Haters

Pity Luton. People only ever pass through. It is a commuter train station of a town. Every year ten million people come within fifteen minutes of its centre yet never think to drop in. Luton is a discarded great-aunt with Alzheimer’s we keep meaning to visit. The trouble is, people think she stinks of piss.

I am popping in, and from the airport at that. The driver of the number 61 looks a little confused when I tell him I want to go into the town centre and not alight at the airport’s railway station for a train to London. He is positively discombobulated when three German backpackers board and demand transport to ‘the centre of Luton Town’. From the window the grey horizon of tarmac and sky is broken only by grey factory buildings in-between. It makes a change from the scarlet rust of Teesside and South Yorkshire, I suppose.

One of them is Home of the Vauxhall Vivaro, a reminder that the company once employed 30,000 workers here. From everywhere, people were drawn to Luton and the work it offered. A decade ago, the main Vauxhall factory closed. Working-class work wound down another gear and the melting pot began boiling over. Vauxhall’s demise brought the death of its social structures – the clubs, the societies, the outings, the football teams. Those people from everywhere needed something to belong to.

We splash on, making the satisfying noise of bus tyre on wet road. The Daily Express and Star printing hangar is sleeping now, awaiting the new poison-arrow words and pictures that will arouse England in so many different ways tomorrow. Chevrolet and General Motors look silent too, but do hint at weekday work. There are no north-eastern-style gaps here, but then the south-east has always had a better PR department. Just like Teesside, the public sector is Luton’s biggest employer. We plunge past the Sicilian Cafe, its Budweiser sign flashing, and the University of Bedfordshire’s visual timeline of architectural horror schemes into view. The latest effort – Jenga comes off worse in a barney with a full cement mixer – is, at least, unique. The Sunday Telegraph once asked if this was the ‘worst university in Britain’. It is easy to sneer at these Cornflake-box polys, but it is often they who give access to a family’s first university attendee, and they who prop up wasted small-town economies.

The bus drops me outside the back of something, but then, as I later find, a fair proportion of central Luton seems to be the back of something. Slightly befuddled and wondering if jetlag is possible from an Edinburgh to Luton flight, I find myself in a courtyard full of industrial bins. They seem to man-mark me and I am only able to escape with a deft drop of the shoulder. When I emerge, the rain is doing Luton’s concrete no favours. Mascara is running all down her face. There are spots and sites to cheer. The Hat Factory is a smartly adapted old industrial unit now comprising an arts and entertainment venue. I think of chancing the cafe, but am put off by frequent mentions of jazz and contemporary dance. Plus, Luton is not really open yet, so I perch on a wall and read about hats.

Luton exists because of hats. Before migrants arrived to make things for roads, they arrived to make things for heads. Some were troubled souls, driven to the workhouses to make headwear they would never wear. From the 1600s straw boaters were Luton’s number-one export. Over the next couple of hundred years, women and children used their bare hands to plait straw and were paid by the hat. The Plait Mistresses built a cottage industry in their hovels. Its spoils symbolised their town. Nowhere else did the police sport straw helmets, nor the football crowd boaters.

I walk on by Polish lads in baseball caps, up early to beaver away and send a few quid home. Towards The Mall a concrete labyrinth of stilted walkways leads to the Holiday Inn, a groaningly tired tower block stocked with guests who thought they had booked a hotel in London. In the 1990s my guidebook, The Changing Face of Luton, had confessed of its ‘dismal’ subject: ‘It is easy to identify the town centre as a problem area, being one which encapsulates Luton’s difficulties with its self-esteem as a whole’ and gone on to list previous descriptions of the place: ‘a dirty town’ (1782), ‘a poor town which evinced marks of decadency’ (1828), a place where ‘no lady dares walk the streets after dark’ (1846), ‘an urban smudge amid the green of Bedfordshire’ (1989). The same work, though, encapsulates in a line the genetics and genius of the place when it offers that ‘Luton was not an attractive town, but it was a place of opportunity, drawing in thousands of hopeful people.’

