You Are Awful (But I Like You) Read online

  ‘Fuckinell, wossat stink?’

  I faltered inside the dim threshold, wavering between a diplomatic half-pint and brusque flight.

  ‘Is it you, mate? You done summing in your trousers?’

  Amidst unvarnished cackles I looked over and met a trio of weathered and extremely happy male faces. ‘Don’t mind them,’ said the old barmaid when I presented her with my craven features. ‘It’s the farmer up the road, muck-spreading. Terrible business. Want to sign our petition?’ I did so, and rather than sit alone beside my tormentors, then stayed at the bar to sip my half in the barmaid’s company. Thus did I come to learn of Leysdown-on-Sea’s astounding past, challenging present and utterly hopeless future.

  My own subsequent research has captured the Isle of Sheppey’s significance to such historical big-hitters as the Vikings (being the place they spent their first British winter), Henry VIII (who honeymooned with Anne Boleyn at Shurland Hall, just outside Leysdown), and the Dutch navy (which occupied the island for a week in 1667, securing Sheppey’s infamy as the only part of the British mainland to have endured a foreign invasion since 1066). But the barmaid’s history focused on Leysdown-on-Sea’s more recent and most extraordinary contribution to the annals. ‘Cradle of aviation,’ she said with an arch smile, explaining how in the summer of 1909, the Aero Club’s flying ground at Leysdown had witnessed the first flight by a British pilot in Britain. ‘Couple of weeks later, same feller went up with a pig in a basket,’ she said. ‘He was just having a laugh about flying pigs, but it went down as the world’s first cargo flight!’ Indeed, the centenary of John Moore-Brabazon’s pioneering achievements had just been marked by a carnival parade through Leysdown. She tilted her head at a poster beneath the pub’s telly: I’d missed it by two days.

  Our conversation charted Leysdown’s descent from these high-flying glory days. As a Cockney Club Med it had been in steady decline since the Fifties, when the railway closed, every summer quieter than its predecessor. The hotels and guest houses had all gone, and occupancy at the caravan and chalet parks was now falling steeply away. It didn’t help that annual rates and ground rents apparently ran to £2,500 per pitch: ‘I mean, come on: you could have a proper olerdy for that, somewhere nice!’ These days, scratching a living in Leysdown meant feverish seasonal multi-tasking: cab driving, bar work, cleaning and maintenance in the holiday villages. When I mentioned how bustling the town had seemed one unpromising afternoon twenty years before, she barked a mirthless laugh. Since then the bus station and even the church had been demolished, she said. ‘Come back in another twenty and there’ll be nothing left.’

  One of the burnished regulars had overheard all this, standing at the bar as he waited for his half-poured Guinness to settle. ‘If you think this place is buggered,’ he said, a little more amiably than the words imply, ‘you should go to Great bloody Yarmouth.’ All right, I thought as I walked out into the smelly night and made towards my car, maybe I will.

  * * *

  The revelations of Leysdown’s noble history and its ongoing, drawn-out demise nagged at me, stirring a melancholy that flourished deep into those family-free summer nights. In the small hours of one I found myself clicking through some online photos of Leysdown’s heyday, and gathered from a linked discussion forum that The Talk of the Town had abruptly closed down. Leysdown was on its deathbed, but those gathered around it hadn’t come to pay their respects. Declaring it the second-worst seaside resort in Britain, a travel blog encapsulated Leysdown as ‘an abandoned wilderness at the end of a 10-mile-long cul-de-sac’. A man who had spent a lot of time there while visiting his son in a Sheppey prison told the internet: ‘Come to Leysdown if you’re excessively fat and ugly, you will blend in ... It’s the end of the world, nobody finds it by accident and only the demented go there more than once.’ (A twin failure on my part.)

  Yet countless thousands clearly had gone there more than once, had in fact gone there year after year. There they were in the archived photos, packing the beach and having the Brylcreemed, black-and-white time of their lives, and there they were in my memory, filing happily away into the late-Eighties summer fog. I wasn’t just mourning Leysdown, I realised, but the passing of a heroic breed of hardy, stiff-upper-lip Britons. The Windbreak Generation: our austere forefathers who didn’t mind a bit of fog and faecal coliform in their holiday mix. Now that spirit had died, and Leysdown-on-Sea was slipping into oblivion just as surely as the holiday complex I’d found in chunks at the foot of that crumbling cliff.

