IT WAS ANOTHER crisp and magnificent day – and this one came with scenery to match, though appreciating the majesty of North Wales without windscreen wipers necessitated several hard-shoulder stops, four litres of Tesco Value table water and an entire box of mansize tissues. Muscular, snow-capped foothills of Snowdonia to the left, sun-dappled Irish Sea to the right, and ahead long miles of empty tarmac and – whoa there, young Craig! – the odd slick of black ice.
Ozzy’s announcement that we had reached our fucking destination took me rather by surprise. Lost in the landscapes, and the surprisingly extensive acoustic hinterland charted by the Wombles’ second album, I’d forgotten that my 65-mile journey had a goal, and that this goal was Sw Môr Môn. An unusually economic use of the Welsh language – the nearest settlement had announced itself, mercifully not aloud, as Llanfairpwllgwynyll – this was the translation emblazoned beneath the cartoon prawn who welcomed me to Anglesey Sea Zoo. To some visitors ‘shoddy’, to others ‘weird’, but to all an unmissable opportunity to indulge the abysmal pun reflex that fish seem fated to trigger. From the zoo’s website comments: ‘It was eely good’, ‘we don’t think it cod be batter’, ‘we had a whale of a time in a great plaice’. I pulled up in the empty carp-ark and thought: Fins can only get wetter.
‘That’ll be £7.25,’ said the young man at the entrance desk, sounding a little apologetic, and then a little desperate: ‘Though your ticket does entitle you to come back as often as you like for the next seven days.’ Consultation of the opening hours posted beside him inspired a brief, wild fantasy in which I sought to extract forty-nine hours’ worth of enjoyment from his establishment.
Anglesey Sea Zoo, I very quickly gathered, is a showcase of the underwater quotidian. Its first dim chamber was dominated by a shallow tank full of plaice doing what they do best, namely very little beyond blending in with the seabed. Those that followed allowed many further native marine creatures to demonstrate a similar appetite for humble inertia: mussels, starfish, anemones. In short, anyone who arrives at Sw Môr Môn hoping to ride a manatee or watch dolphins vault through laser hoops will leave underwhelmed. This is a place for those whose sober aquatic interests are not catered for by the more prevalent breed of glitzy aquaria: the kind of people who don’t snigger when invited to adopt a grey mullet, or to press a button labelled, Bellamy on flat fish (sadly not on a snack vending machine).
For two hours I walked alone through the dark and dripping cold, pressing my numb nose up to laminated information sheets about the common prawn, gazing at bland and cod-like British sharks, and being severally reminded of the dangers posed to marine life by plastic waste. There was standing water, a pervasive smell of fuel oil, and much stooping through corroded bulkheads. A low-tech wave machine periodically dumped a rusty skipful of brine onto some mocked-up rock pools with a great booming crash. I began to feel like a captain going down with his stricken trawler. This strange and ominous vibe encapsulated the shoddy weirdness that previous visitors had referred to, and which was now keenly emoted by a very straight-faced middle-aged couple who passed me at the speed of a Benny Hill title sequence. But in my new capacity as a connoisseur of the odd and the awful, I liked it. It was so mundane, yet so mad. I found myself drawing especial vicarious pleasure from the Welsh translations, imagining the happy challenge presented by ‘skates and rays can detect electrical pulses through tiny pores on their undersides’ to a native linguist more commonly obliged to earn his or her crust from ‘give way to sheep’ or ‘driver carries no cash, look you’.
As I walked on I came to appreciate and then internally applaud Anglesey Sea Zoo’s dogged repudiation of the gloss and glamour that defines their better-known rivals. At Seaworld, a demonstration of marine biology in action would mean some perma-tanned high-fiver in a cutdown wetsuit counting clown fish aloud. Here, through streaky Perspex, I watched a silent Open University type in a crumpled lab coat do painstaking things with a pipette. A yellowy Sellotaped sheet laid out his scientific agenda: an incest-proof breeding programme for short-snouted seahorses. For whatever reason, this was not explained in Welsh.
