Tag Archives: Tread

These oft-bypassed towns have all been, at some period in history, influential if not necessarily powerful; wealth-creating though hardly opulent; and vital to the nation’s wealth and security while never fully rewarded for it. Communications and trade once gave some urban centres the edge over others. Churches and marketplaces were …

Port Talbot Port Talbot recently returned to the spotlight, when Tata Steel announced electrification and layoffs last month and the BBC broadcast Michael Sheen’s television series The Way this week. Politicians and foreign companies can shut down entire towns with impressive equanimity when the factories they are mothballing and the …

part one | part two | part three | part four | part five | part six There’s Crap Towns. There’s UK Grim. There’s John Betjeman. And then there’s James Cleverly, the Lewisham-born MP for Braintree. British towns get punched from above, below and the side – even from inside: …

part one | part two | part three | part four | part five Type the names of many ordinary towns into Google followed by “is” and the search engine often autocompletes with “a dump”. The predictive text becomes self-perpetuating as people click on the link, through curiosity or accident. …

Frontier towns are bypassed, forgotten, often forlorn, occasionally vicious in the old sense of the word: full of vice. Seediness inhabits their edges, and edges are what they mainly are. Meant to be bulwarks or limits, they are usually porous and uncertain. Travellers pause before making their next move. Frontiers …

Part one / Part two / Part three No compelling reasons underlie the selection of Bury, Burton upon Trent, Wigan, Workington and Whitehaven. These are not places with a single major attraction. None fits neatly beside the adjectives we use to sell and hype a sense of place – quaint, …

Heritage tourism should be about crisis and decay as well as conservation. As Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley write in Edgelands, their psycho-geographical field guide, “England … offers the world’s most mature post-industrial terrain.” We were first to turn the engines on, and the lights out. It’s a pity …

Presidential candidate of the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), Rabiu Kwankwaso, has urged members of the National Assembly to tread softly on threats to impeach President Muhammadu Buhari over widespread insecurity in the country.    Speaking during a courtesy call on Kwara State governor in Illorin, Kwankwaso stated that though everyone …