, to travel vicariously.

  Before setting out on my walk, I immersed myself in some of the most well-known English (and British) travelogues. These included Bill Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island and its follow-up The Road to Little Dribbling, as well as Paul Theroux’s The Kingdom By The Sea, the last written when the country was in the throes of another crisis, on that occasion the Falklands War. I also delved back in history and consulted J.B. Priestley’s 1930s classic English Journey, as well as H.V. Morton’s post-First World War tome In Search of England and, going even further back, William Cobbett’s nineteenth-century horseback journey through England Rural Rides.

  These all had a lot in common. They were snapshots of a moment in time, they were subjective and they were random. This book is all of those, too. I don’t claim to be in the same league as others on this noble list, but I can claim to share their intentions. It was time for another look at England.

  Diagonal Walking describes what I saw.

  Nick Corble, 2018

  Stage 1

  Formby

  to

  Alsager

  98.3 miles

  224,124 steps

  1

  Staring Out to Sea

  Sand dunes thick with marram grass clutched the edge of the shore like a giant bear’s claw. Below them lay a beach of pristine sand and beyond that, inevitably, the sea, with wind turbines peppering the horizon. It was approaching high tide, and the shallow waves were close to abandoning their twice-daily quest to connect with the shaggy dunes. The vista before me stretched like an extended concertina, the sea breathing in and out, exhaling a restorative briny air which, by then, I was ready to take a few lungfuls of.

  That was when I remembered a tradition amongst coast-to-coast walkers. They take a pebble from their starting shore and carry it to their destination on the other side of the country. I wondere
d if this was something I should copy. After all, wasn’t my walk also from coast to coast, even if it did follow a slightly unconventional route? Not for me the simplicity of taking the shortest line between two shores. No, I was going to be walking diagonally, from the north-west edge to the south-east corner, following a line passing through the very centre of England. Even so, I told myself, it was still from one coast to another.

  There was a problem though. Not a pebble to be found. The beach at Formby Sands hasn’t earned its name by accident, it is just that: sand. Mile upon immaculate mile of it. Besides, I knew from past experience that the beach at the other end of my walk, at New Romney near Dungeness in Kent, is nothing but stones. One option might be to take a bag of sand, but what was the point? It would only slip between the pebbles in an instant. Equally, why carry a pebble all the way across the country to deposit it somewhere where it would be completely unremarkable? I’d already learned one thing in the hour it had taken me to get to this point: I’d overpacked my rucksack. To add more weight seemed madness. Damn it, I resolved. This was my walk, my route, my project, and I’ll live by my own rules.

  One of those was to engage with as many people as possible. Part of my rationale for the trek was to try to understand what made England tick. It wasn’t a particularly original quest, it had been the standby of travel writers for generations, but for me it had taken on a new poignancy for two reasons. First, it was something I’d done before. Nearly twenty years previously, on the eve of the millennium, I’d taken our newly acquired, but long in the tooth and battered, narrowboat down the spine of the inland waterways system. My wife Annette and I had young children at the time, and I was taking a mid-career break, partly to re-assess that career, and partly to get an understanding of what sort of country our children were destined to grow up in.

  That resulted in my first book, Walking on Water, detailing the voyage in stages, with different combinations of people providing a constantly changing chemistry to the trip. Writing it was cathartic, as well as giving me some insights into parts of the country I would never have visited ordinarily (Chorley anyone?). It also provided insights into both myself and those closest to me, making the experience a seminal one.

  The second reason for this fresh challenge was the Brexit referendum, which had pulled me up a bit. Like so many others, I was confused. Rather than stay confused, I wanted to do something proactive, to try to understand, to re-connect, and to indulge myself in some thinking time. My children had grown up and there was the faintest whiff of grandchildren in the air. What sort of country might they grow up in? I wasn’t arrogant enough to think that I alone could unpick the Brexit Gordian Knot, but I did want to revisit my understanding of England and the English. Previous experience suggested the best way to do this was to engage rather than become enraged.

  The narrowboat was history, sold when the two boys we used to tuck up in its bunk beds alongside their soft toys outgrew their berths. In any case, I wanted to do something different. Along with Annette, I’d completed a number of the country’s long-distance walking trails. Maybe the answer lay there? But that presented a problem. By definition, these trails are confined to a particular geography or feature. None offered the prospect of connecting with a cross-section of the population. Besides, they’d all been walked, written about and discussed hundreds of times before. There was nothing for it, I was going to have to create my own route.

  At that point, I recalled an old market research technique called the Diagonal Slice. In fact, it was such an old concept that when I googled it nothing came up. It predates the internet. I remembered it as a methodology that allowed researchers to get a cross-section of opinion from a given sample – a company’s employees for example – by identifying those at the very top of an organisation and those at the very bottom, and interviewing them along with representatives at every level in between.