Having failed to squeeze into my itinerary the roundly denounced National Lobster Hatchery in Cornwall – ‘smaller than my bedroom, with some portholes through which you can see a lobster’ – you may imagine how my already buoyant enjoyment levels now soared on finding that Anglesey Sea Zoo incorporated the National Lobster Hatchery of Wales. It wasn’t a sprawling complex. A newspaper clipping stuck to the relevant viewing area recounted a ‘scandal’ in which hot lobster-on-lobster content filmed here had been passed off as natural-environment footage in the BBC series Blue Planet. The evidence of my eyes suggested this deception would have required some very lavish set-dressing. ‘When a mummy lobster and a daddy lobster love each other very much,’ an honest information panel might have read, ‘they get it on in a big white bucket.’
At length I made it to the cafeteria, where I sat down with a cup of tea and a big bun and concluded that Anglesey Sea Zoo’s perceived shortcomings were all of society’s own making. On the face of it, beyond a little light seahorse-sexing, the place offered nothing a family couldn’t experience for free on any of the long stretches of shoreline available close at hand. But then these days families can’t seem to face combing beaches or poking about in rock pools, in fact can’t seem to face anything that isn’t a packaged and processed experience presented by some half-arsed cartoon mascot, and which doesn’t offer en-suite refreshments and a hateful giftshop packed full of tenuously relevant rubbish (in ASZ’s case, anything with a picture of Sponge Bob Square Pants on it was considered fair game). And though £7.25 did seem a bit much, I strongly suspected this barely covered the insurance premiums in an age where a splashed pair of shoes might spark off ruinous litigation. We sue sea zoos on the sea shore. With all that said, I drove out of Sw Môr Môn vowing to bring my children here should the family find itself in the Anglesey area. Apart from anything else, it would be worth it just to see their faces when we drew up in the car park for the seventh morning in a row.
A stiff wind blew me back over the Menai Straits, past fields of hunkered-down static caravans and into the doyenne of terrible North Welsh seaside resorts. Its introductory thoroughfare was impressively unwelcoming: scrubby dunes to one side, and to the other an endless blue hoarding that kept at bay a mountain range of demolished rubble. This, I knew, was all that remained of a once famous old funfair, home to a number of historic rides, amongst them the world’s last surviving circular water chute. But the developers had just gone bust, leaving their vision for the site no more than faded words on a weatherbeaten ‘coming soon’ billboard: a 92,000-square-foot Asda, and the legend, RHYL – GOING FORWARD.
From residents to erstwhile holidaymakers, it’s hard to find anyone with a good word to say about Rhyl. ‘My aunt is the Mayor of Rhyl,’ began my favourite onslaught, ‘but family loyalty aside, it’s the most awful place I know.’ The town was ‘an absolute scum-hole’, a place where ‘seagulls fly upside-down because there’s nothing worth shitting on’. The Times called it ‘Britain’s first shanty town’, and the Consumer Association took a break from testing dishwashers to slag off Rhyl as ‘depressing and down at heel’. The last time the place made the news was when John Prescott punched a man in the face there, and with the waning of Carol Vorderman’s celebrity the mantle of Rhyl’s most famous daughter has passed back to Ruth Ellis, the last British woman to be hanged. Then there’s the issue of nomenclature. Rhyl: it’s another of those stark and plug-ugly town-names, hanging over the place like an albatross, with a beakful of your chips.
The dunes disappeared behind a flank of bare concrete desultorily topped with brown-leaved yucca plants, and the mothballed building site gave way to Homebase-sized amusement sheds – bleeping and open, as such places always seem to be whenever there are helpless fruit-machine addicts to amuse. Then it was into a long, ramshackle parade of towering Victorian boarding houses, some boarded up, some knocked down, and most of the rest – according to locals and the press – divided into bedsitting accommodation for the benefit of unemployed Liverpudlian opiate enthusiasts.
I pulled up in a pay-and-display bay and set off up the promenade with a whistle, the sound a budget-conscious motorist makes when it’s Sunday. But jaunty tootling quickly proved ill-suited to my environment. A local website had informed me that ‘Rhyl basks in a micro-climate said to match the temperatures in Torbay’. Said by who? The bitter Irish Sea wind forcing itself up my sleeves and trouser legs had the answer: said by liars. I think you’ll find that at least 98 per cent of all ‘micro-climates’ are complete fabrications, made up by tourist boards or friends who have moved somewhere horrid but still want you to visit them.
