On my way into
Peterborough, Lou Reed’s re-mastered ‘Transformer’ is on the car stereo.
Reed had just left the uber-cool ‘Velvet Underground’ and this much
praised album (1972?) was largely recorded in London with David Bowie, Mick
Ronson and others, including the legendary British bass player Herbie Flowers.
(Flowers was real. ‘Herbie’ was a nickname. He’s actually and disappointingly,
Brian). These days ‘Transformer’ sounds tired to me, ‘Perfect Day’ apart,
although others still champion the record, glam-rock flirting with Berlin style
cabaret, but failing to embrace either genre satisfactorily, or so I think. It
was the epitome of ‘counter-culture’ for a while, making transgender hip – and
in it Reed may even have invented the phrase ‘coming out of the closet’
for all I know. These days to be transgender is mainstream, and not at all
counter-cultural. Which is weird.
Am I grown up enough to
try reading Augustine of Hippo’s ‘The City of God’? Once upon a long time ago I was a student
philosopher, but never got round to it (or the many other volumes I ought to
have read!) There’s a short chapter
about Augustine in Rowan Williams’ ‘Luminaries’ which makes me think I
should give it a go. As I understand it, this outstanding saint was defending
Christianity from the charge that the new faith weakened Rome and was thus the
cause of the empire/city’s fall to the pagans. There are parallels with
today…
The Faith is under attack.
No one with charisma and media presence is prepared to make the intellectual
case for it. If anything, the Church is a target for blame. The charge is that
we’ve connived at slavery, sexual abuse and exploitation of the earth’s
resources. The old order is rapidly changing…
This entire final section
of my Big Walk lies within the City of Peterborough. I begin at Itter
Park in Paston. It’s half term, so there are children and parents, strolling,
playing, buying coffee from the stand. I skirt the open field behind the tennis
courts, and cross the A47.
Some people are amazing.
Two middle aged ladies are patiently clearing litter from the verge of
Fulbridge Road, dropping the detritus into a cumbersome cart which they’re
humping and bumping over the tangled grass. It’s not a beautiful corner, and in
most communities the rubbish would be left to fester, but these two volunteers
have decided to devote a Thursday morning to making things better. I stand on
the bridge above them, and think about calling down my respect, but the traffic
noise is too great. I do swap a ‘thank you’ and a smile as a tattoo-ed young
woman makes nice with me, giving social distance further up the road.
 |
| New England |
Turning right into St.
Paul’s Road I’m suddenly hit by evidence of social deprivation. There’s a smell
of stale food, the streets become raggedy, the people seem tired, lame and
poor. Though it’s only mid-day, a clearly drunk man is helped down the Lincoln
Road, flanked by supporters to right and left. The area known as New England
and to its south, Millfield, are host to an array of communities making
faltering progress towards becoming New Britons. On hoardings and by their
presence on the streets, I register Polish, Lithuanian, Slovakian, Turkish,
Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Hindu, Portugese, Filipino. There is the Timisoara
mini-market. Here is the Afghan store. At the Baltic coffee house, the crowd
seems South Asian.
There’s no shortage of built
Christian witness. St. Paul’s sits in the middle of a one-way triangle, and
then further down in Millfield I come to St. Mark’s. The Sally Army are here,
and over the road from St. Paul’s is the Peterborough International Christian
Centre. I’ve just passed the Gospel Hall and a Kingdom Hall. But how shall we
sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
It’s a shock, being in a proper city, after walking round a mostly green
and pleasant diocese.
There’s an ironic
inevitability in the gathering of these new communities just here. When the
Great Northern Railway was built and trains began to thunder up the eastern
side of Britain towards Edinburgh, Peterborough was one of the important rail-hubs
(perhaps aside from Doncaster the most important) between London and
York. There were engine sheds and a large marshalling yard to the west of the
line, and the houses of New England were built for the men and their families
who worked there. The optimistic spirit of the Victorian heyday was in the air,
with a burgeoning empire and booming economy in a time (mostly) of peace and
increasing prosperity. People felt they really were building a new kind of
England. The thrust of that development went on for a hundred years, itself
powering the nation’s financial health despite the hiccups of the two World
Wars. Then, during the last fifty the white British population started to move
on from New England into suburban patterns of housing it deemed more
fashionable and comfortable, while the country slipped out of manufacturing
into a service-based economy.
And, with the perspective
of my many miles round this largely green diocese in mind, how do we reconcile
the dispersed needs of the countryside, and the apparently urgent demands
represented by the Lincoln Road’s staggering noontide drunk?