  My portentous nostalgia soon outgrew the Isle of Sheppey. One night I found myself reminiscing on the iconic hangouts from a childhood spent in Ealing: the Wimpy and the Berni Inn on the Broadway, the Grace Brothers department-store double act of Bentalls and John Sanders, the ABC cinema in West Ealing. All cheerfully inept or tatty, or both, and all now long gone, replaced with sleek, competent and studiously unendearing commercial successors, or one of those dreary new-build residential blocks with kettle barbecues set out on a thousand never-used balconies. This same blandification would be ongoing right across the country, and in settlements far more significant, and far more awful, than the self-styled Queen of the Suburbs had ever been. There were so many fascinatingly terrible, terribly fascinating places all around Britain that I had never visited, never even been near, and as the fate of Leysdown made plain, time was running out.

  Hunched at the computer on that final pizza-stubbled night of bachelor dishevelment, I tried to make sense of the beery melodrama sloshing around in my brain. At its core was a native weakness for the underdog, that very British affection for the neglected, the down-at-heel, the uselessly crap. A bass note of awed admiration for those who had no choice but to put up with it. And topping it all off a sudden, earnest conviction that this was my last chance to see these places before they were all knocked down and claimed by the ghostly Leysdown sea-fog, taking their stories with them.

  By rights I should have calmed down after the family came home, but I’m afraid I absolutely didn’t. The nocturnal histrionics of summer begat a properly bonkers autumn, and when it ended there I was, juddering along behind a queue of brake lights as ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’ gave way to Des O’Connor’s ‘Dick-A-Dum-Dum’. With Hanger Lane Gyratory System behind me I had successfully negotiated Britain’s worst road junction, and endured two of the most unpopular songs in the history of British popular music. A wisp of steam coiled forth from the bonnet of Britain’s least esteemed car, and a man endowed with Britain’s ugliest regional accent ordered me to turn right at the fucking roundabout, third exit. It was an early Saturday afternoon at the fag-end of November, four months since I’d come home from the Kentish seaside with my fingers stinking of chips and change. And half an hour since I’d set off on a Leysdown-inspired tour of the unloved, the rundown, the half-arsed and the hideous. All the brilliantly miserable crap, in short, that makes our country so bloody great.

  As a basic understanding of animal behaviour tells us, it’s hard for any rational entity to commit a deliberate foreseeable wrong. I don’t mean moral transgressions or other such complexities, just any action with an obvious and instant negative impact upon one’s own well-being. ‘I am glad to have this fire; it was cold, and now I am warm. But oh! I have removed my trousers and sat down upon it.’ Or: ‘This porridge is both filling and delicious, yet I am pouring sand into it. Now it is less enjoyable to eat. Perhaps some more sand?’

  Planning my trip meant unlearning several million years of such painfully accrued human knowledge. It meant asking friends and family for places they particularly wouldn’t recommend, clicking on the website tabs that sorted reviews from lowest to highest, conducting internet searches beside a thesaurus folded open on ‘bad’. This was the road-trip from hell, and to it.

  I have to say I proved a fast unlearner, and swiftly rose to the challenge of making the worst of a bad job. Quite soon, indeed, I found myself looking for more and more wrong boxes to tick. If I was to visit the worst
British towns, then it seemed only appropriate to stay in their worst hotels. To go to the worst restaurants and eat the worst food. Drink in the worst pubs, see the worst sights, drive the worst car while listening to the worst music. I confess I had begun to find the whole prospect rather exhilarating, in an oddly masochistic fashion: this was to be my down-and-dirty homage to the Windbreak Generation.

  The basic framework for my tour was provided by a survey of the worst places to live in Britain, compiled in 2007 for property-based TV show Location, Location, Location. I approached this with extreme caution, suspecting that as a Channel 4 venture it would have been collated by Gok Wan, and based solely on the average household’s total of matching scatter cushions. In fact, the conclusions were derived from reams of sober and incontestable statistics related to things like air quality, crime, hours of sunshine, life expectancy, leisure facilities, employment rates, educational achievement. I might get sick of the programme’s stupid name (and did, immediately), but I couldn’t argue with their survey’s methodology or conclusions: any town that made the bottom twenty was an indubitably horrid place. (I might as well explain right now that although some of these places lay within the confines of greater London, I shall not be covering any of them. Partly as I’ve spent my entire life living in the capital, and was keen only to visit places I’d never been to, and partly as I’ve already written an entire – and wholly wonderful – book about London. I am consequently fated to come across in this one as the worst sort of sneering, hypocritical metropolitan ponce. Huzzah!)