The Mall itself is awakening garishly. Shutters roll upwards and shop staff arrive and greet one another groggily. Not so long ago, The Mall was an Arndale Centre. If these places are the children of the swinging sixties then it says little of their parents. Only one of Britain’s twenty-two former Arndales is outside England (Aberdeen), and eighteen are in the north. The Arndale scheme represented a vision of a New England, and is thus worthy of mention. It was a utopia built on shops, a consumerist Jerusalem rising from bulldozed streets. If you build it, they will come and buy stuff. As a concept, it worked – it is an idea of England that prevails; only now the Jerusalems are out of town and include household pet megastores. By the time us Children of Thatcher were looking for places to hang around, Arndales had mostly been renamed and lingered only as cultural references. And when I say ‘cultural references’, I mean ‘mentions on Corrie’.

The bright blue frontage of a favourite bijou deli of mine – Greggs – beckons. Now that their range extends to sausage sandwiches, there is no reason, other than morbid obesity, not to purchase all three daily meals from their be-capped servers. As I lumber about The Mall eating microwaved meat from a brown paper bag, I am embarrassed to recall a Greggs encounter more southern than even this. I had become lost in old London town prior to Christmas, and not a little unsettled. When her azure façade came into view and my eyes met her pasties, I felt the kind of homecoming comfort that greets an Arctic explorer when he returns and hears someone moan about the weather. Oh faithful Greggs, there you were in London, just ready to hold me as I now hold you.

As I leave The Mall I hear two men enthusiastically debating the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The burghers of Luton, it seems, are not afraid to embrace the current affairs agenda. I emerge on to George Square, a hotchpotch of regeneration schemes. There are fountains in its centre, largely populated by rainwater, and a large pole that seems to bear two solar panels and some upturned bells. To the left, the faux-marble giant tree house of TK Maxx leads around to the firm and fair town hall. The far side is lined by a sliding scale of Victorian shops, which is brutally capped off by a forbidding multi-storey car park. Next, a couple of chain bars in 1990s rotting lemon colour fill one side, before giving way to the library and theatre. The library and theatre building also contains a blood donor centre, which, hearteningly, is packed with givers. Theatre posters advertise visits by Lutonian genius John Hegley, and ‘Cinderella: The Second Coming – A Naughty Panto For Big Boys and Girls’. Intriguingly, a plaque on the side of the library erected by the African Caribbean Community Development Forum commemorates ‘all slaves who suffered and died in Bedfordshire’. I leave George Square in search of legendary arson.

Luton’s current town hall is a thing of beauty, though admittedly it stands next to some pretty ropey competition, a puma among pugs. It resembles a traditional junior office of government, one that deals in wars with minor African republics or regulating car washes. Doe-eyed windows surround an ornate and pillared portico, before two hidden tiers recline. These seem secretive. Perhaps this is where the Lutonian authorities prepare for chemical warfare with Dunstable. A banner hoisted by something called the Love Luton campaign hangs above the main door and heralds the town’s bid for city status in 2012. Just when any normally pleasant art deco building might stop, there is a chunky but graceful clock tower. It looks like a monumental brick sculpture of an old-fashioned police box, standing vigilant and proud over Luton’s main shopping street.

Adding to this scene of stony reverence, in the town hall’s lap a magnificent war memorial steals the eye and speaks to the heart. Carved on to its plinth in an understatedly poignant font-size are the words: ‘Greater love hath no man than this/that a man lay down his life for his friends’. Not his country, note, his friends. Many of those friends are listed around the statue. Names, names, names; people from Luton and England. This particular England, War Memorial England, is not necessarily as patriotic as it appears at first poppy-wreathed glance. It is about lost people, united. United with people from everywhere.

The friends who came home never forgot. They did not need a plaque to remind them of that greater love possessed. What England had put them through, and the deaths she had sent their friends to, shook them. So in Luton with fire they came and burnt the town hall down.

It happened on 19 July 1919, under a year since the people of England were left to their uneasy peace. After the war, Luton’s veterans, Luton’s friends, had formed into two organisations, the Discharged Soldiers and Seafarers Federation (DSSF) and the Comrades. Both resented how government had disregarded servicemen since the conflict ceased, and each disliked the other.

