There’ll be dancing on the Hoe again as Drake’s port begins to punch its weight
The Luftwaffe blitzed Plymouth for two months in 1941 and destroyed 20,000 houses, 100 pubs, 42 churches, 24 schools, eight cinemas and six hotels. In a symbolic act of defiance many of the survivors formed up behind the lady mayoress and danced on the Hoe, where Sir Francis Drake had played his similarly symbolic game of bowls almost 400 years earlier. The Germans exultantly claimed that Plymouth could never be rebuilt. The city’s next response was to produce a blueprint for a New Plymouth — the Abercrombie Plan, Sir Patrick Abercrombie being the foremost town-planner of the day. Ironically, his plan’s partial implementation meant the destruction of more historic buildings than were lost to Hitler.
Today Plymouth is following another new plan, drawn up by another celebrated planner, Andrew Mackay, who was responsible for much of the revitalised Barcelona. A new shopping centre has been erected at Drake Circus; Armada Way, the pedestrian avenue from the station to the Hoe, has been ‘improved’; Sutton Harbour has sprouted trendy bars and restaurants; scaffolding is everywhere. Despite all this, I have an uneasy feeling that, for decades at least, the Germans won and the heart was ripped out of a oncegreat city. The conurbation is one of the 20 most populous in England, but its style seldom matches its size. Part of the reason is that missing heart. The state-of-the art headquarters of the Western Morning News is in a business park on the north side of the A38 dual carriageway. Like the nearby Derriford Hospital, it is cut off from the core of the city. The ferry terminal linking Plymouth to France and Spain is way out in the bleak Millbay docks. Great cities such as New York, Sydney or Naples are enhanced by great ships docking in their centres. Not so, sadly, the port of Drake and the Pilgrim Fathers.
Yet despite this sprawling sense of dislocation, signs of revival are apparent. The University of Plymouth, once a poor relation of rival Exeter, has leapt up in the league tables. The university’s presence in the city is instantly visible in huge orange logos on the sides of a host of new buildings. It used to have two outlying campuses — a former teacher-training college at Exmouth and an agricultural college at Newton Abbot — and a student could complete a degree at either while scarcely visiting the mother house in Plymouth. That has now changed. Both campuses have been closed and the university concentrated on a huge city-centre site.
This transformation has been credited to a dynamic vice-chancellor, Roland Lewinsky, who arrived in 2002. Born in South Africa, he made his reputation as a pioneer of bonemarrow transplants at Great Ormond Street. He was not only a rambunctious leader but also a polymath who was a catalyst for the Peninsula Medical School, which takes its first students this year. Alas, Lewinsky was out with his wife walking the dog on New Year’s Day when a shaft of lightning hit a pole nearby, bringing down power cables that killed him. This personal tragedy could turn out to be a tragedy for the city as well.
A new arts centre will now carry Lewinsky’s name, although it was originally to be called after Sir Joshua Reynolds, the city’s most famous artistic son. Two more recent artistic celebrities here have been commercially successful like Reynolds, but unlike him, critically dismissed. The first was Robert Lenkiewicz, who affected a determinedly Augustus Johnish manner and executed huge, traditional canvases which go for serious money but are sneered at by the cognoscenti. The other is Beryl Cook, famous for her fat boozy ladies. They both sum up Plymouth’s disdain for the fashionable and trendy.
Plymouth University’s business school is run by Professor David Head, whose first 20 years in higher education were spent teaching German. He thinks he’s the only professional linguist in such a post and that this helps account for the Plymouth school’s international flavour: when I spoke to him he was putting the finishing touches to a joint venture with Hong Kong. But the school is also keen to cultivate its grassroots. A recent marketing graduate has been embedded at Pendennis Worldclass Superyachts at Falmouth under a scheme called ‘Knowledge Transfer Partnerships’, and Pendennis’s managing director says the university’s involvement has done much to boost his company’s position in the global yacht market. The business school also participates in a scheme called ‘Work-Based Learning’, which creates links with local organisations such as Plymouth Argyle football club, where the school advised on the season ticket scheme. Professor Head says these schemes benefit the university as much as the city. They’re not simply about academics giving local companies the benefit of their wisdom; it works both ways.
Argyle’s most famous season-ticket holder is, incidentally, the former Labour leader Michael Foot, MP for Plymouth Devonport between 1945 and 1955. Argyle currently lie around the halfway mark in what used to be the second division, now the Championship. They have an ambitious manager, three quarters of a modern stadium, progressed to the last eight of this year’s FA Cup and should, in terms of Plymouth’s population size, be challenging for a place in the Premiership. They’re not yet, but like the city itself, the team is beginning to punch its weight.
Ifirst visited Plymouth half a century ago with my friend Bill Trythall. His father was Captain of the Fleet when we still had one, and the Trythalls lived in an impressive naval mansion on Mount Wise. One day we borrowed the Admiral’s barge and sailed up the Tamar past the newly mothballed battleship Vanguard. We also toured HMS Eagle which, like Ark Royal, was a proper aircraft carrier. Today the naval dockyard is still there at Devonport: I pass it on the train from Cornwall just after rumbling over Brunel’s incomparable railway bridge and I find it reassuring to see gunmetal-grey ships of the line alongside the quays. But the dockyard is under threat and it is said that either Devonport or Portsmouth will soon perish. The Royal Navy certainly helps to give this place a rough edge, but taking the senior service out of Plymouth would be like removing the ravens from the Tower or the apes from Gibraltar. How ironic if New Labour were able to achieve what the Luftwaffe couldn’t.
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