The seafront parade, in sympathy with the conditions, proved comfortably more dreadful than any I had yet experienced. Some of it was shut down for the season, but most of it was shut down for ever. Rhyl had even managed to kill off its retailers of last resort, those elsewhere indestructible commercial cockroaches who moved in when all else failed: CHEAP STORE – MANY ITEMS £1 – EVERYTHING NOW 50P – WE HAVE CLOSED DOWN. Every frontage was peeling and scabbed. A lot of upper floors had been completely painted over with thick magnolia emulsion, windows and all. Day-glo starbursts blared shabby inducements like FREE LAGER WITH ROAST MEAL! and CHEAPEST CHIPS IN RHYL. An invisible asterisk had hovered above most of the previous scenes of decay and decline I’d passed through, reminding me that whatever was no longer being done there, it probably hadn’t been much fun to do in the first place, like mining coal or making sulphuric acid. But there was no asterisk here: just the betrayed and haunting air of a place that had been purpose-built for having a good time, and now wasn’t.
In desperation I struck off down a side street. A mistake: it was worse. The pavement looked like it had been cluster bombed, and half the boarding-house hulks that lined it were shedding roof tiles and had their doors and windows sealed up behind drilled-metal shutters. Looping back round I passed an estate agent’s window, and saw houses priced in four figures. I plunged my hands deep into my coat pockets, bowed my head to the incoming bluster and hurried back to the seafront.
The first bathing machines were wheeled out onto the Rhyl sands in the early years of Victoria’s reign, but in accordance with the usual pattern, the place took off as a seaside destination when the railway came to town in 1848. At a stroke this opened up the resort to millions of city dwellers – most of them in the deeply land-locked West Midlands, who found that despite being 100 miles from Birmingham, Rhyl was nonetheless their nearest beach. For over a hundred years the Brummies came in happy droves. Rhyl was soon home to the largest fairground in Wales, a half-mile pier, and the splendidly ornate five-domed Pavilion Theatre, whose massive, illuminated central hemisphere was visible from way out to sea. A mechanical elephant carried children along the prom. So too did the oldest miniature railway in Britain.
Unusually for those in charge of a post-war British seaside town, Rhyl’s elders saw the cheap-flight package-holiday crisis coming and took action – but because they did so in the early 1970s, all of it was horribly wrongheaded. The pier was pulled down in 1972, and the wondrous Pavilion Theatre a year later – reborn soon after as a corrugated oatmeal hangar with all the ritzy good-time appeal of a supermarket distribution centre. A number of shopping arcades were built in homage to the most dispiriting trends in period retail architecture, and the mechanical elephant was tarred and feathered and pushed down a well. In a few short years, every trace of the character that had made Rhyl seem glamorous and exuberant was brutally stripped away. People go on holiday to find something different, even if that difference is only the weather. But by the end of the 1970s, Rhyl was beginning to look and feel like every other slightly downbeat, grey-skied town in Britain – a process completed once the funfair went and the beach was shielded from sight by that big concrete wall. Holidaymakers from Wolverhampton got off the train or out of their cars and found themselves in Wolverhampton-by-Sea – in fact, Wolverhampton-by-Wall. Llandudno, just up the coast from Rhyl and for a century its poor and backward relation, was run by clueless Luddites who wouldn’t knock down their pier and other outdated embarrassments. As a result, the town has cleaned up from the current boom in genteel and nostalgic mini-breaks, and now counts itself the largest seaside resort in Wales.