Saturday 19 July had been designated Peace Day. A march, led by the mayor on his Throne of Peace, stuttered through town, heckled at every turn by the ex-fighters and their other friends, those that were not there, and did not see, but cared. Festival floats rolled sadly on and bunting sagged in the rain. ‘We Do Not Want Processions, We Want Work’ read a banner strung across the road by the DSSF. When the mayor read a proclamation from the king, shrill jeers drowned him out. On he shuffled in his robes to the town hall and safety. The seventy-year-old doors of oak harrumphed closed behind him. He could breathe. He could curse the ungrateful people of Luton. How dare they not celebrate victory, how dare they boo England’s king?

Then they came. The mob of democracy. At 3 p.m., kick-off time, they began to gather. First it was the ex-servicemen, then their many supporters. When the women and children joined in, the mayor knew they were not for turning. Loudly the crowd demanded he address them. Quietly he moused from a back door. The police in their straw helmets made by locals formed a line. The people crawled through it to make speeches. What surnames they had, Goodship, Good, Quince and all. Each spoke of the injustice done to them and to their friends. Piffling war pensions, no jobs, the wounded left for dead in dirty houses. Now, 10,000 were here to listen and roar.

The straw police collapsed and a sub-mob raided the town hall. They tore flock from the walls, lights from the ceilings and threw lampshades and chairs into the street. The police fought back and forced them out, but on went the speeches. Harry Miles, Bolshevist recipient of the Military Medal, offered to lead the revolution. A workers’ Soviet in Luton for the people.

When the pubs opened, the numbers dropped off. When they closed, they grew again. Bricks, iron bars and bottles had been added to their armoury. On the hills around town, flares were lit to signal Round Two. George Heley, a seaman with HMS Violent, took on the police, hitting one on the jaw, one in the stomach and, when floored, one privately. Around the side of the town hall, they broke into its food store and burnt ration books and coupons. In charged the fire brigade.

The emergency services fought with the men from the services. Gentlemen, we have ourselves a riot. From the shattered windows of Herts Motors a man emerged with dribbling petrol cans. On to the town hall went the petrol. Up went the town hall. Looted perfume and potions were added to the blaze. Just after midnight, the town hall clock’s face melted away and fell into the street. With the building beyond saving, stalemate prevailed between rioters and protectors. Still, on they looted, this time S. Farmer and Co. Music. Gramophones were liberated, grand pianos pushed into the street. A pianist appeared and within minutes hundreds were singing ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and dancing the night away to show-tunes, their backdrop an inflamed orange sky. At 3 a.m., the troops came – their friends. They would not fight their friends and so ended England’s first peace riots.

Of the twenty-eight men and women sent for trial at Bedford Assizes, most had a military background. Where they did not, they had a friend or family connection, or just wore a soldier’s tunic and cap for the fun of it (mad Maud Kitchener, a machinist, who got six months in prison for ‘inciting riot with obscene language’). There did not seem to be too much regret. The following summer, on their holiday travels Lutonians sang, ‘We’re a jolly lot of fellows yes we are/For we come from Luton Town/Where they burnt the town hall down ...’

The town hall incident is important. It reminds us, a few months after shattered glass on the streets of London, that burning and a-lootin’ is not new, that the 2011 summer riots, though far different in participant motivation, were not the rotten fruit of a New England, but an uncomfortable tradition. It is also important because it represents the distortion of an England we thought we knew. War Memorial England was a reverent place that quietly and mawkishly mourned the passing of a generation. It was patriotic and occasionally proud of victory. But we, Thatcher’s children and our parents, created that England. Real war memorial England is often none of that. It is angry, its memorial the burnt down town hall. It is angry at war and waste and people with money sending those without to die. It is rebellious. Luton’s act, disregarding the appalling damage caused, spoke for a nation united in unrest. Luton’s War Memorial England, I find far easier to relate to.

