CITY OF GOD

 

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.

Internationally Britain is now in a very different place. Without a core industry to maintain in north Peterborough, will these new communities be an engine of progress for the nation or a drain on resources? We don’t yet know, but we do know that the Church of England no longer has the finance or sponsorship to throw up buildings like ‘The Railwayman’s Church’ (St. Paul’s Peterborough). In 1867 this was a brand spanking new facility; an attractive, visible sign of God’s grace and welcome. There was a great enthusiasm for spreading the Gospel among working people. Now in a multi-multi-cultural society, we have no confidence in preaching Christ as the way, the truth and the life. We tend to see Jesus’ call as one among many life options from which we could choose, as if we were buying a new computer or car. What will it be today, Kabbalah or the Tao? And even if we did claim primacy for Christian values and faith, we don’t appear to have the money to do much about it. So what do we do? Give up?

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.