Rhyl’s fall from grace was swift and dramatic. Between 1979 and 1988, the number of visitor nights fell by over a quarter, and then by another third in the seven years that followed. Of the eighteen separate seafront properties that offered tourist accommodation in the 1977 season, just three were still doing so by 2000. And so Rhyl skulked away into the shadowy overlap that exists between the melancholy of a faded seaside resort and the heavier shit of hardcore urban degeneration. Attracted by the ample availability of cheap accommodation, jobless drifters gravitated towards the town. By the mid 1980s, the tabloids had dubbed it the ‘Costa del Dole’, and today a quarter of Rhyl’s 26,000 population lives in long-term b. & b. accommodation. The West End ward – which takes in the seafront – rates as the most deprived area in Wales, and the town as a whole is burdened with the highest unemployment rate in Britain: 48.9 per cent of the adult population is classified as economically inactive. A third of all Denbighshire crimes are committed in Rhyl. The Scousers-and-smack reputation seems to date back to 1996, when local police discovered that most of Rhyl’s heroin addicts were being supplied by a fourteen-year-old boy from Liverpool. (He kept his stash in those plastic capsules out of Kinder Eggs, and was driven around in a big car by two heavies: the whole operation seems like some Young Apprentice for class-A drug dealers.)
Back on West Parade even the seagulls sounded mournful. Rhyl’s Victorian visitors had gazed up at the town’s snowed-on Snowdonian backdrop with hearty relish, but today the mountains looked less of an inspiration than a reproach, there to emphasise the frail impermanence of the dying town laid out at their feet, in fact the futility of all human endeavour. Everything kept going wrong for Rhyl, yet still they kept trying to put it right. To atone for the misguided demolition of their pier and that splendid theatre, Rhyl’s authorities had erected some faux Victorian booths with roof finials and Gothic arches, housing the tourist office and the snack bars and coin-slot attractions of a ‘children’s village’. But it all looked so half-baked and shoddy: sagging fibreglass, stained concrete and business-park brickwork, a bad copy of a fake, like Main Street USA in Disneyland recommissioned by Leonid Brezhnev. His input would certainly explain the starkly incompatible 250-foot glory-to-the-people observation tower that speared into the cold, dead sky.
Further up, the seafront pleasure gardens that had been one of Rhyl’s many pride and joys were now a skatepark, an abstract landscape of ramps and half-pipes. While appreciating the value of such a facility in a town where needle-sharing is only a bored afternoon away, I couldn’t understand why it had to be put here. Rhyl is hardly short of vacant land, yet the town had opted to hand over its showpiece public space – the promenade’s focal point, backdrop to a million sepia postcards – to hooded teenage miserablists.
I peered over the sea wall and beheld Rhyl’s fabled miles of golden sand, shrunk by high tide to a muddy ribbon of shingle. By this stage it hardly seemed to matter: I fancied that even in high season, the British bucket-and-spade holiday demanded a degree of goose-pimpled hardiness that today’s centrally heated, double-glazed native namby-pambies no longer possessed. Lay out a towel on just one Mediterranean beach, and there’s no going back to windbreaks.
Hence the Sun Centre, Rhyl’s attempt to ‘bring the seaside inside’, opened to great hurrahs in 1980. Permanent summer! Tropical storm effects! Europe’s first indoor surfing pool! But even from the outside I could sense the excitement hadn’t been sustained. A massive plastic barn, weathered and anonymous, the Sun Centre looked less like a climate-controlled aquatic paradise than the sort of place where you might find yourself losing an argument with customer services about a faulty leaf blower.
I knew it wouldn’t be open again for two months, but I was keen to see what had inspired contributors at reviewcentre. com to rate the place as the worst tourist attraction in all of Wales. Happily, it shared a lobby with the New Pavilion Theatre, which was preparing for a matinée performance of Noddy in Toyland (forthcoming highlights: Roger Dee Sings the Johnny Cash Story and Go West – the 25th Anniversary Tour). I walked in and pressed my face up to the Sun Centre’s locked glass doors, catching a thin waft of chlorine, mouldy towels and last season’s chip fat. Drained and stained, the irregular-shaped pools seemed sad and creepy; the primary-hued plastic employed for everything from water slides to snack huts had dulled and roughened like an old toothbrush. The whole Chernobyl fairground look.
Poor Rhyl. They’d drained the civic coffers building this place, only to see its attractions swiftly matched, then trumped, by every other suburban leisure centre in Britain. Beyond the odd mouthful of Elastoplast, most of the online gripes focused on the Sun Centre’s failure to improve or update, to offer jaded regulars something more, something different for their £7.95. Today, Europe’s first indoor surfing pool isn’t even the best in Wales.