As a muso and at this time
of year, my mind goes to that great (though rather jingoistic) Victorian hymn
of Edward Plumptre – ‘through many a day of darkness…etc.’ The last
verse goes: ‘And we, shall we be faithless? Shall hearts fail, hands hang
down?/ Shall we evade the conflict and cast away our crowns?/ Not so. In God’s
deep counsels some better thing is stored/ We will maintain unflinching:
‘One Church, one Faith, one Lord.’ If that hymn comes your way this
Remembrance-tide, don’t you dare sing it without a tear in the eye or a wobble
in the stomach.
Lincoln Road reaches a
t-junction with Westgate. I turn left and spend a few minutes with coffee and cake
in a strangely empty Beales department store. It’s recently re-opened
after refurbishment. Peterborough has lost its John Lewis, and on the
evidence of this footfall, I don’t give much for Beales’ chances. Out of
town facilities, on-line shopping and the differently-placed retail needs of
the incoming communities make this what commentators call a ‘challenging
business environment’. When I emerge
again into daylight the streets around the Queensgate mall are thronged, driven
into the open air by a fire alarm. Observing the blue lights reflecting off St.
John the Baptist’s church in the square, I smile to myself that this is no new
Day of Pentecost, though Stanley Spencer would have done a fine job of
picturing Peterborough’s citizens running around in front of the Cathedral with
flaming hair.
I walk on, past the market
and the Passport Office, and admire the pretty glass and stone façade of St.
Mary’s, which looks like a nice church to go to if you don’t fancy the wide
open spaces of the Cathedral, though it seems a bit weird that there’s a modern
church of this size just five minutes’ walk away from the Bishop’s Palace and
all. What was the thinking behind that? The answer is of course ‘the parochial
system’, about which there’s much debate at present. I’m on the side of those
who wish to protect and nourish it, and I suppose the price of that is that
sometimes anomalies will occur. And this is one of them. As with so much else,
the pandemic heightens the intensity of critical thinking. If we weren’t all
still half-Zoomed, if we weren’t cash-strapped, we wouldn’t think twice about
the apparent double-up.
Up on Park Street sits All
Saints Church, currently in vacancy, but offering shelter within its
Anglo-Catholic tradition to musicians, philatelists, Yoga for health, and the
U3A amongst many others, no doubt. As always in cities, you travel a block or
two and the social dynamic alters abruptly, as a protagonist finds to his cost
in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Drive down the wrong ramp in New
York, and your world begins to unravel. Even in London, it pays to know how the
neighbourhoods do or don’t match up. Here, close to the King’s School, all is
mostly comfortable and safe, at least on the outside.
I trundle on northwards
and, heading for Dogsthorpe, take a careless wrong turn through the detached
and bungalowed suburb, before reaching Christ the Carpenter church, a
fifties’ style build with an attractive copper roof. In student days I think we
came to play here. ‘We’ were ‘Twentieth Century’, a very uncool name even in
1970, heirs to the group of Cambridge beatniks who started to write ‘jazzy’
(well, not particularly) versions of favourite hymns. Get with it, daddio. The
vibe was a Cliff Richard film c. 1959, but sometimes you can still hear their
alternative tunes to ‘Oh Jesus I have promised’, or (more commonly) ‘At the name of Jesus’. I still have a soft spot for Geoffrey
Beaumont’s jolly ‘Now thank we all our God’. The funny thing is that as
they used to say about the sixties and early seventies, ‘if you remember it,
you weren’t there’. And I can’t remember a single thing about the
Dogsthorpe gig. It might have been a performance of Mike Lehr and John
Lockley’s clever and inspiring ‘A Folk Passion’. Or perhaps it was one of our regular concerts,
whose content might amiably ramble between Joni Mitchell, Roger McGough, Sydney Carter and Ten
Years After - all in the service of the Gospel. Despite our flared trousers and
flowered shirts, we weren’t very counter-cultural, just moderately dedicated, broke,
followers of fashion. But today we Christians are truly radical, often working
against the grain of society, and if we could only work out a consensus
manifesto, asserting a completely different set of assumptions to those
exercised by the vast majority.
The Church’s immediate
future may be that we’re a ‘remnant’, but with Martin Luther I do believe that:
God’s word, for all
their craft and force
One moment will not
linger
But, spite of hell,
shall have its course
‘Tis written by his
finger.
And though they take
our life,
Goods honour, children,
wife,
Yet is their profit
small
These things shall
vanish all
The city of God
remaineth.
Minutes to
midnight: 12.5 km. 15 degrees C. Cloud and sun. Breezy. Six
churches. None open.