  I also drew upon a number of more opinionated but statistically credible polls organised by various magazines, radio and television shows and websites to find the nation’s most dreadful albums, buildings, high streets, beaches, foodstuffs, sea zoos, and so on. Beyond these came sundry harvested sources of diminishing credibility, on a scale that ran from the ropily agenda-driven to the frankly laughable. In descending order:

  1) TripAdvisor and the many internet-based rivals offering user reviews of hotels, restaurants, visitor attractions and so forth. Beyond filtering out sparsely reviewed establishments whose dire ratings might be down to no more than some rogue individual grudge, my main challenge here was to root out any sore-thumb thumbs-ups: contributions supplied by a proprietor or lackey, in order to counter the welter of damning criticism and bump up a lowly average score. Happily, most seemed incapable of mustering even the tiniest degree of subtlety, singing their own five-star praises with a magnificent disregard for the language of genuine opinion. There was transparent bitterness: ‘All I can say is some people wouldn’t be satisfied if the Queen’s butler served them.’ There was hyperbole bred of rank desperation: ‘Please ignore all the negative reviews. Everything about this hotel is completely fantastic, and my wife cried when we left.’ Best of all, there was praise lavished where no sane visitor would ever lavish it: ‘The sign-posting was excellent’; ‘Refreshments were reasonably priced and there was ample parking’. How I loved that. ‘Is this parking ample, or what? I say we go straight home and positively review the hell out of it!’

  2) Places and stuff that other people, drawing on personal experience, had assured me were disastrously run, ugly, daft, unpalatable or in some other way very badly wrong.

  3) Places and stuff I’d always thought might be a bit rubbish.

  4) Sky 3’s Britain’s Toughest … series of television programmes, an empirical nationwide investigation covering villages, pubs and twenty-four-hour dry-cleaners, would you believe (though you absolutely shouldn’t)?

  5) Surveys compiled by market-research companies for corporate clients in the interests of garnering publicity. That which pronounced the Hanger Lane Gyratory System to be Britain’s worst road junction ranked amongst the more coherent of these, having been commissioned on behalf of some insurance company and thus bearing at least vague relevance to the client’s core business. More typically I encountered a cheerfully brazen disconnect. You know the sort of thing: ‘Two out of three Welshmen would eat a bar of soap for £800, reveals a poll carried out on behalf of Jack Russell’s, Guildford’s leading twenty-four-hour pet-supplies warehouse.’ Only an idiot would place any faith in the legitimacy of such asinine investigations. I must have used at least a dozen.

  I was putting a lot of pins in my map, but still had to decide on the vehicle in which I’d be joining them all up. The runaway winner of most ‘worst ever British car’ polls was the Austin Allegro, that definitive 1970s British Leyland disaster: a wallowing, bulbous oaf swiftly nicknamed the ‘flying pig’, launched with a rectangular steering wheel and so ineptly designed that a wind-tunnel test found it was more aerodynamic going backwards. But even the newest Allegros were already twenty-seven years old, and it didn’t seem quite fair to put a geriatric through what I had in mind. Plus, the Allegro was already heading around the horn of post-modern irony, now so bad it was good, an object of ugly-duckling retro affection. I didn’t want any of that rubbish. In its dotage as the Austin Rover Group, our nationalised motor manufacturer had knocked out a bewildering array of truly abysmal cars; it was just a question of deciding upon the most awful, the least loved, the still unforgiven.

  My epiphany was delivered one evening by a BBC4 re-run of a mid-Nineties BBC programme about people and their cars, entitled From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring. In the course of this, I watched a sales representative being interviewed while driving the car he’d been given to replace his Vauxhall Cavalier. ‘Obviously my wife knew I was getting a new company car,’ he said, knuckles whitening on the wheel. ‘When I told her it was an Austin Maestro, we both literally sat down and cried – we physically cried.’