  In other words, it was pure market research BS. But it sparked a thought. If you took the very centre of England, and drew a diagonal line at forty-five degrees right through it, where would it take you? The first problem, of course, was isolating where the absolute centre actually is. There are a number of claimants to this crown, but only one carries the imprimatur of the highest of authorities – well, within walking circles anyway: the Ordnance Survey. In 2002 they’d come up with their own candidate. The way they did this was complicated, but stick with me for a moment.

  What they did was find the centroid or barycentre of the country. A centroid is defined as the intersection of all the hyperplanes that divide an object X into two parts of equal moment about the hyperplane. In layman’s terms, the average of all points of X. In layman’s children’s terms, they did something marvellously cunning. They used maths. At a stroke they added a gloss of science to their conclusions, whilst at the same time making them completely baffling and therefore impossible for the average Joe to contradict.

  The point they arrived at was just inside Leicestershire near its border with Warwickshire, a couple of miles east of the canal town of Atherstone. A quick walk to WHSmith delivered into my possession not only a map of England but a protractor, something I hadn’t owned since I used the contents of my Helix Geometry Set to flick paper pellets across a crowded classroom. Back home, with the map spread out over the kitchen table, I tentatively drew my line, choosing the north-west to south-west option as it passed through more of the population. At the top left it hit the sea around Formby in Lancashire, north of Liverpool; at the bottom right it did the same around New Romney in Kent. It was as I surveyed this line that coincidences started to reveal themselves.

  Shortly after Liverpool it passed through Runcorn, which I’d visited with my brother and nephew on the narrowboat trip twenty years before. An interesting evening there following a curry formed the cornerstone of a chapter of Walking on Water. Revisiting the town would give me the chance of a then-and-now comparison. This was a promising beginning. The line then cut through the Potteries, where I’d gone to university; skirted Milton Keynes, where I’d helped build a house thirty-odd years before; edged past a village near St. Albans where I’d once lived, and finally glanced off the edge of Gravesend, where one of our grown-up sons now resided. It was almost as if the line was trying to tell me something. I took it as enough encouragement to take things to the next level.

  As I thought about it and spoke with others, it dawned on me that an opportunity existed to fashion my idea into more than just another trip with accompanying travel book. The greatest change that has taken place since I wrote Walking on Water is the way the internet has become central to all our lives. Back then the World Wide Web, as we called it, was still a curiosity, something we were struggling to get our analogue-conditioned brains around. In those days, phoning someone when away from home still meant having a pocketful of two- and ten-pence pieces, connecting to the web involved plugging into your phone socket and listening to something Stockhausen might have written, whilst social media meant watching the telly with someone else in the room.

  Why not harness this change to create something different, to democratise the whole process? I could ask others to be part of the trip, to follow every step, ‘to walk with me’ virtually as well as walking alongside me in person, using everything the internet has to offer: blogs, podcasts, videos, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And not just sharing the actual walking, but the whole shebang. The planning and preparation, the emotions of the trek, the dubious opportunity to get inside my head as I wrote the book and explored publishing options.

  An idea was born that was to take over my life. As the new year began, I started as I meant to go on by engaging with others: notably a local website designer and media students from the nearby university. Together, we created an internet presence, as well as a couple of introductory films for a sparkling new YouTube channel, as well as a handful of explanatory podcasts. The whole project was given a name, gained its own logo and even acquired a theme tune. Di
agonal Walking was delivered into the world.

  Through a combination of talking with others and internet research, I taught myself fresh skills such as how to record and publish a podcast, film editing, search engine optimisation and, most importantly, a different way of thinking. Diagonal thinking, if you like. I needed to consider my walk not just through my own eyes, but through the eyes of others. What would they find interesting? How could I engage with them? Some immediate successes came via social media, which helped form relationships with ramblers and community groups along the route as well as journalists and others. These helped to populate my social media accounts and gave a morale-boosting following wind as I waited for the days to lengthen and for the moment of reckoning to arrive – the day when I would finally get walking.

  *

  Interacting with people was a key objective of the Diagonal Walking concept, but I hadn’t anticipated it starting immediately. Seconds after being dropped off in the centre of Formby I was studying a map of local attractions (bowling club, cricket club, asparagus fields), when a senior citizen approached me, brandishing a stick. Did I know where I was going, he asked. I had yet to perfect my opener of ‘Yes, I’m walking diagonally’. I simply replied in the affirmative, omitting to mention that I intended to use the map on my phone to reach my actual start point. My first chance to interact and I’d failed spectacularly, seduced by the screen. Following this early lesson, at my next stop – to pick up some emergency snacks at a local health food store, because my rucksack just wasn’t quite heavy enough – I purposely asked for directions.