I tramped across the gum-blotted carpet tiles and pushed my way out into the wind. Opposite stood a pair of large Victorian hotels in the mock-Tudor style: one was for sale, the other long-since burnt-out. ‘Rhyl just needs to stop pretending it’s a tourist town,’ said one local commentator. ‘There’s nothing for tourists here, so why keep hoping they’ll come back?’ Walking back towards Craig, I wondered what choice the place had. Perhaps in America, or somewhere else more ruthlessly commercial, the local authorities would have bowed to market forces, accepted their town had outlived its usefulness and abandoned it. I fired Craig up, stuck the heater on max and puttered off towards Rhyl’s caravan belt. ‘The best thing about Rhyl is the A548 out of it,’ wrote one local, introducing a new spin on an old joke. ‘The worst thing is that this takes you straight to Prestatyn.’
Craig built up a decent head of steam as darkness fell and we reeled our way back north-west on England’s motorway network. I drove much too fast to Castleford, which offered no room at any of its shittier inns, and even faster to Doncaster, which did.
Doncaster ranked fifteenth on the Location list, and was my wife’s personal nomination – courtesy of many bleak and hypothermic evenings spent changing trains there en route to York University, whose memory even twenty years on brings out her thousand-yard stare. An Ozzy-resistant roundabout network and the MP3 player’s decision to engage ‘repeat’ mode during Kevin Rowland’s cover version of ‘The Greatest Love of All’ meant I arrived in central Doncaster ready to hate everything about the place, but it just didn’t happen. My downtown hotel had been damned in the harshest terms by reviews that ranked it worse than 597 Yorkshire rivals, and better than only eight, but had naturally just emerged from a comprehensive makeover. So too, as I discovered during a brisk walk through Doncaster’s silent night, had the railway station, restored to the airy, bright, monochrome grandeur of its 1938 refit – the very year that the Doncaster-built Mallard set a record it still holds as the fastest steam locomotive on earth. I found it hard to imagine such an inspiringly historic building playing host to the worst nights of my wife’s life, though she may be pleased to hear that the forebearance displayed during her many ordeals is commemorated by a discreet plaque near the platform 3 waiting room.
Doncaster’s shopping malls seemed no worse than averagely bland and ill-considered, and its streets displayed no signs of rampant civic despair beyond a few too many Cash Converters and the odd 99p-all-night booze promotion. And the flag-stoned market square was a proper delight, congregated with venerable coaching inns and the fancy old façades of Doncaster’s corn and wool exchanges. I’d forgotten that places like this ever survived in British town centres, and felt something akin to relief when I walked round the back and saw St George’s Minster, a jewel of Victorian Gothic and the town’s loveliest edifice, cowering in the middle of a gyratory system.
What’s bright yellow and contains 1,872 calories? That’s right: deep-fried Scotsman’s liver on a bed of Quavers. But lagging just one calorie behind is Chinese lemon chicken, a dish that had been on my to-eat list as the unhealthiest available on British high streets, and which fate now chose to offer up in a menu affixed to a restaurant window directly opposite my hotel.
‘Is sweet, yeh?’ said the terrifically enthusiastic waitress when I placed my order. ‘You like sweet?’
‘I absolutely love it,’ I lied, for my place on the Chinese takeaway taste spectrum lies at the distant other extreme: sour-and-sourer.
‘Oh, I tell husband in kitchen! He make special for you, extra sweet!’
The restaurant was the usual study in red, gold and heavily lacquered imperial black. On my table a plastic sprig of pink blossom sat in a vase full of coloured glass gravel; it was promptly joined by a basket of prawn crackers and a pint of lager – not my last of the evening, if the waitress’s terrible parting words lived up to their tongue-varnishing promise. I didn’t quite have the place to myself. A few tables back a young executive was trying to impress two female colleagues – and doing an excellent job of it, if one assumed they were interviewing him for a position as South Yorkshire’s most insufferable arse. At one point I heard him say, ‘Let me offer you ladies a king prawn – I’m in chill-out project-handover mode.’ At no point did I hear his companions say anything that wasn’t a request for more wine.