  I literally stood up and cheered – I physically cheered.

  Since that happy moment I have acquired a great store of knowledge about the Austin Maestro, and I’m afraid I’m going to share a little of it with you now. No matter what my wife keeps telling me, I like to think that as a very British tale of delusion, sloth, incompetence and on-the-cheap botch-jobbery, it is the enthralling embodiment of everything my trip was about.

  One day in the early 1980s, Austin Rover’s top brass sat down to do something they were good at: mulling over recent embarrassments. What had their globally successful Mini and Morris Minor possessed that the Allegro so patently lacked? Innovative design, reliability, circular steering wheels – these were the obvious answers. But there was another, and it came cheap: a name beginning with M. In great excitement the management drew up an appropriate shortlist of such names with which to endow the Allegro’s hatchbacked successor. To placate the perpetually troublesome trade unions, they even allowed their factory-floor workforce to vote on this short list. (I’m assuming the other options were things like Mudblood and Manbag, as Maestro seems very much like the best of a bad bunch. Sounds awful and looks worse: even members of the Maestro Owners’ Club still have trouble getting those vowels in the right order.)

  No one knew then that the Austin Maestro would turn out to be the final ever British-designed, British-built mass-produced family car (its booted sister model, the Montego, was snarkily dubbed BL’s ‘last-chance saloon’). No one except perhaps Roy Axe, newly installed as Austin Rover’s head of design just before the car was launched in 1983. Some years later he recalled his first encounter with a pre-production example: ‘I was ushered into a room and stood in front of this object and asked, “What do you think of that?” It was the Maestro. I couldn’t believe my eyes. The car’s whole stance and proportion were wrong. Design was moving into more rounded forms and this car was back in the old folded-paper era. Its proportions were peculiar, too. In short, it was a complete shambles. I thought so and said so.’

  Poor old Roy was surveying a design that had left the drawing board way back in 1976, and worse was to come when he lifted the bonnet and beheld an engine that had powered its first Austin over thirty years previously. ‘It was engineering of the Fifties not of the Eighties … The interior was even worse. The fascia panel was like a w
et codfish, all floppy. The whole car was decades old in its thinking. When I said, “We have got to start again”, it was made clear to me that production was only four months off, so there was nothing anybody could do.’ One motoring magazine’s launch review drolly encapsulated the Maestro thus: ‘Truly a car for the 80s – or any 90-year-olds still up to driving.’

  Then there were the build-quality issues that came to dominate – in fact, comprise – the Maestro-owning experience. The plastic bumpers shattered in the cold, and the dashboard swelled up and split in the sun. Wheels would randomly detach themselves, and when the car was jacked up to replace them, the windscreen popped out. Leaks sprang out everywhere – passengers sat in the back rather than endure the ever-water-logged front seat, and for drivers, even the standard under-arse plastic bag sometimes wasn’t enough: ‘In bad weather,’ recalled one owner, ‘I had to wear a raincoat.’ Living with the Maestro meant a permanent oil stain on your driveway, and a mechanical soundtrack that has been memorably compared to ‘a skeleton wanking in a biscuit tin’. ‘It wasn’t that unpleasant to drive,’ said Roy Axe, trying to find something nice to say about the car, ‘but things fell off it all the time.’

  You might be starting to see where that tearful sales rep was coming from. But in doing so, you underestimate the more typically undiscerning, because-we’re-not-worth-it British motorist of the era. The Allegro was a terrible disappointment because in 1973, when it appeared, Britain still expected great things from its national motor manufacturer. Ten years later we expected nothing, and in the Maestro we got it. Wet pants, oil stains, a canned skelly knocking one out under the bonnet: small beer for the long-suffering, make-do, Leysdown-bound Windbreak Generation. In eleven years, 600,000 Maestros dribbled and creaked out of British showrooms.

  Most weren’t around for long. The enthusiasm with which the car welcomed and retained water rolled out the browny-red carpet for Sir Rampant Corrosion, and early Maestros were being scrapped almost as fast as new ones rolled off the lines. Without any fond farewells, production quietly ceased in 1994. You may therefore imagine my surprise when I chanced upon a 1998 Maestro for sale – and in Slough, which seemed like the kind of place I ought to be going to anyway.