How to ruin a good, honest, hard-working town: turn it into a city
MATTHEW PARRIS
This year, to celebrate the Queen's Golden Jubilee, city status is being conferred on the many applicants for that supposed honour. Derby has never recovered from becoming a city. Honoured with that status by the Queen during her Silver Jubilee in 1977, what had always been a fine, strong Midlands town became a second-rate Midlands 'city'. At the stroke of Her Majesty's pen, Derby's impressive church became a disappointing cathedral and her substantial town centre an unimpressive city centre. This completed a degradation started when her would-be-`city' council knocked down a splendid mid-Victorian railway station much in keeping with the solid town it served, replaced it with a slab of unmemorable late20th-century concrete and glass, and strung bits of flyover and fly-under all round the edge of town. Cities have these. Now poor Derby was ready to be unfavourably compared with neighbouring Leicester, Sheffield and Manchester: real cities. RIP Derby.
There are nine cities in England: London, Birmingham, Leicester, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle and Bristol. In Scotland there are obviously two. Ireland has Dublin and Belfast. In Wales you could stretch a point and call Cardiff a city. And that is about that, though I suppose we could argue about Nottingham and one or two other very big towns on the borderline.
We can discount the presence (or absence) of a cathedral. Ely is plainly not a city. I am content for traditional reasons to call York or Durham the Cities of York or Durham, but that does not mean their burghers are city-dwellers.
The concept of city is more raft than rowing-boat: no single spine or set-design defines it, just an agglomeration of qualities which, stranded together, gain power. To be a city is to be, in urban terms, in the super-league. If the word is to have any useful meaning, it must typically connote extraordinary size (more than a couple of parliamentary constituencies) and a sense of presence, self-confidence and self-containedness such that its citizens can feel it is their country within a country, with many of the attributes and some of the infrastructure of a state. It goes without saying that there will be thriving universities, theatres, stadiums, perhaps an opera-house, and a public transport system which amounts to more than a few radiating bus-routes. You must be able meaningfully to talk about travelling across this city from its east to its west or its north to its south; and, besides its suburbs, there will be a substantial resident population who live in the city.
Beyond this, there will be in the architecture and — as it were — the furniture of the place a kind of stature and a sense of civic identity: a string on which these beads are threaded. Because Edinburgh has this stature and identity, for example, we overlook the city's relative smallness. Because Croydon has it not at all, the populous sprawl of the place cannot alone qualify Croydon to be a city.
Often subjective tests, I concede. I concede, too, that there will always be a grey area along the frontier between the statuses of town and city. But the word 'city' has been important and useful in history and in our own lives, as witnessed by the ideas and phrases to which it has given birth: city life, city boy, the big city, sex in the city, inner-city, inter-city, city-slicker ...the connotation is of pace, scale, sophistication, even danger; never far away is a hardbitten, streetwise, stylish feeling.
And there is another good reason for marking the distinction properly. The word 'town' has a good and honourable pedigree, and connotes a set of attributes all its own. It is a wonderfully robust word and idea. Think of Middlemarch, of Barchester, indeed, of Toytown. Think of Calais. Think of Newark, Stamford, Barnard Castle. Think of any number of solid provincial places with their marketplaces, their gossip, their police station and main post office, their professional classes, their manufactures and trade, and their close and daily links with the rural hinterland they serve.
I like the words 'townspeople', 'townie' and 'townsfolk'. Town council, townhouses, town hall, townswomen, 'dirty old town' . . . these all evoke strong and sturdy associations. I think of red brick, hefty timber and stone, of seaside promenades and riverside walks and rats. I think of small streets and high streets and a well-tended municipal park. I think of an England composed as definitively of a hundred fine towns as of a half-a-dozen great cities.
Why should Brighton now disdain that status? What does Hove think it is if it is not a town? Why should Rochester think it better to be a joke city than a notable town? Do Luton or Croydon, Blackpool, Bolton, Colchester, Doncaster, Dover, Ipswich, Maidstone, Northampton, Shrewsbury, Stockport, Swindon, Telford, Warrington or Wrexham — all of which have applied, this time (mercifully) unsuccessfully, to be 'cities' — really believe they possess the elements of city status already? Or do they hope that by calling themselves cities they will attract new qualities and be seen differently? Does it not strike the campaigners for city status that widespread success will simply devalue the term 'city', pulling the word down — rather than themselves up — in popular esteem?
Why is Simon Burns, MP, complaining that the town he represents has not been granted city status for the Queen's Golden Jubilee? Instead, Chelmsford, a town if ever there was one, should be rejoicing at its narrow escape. Guildford, which has escaped too, should reflect on how pleasantly that place reflects our idea of a solid Home-Counties town, and how meagre a city it would be.
And we should be commiserating with the townsfolk of Preston, whose bid has been successful. 'City of Preston', my eye. 'City of Newport' too, it seems, soon: a flimsy city indeed. Do not, I repeat, think I mean to disparage Preston or Newport. Neither are exceptionally beautiful places but both have a sense of fortitude, of usefulness, of working, which is nicely expressed in the word 'town'. Town is a plainspeaking word, and Preston is a plainspeaking place, or was, before its councillors started filling their heads with poncy ideas.
Look at the list of winners for this Jubilee and you will see at work a spirit which is cravenly politic and careless of meaning. One Protestant and one Catholic town in Northern Ireland (neither imaginable as cities); Stirling. in Scotland, with a population of 30,000.
Good luck to them. The battle to keep a useful meaning for the word 'city' is lost. Let every hamlet be a village, every village a town, and every town a city. We shall just have to find a new word for city. 'Proper city', perhaps?
Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.
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