My yellow peril arrived during a monologue on the interpersonal shortcomings of Carl in the finance department over at Derby HQ. ‘You lucky!’ said the waitress, laying down a steaming plate and a bowl neatly filled with a little sphere of boiled rice. ‘I go in kitchen and husband has coat on, want to go home!’ My face did its best to register curious concern through a mist of challenging odours. ‘Today, whole day, we have seven customer – you eight! Yesterday five!’
The rise and fall of the high-street Chinese restaurant, as I later established, is directly and curiously connected to the similar parabola traced by another British institution. In 1958, London-based restaurateur John Koon met Billy Butlin, a regular customer at the Chinese takeaway – Britain’s first – that Koon had recently opened on Queensway. As his dabbling with monorails made clear, Billy had a weakness for exotic novelty, and eagerly struck up an agreement with Koon to open a ‘Chinese kitchen’ in every one of his holiday camps (signature dish: chicken chop suey and chips). The popularity of this strange new food was instant and enormous, and when the Butlin’s millions went back home they wanted more of it. Within a decade, Britain was home to over a thousand Chinese restaurants.
After the waitress had gone, I took a steadying draught of Carlsberg, then assessed the task at hand. My plate was a stack of battered meat wedges doused in amber gel: it looked like the result of some ill-fated experiment by the young Colonel Sanders. ‘To my great consternation,’ I imagined him writing in his journal, ‘it appears that Kentucky folk have no taste for roosters boiled in marmalade.’
I speared a wedge with a chopstick and crammed the whole thing into my mouth. Extraordinary sensations were unleashed at once, all of them strange and wrong, as if my palate had been shortcircuited. It was like one of those salt/sugar cereal mishaps we’ve all endured, except without the end bit where you spit Brine Flakes out all over the table then tip the balance down the sink, spluttering imprecations.
Chinese Lemon Chicken has been described in print as ‘the most offensive gastronomic insult to any indigenous culinary tradition’, and it’s a truism that oriental food as served on British high streets bears little relation to the genuine article, heavily corrupted as it has been to suit native tastes. That much was evident in the terrible things being done inside my mouth by the flagrant chief ingredient: lemon curd is a comestible I don’t imagine you’d find on many a Beijing shelf. Nor indeed, I thought during another Carlsberg rinse-out, on many a Doncastrian shelf, not these days. There seemed something stubbornly unreconstructed about this dish, something very 1958: a post-rationing splurge of sugar and spice and all things nice (more sugar). Lemon chicken packs the gut-wobbling punch of three Big Macs and a packet of crisps – 94 per cent of a woman’s recommended daily calorie intake on a single plate, and as much as 112 per cent of a man’s, should he find himself obliged to sluice it down with three pints of lager. But in 1958, post-war and pre-car, too many calories was a good thing.
Anyway, just as Butlin’s found itself superseded by more glamorous, more authentic and less stodgy alternatives, so did Chinese restaurants. They’ve been a declining high-street presence since the 1990s, some rebranded as Thai or Malaysian, many more just throwing in the soy-stained towel: by 2009, fifteen Chinese restaurants or takeaways were closing every week. A recent catering-industry survey identified ‘a reputation for being fatty and laden with additives’ as the key factor. I’ve just looked up a recipe for ‘takeaway style lemon chicken’: amongst the more troubling ingredients is something called ‘chicken powder’.
But after everything the waitress had said to me I knew I would have to clean my plate, even as I watched its contents congeal beneath a wrinkled, iridescent crust, like radioactive rice pudding. The final mouthful was dispatched in the manner of Cool Hand Luke tackling that fiftieth boiled egg. Twelve hours later its legacy was still taking the edge off my appetite, though that might have had something to do with my curious decision to eat jelly babies for lunch.
Prepare yourself for the future – tomorrow will become the future. Thus read the legend inside the uneaten fortune cookie I’d lethargically thumped asunder, and which – in a Mordor – Going Forward kind of way – proved a decent encapsulation of the day.