I turn around from the modern town hall, built on ashen soil in 1936, to peer down George Street. A tracksuited man in his thirties jogs backwards, facing a motley crew of twenty-or-so kids in bright bibs. They strain to keep up, each with a smile of helpless and breathless humour. Rarely has such ecstasy been witnessed in this section of Luton’s main pedestrianised zone. They have the right idea for it is mercilessly cold today, the kind of cold this northerner presumed impossible in the beautiful south. I clamber up and down the modestly inclined side streets that filter from the main drag and give a flavour of Luton’s current DNA. On the first the Lebanon Grill is neighboured by Polska Chata. Up from that pair are The Flame gay bar and the subtlety titled Cheap Adult DVDs (does that mean the adults are cheap or the products?). The parallel street hosts Bangladesh’s Sonali Bank, advertising in its window today’s taka rate, and has a Caribbean food caravan at its foot. Marvellously, alongside curried goat and jerk chicken this claims to sell ‘Raps’. Back on George Street, the stylish premises of Polskie Delikatesy Smaczek are busy doling out evocatively scented bread and exotic sausages to a mixed crowd of Poles and native foodies. Onwards from there a remnant sign describes an event last September: ‘Taste of Luton Food Festival – Celebrating the Food and Culture of Luton’. In Middlesbrough, Sheffield and now here, food offers a passport to integration and understanding. We should not be surprised. When the Portuguese-Jewish helped to establish London’s fish and chip trade, it aided their assimilation no end and bred tolerance from others. England: where tikka masala heals racism.

Among the foul and shabby concrete of Old Bedford Road everyone seems to walk alone. There are no couples or gangs of teenage friends, though it is shortly after 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning. The River Lea, the lifeblood Luton was founded on and then built over, is clogged and shallow. Litter blocks cause it to eddy in places, which I suppose livens proceedings a little. I turn a corner. The houses smarten up, streets widen and a sloped green common offers breathing space and pensionable trees. In Luton’s salad days this route – from the town centre to Wardown Park – was known as ‘The Monkey Parade’. Young pups would throw on their handbags and gladrags and walk up and down eyeing up suitors. Marriages were made here, Luton’s own version of Coles Corner. I enter Wardown Park by an anonymous gate. What a place. A garden of Eden, of England.

We do parks so well in this country. Their very Victorian reason for existing, to provide leisure places for rich and poor, seems still to exist. Of course, the rich now would more likely prefer a weekend in their Cotswold retreat, but the point of a democratic open space remains. Albert Park in Middlesbrough is hemmed on two sides by housing estates that time forgot, but is undeniably beautiful and can lift any spirit. Wardown Park in Luton, though surrounded largely by mock Tudor houses, is the same. Recently spruced up, it doesn’t half look grand for its age. Ducks waddle and float contentedly on its boating lake, oblivious to the toddler attempting to hit them with a stick. Cyclists, joggers and dog-walkers crisscross one another with hearty ‘Mornings!’ bellowed. We are surrounded and walled by naked trees and we could be part of anywhere’s winter. One of them has a notice pinned to it. ‘Budgie found in Wardown Park, Sunday 22nd’, it says, with a number to call.

I pass the frilly Daisy Chain Wall, a hundred years old and stretching out luxuriously, and enter Luton’s town museum. It is hosted in an old stately home and creaks with experience accordingly. Portrait-lined walls lead to snug exhibit rooms. The atmosphere is still, calm and utterly comforting. There are no blaring noises and the only interactive experiences come from the happy nods and glances of other visitors. One of them, a young mum, remarks to a curator: ‘Wow, I’ve not been here for years.’ The curator replies that ‘Oh, it’s changed a lot’ though I don’t really believe her. One room is crowded with artefacts of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment, an Aladdin’s Cave if Aladdin were slightly too obsessed with military regalia. I learn two things that I like: that in the Second World War Luton formed ‘Pig Clubs’ which gathered metal under the slogan ‘saucepans into spitfires’; and that during a 1917 munitions strike union meetings were held at Kenilworth Road, my footballing destination this afternoon.

Upstairs in the Luton Life section, locals Robert Wilkinson, Philip Harman, Bob Ireland, Larry McGrattan and Verna Ible respectively talk about the 1920s, the Arndale Centre, Scottish immigrants fighting Lutonians, and arriving from Ireland and St Kitts. It is a shame their memories are only recorded, as I would love to have met them. ‘I know lots of people say horrible things about Luton,’ says Verna, ‘but I always defend it.’ Putul Islam adds: ‘When you talk about Luton you are talking about English, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Irish, Scottish – everybody. We feel this is our home. Lutonians are multi-coloured, multicultural.’

Beyond the voices of Luton are the hats, floating like camp body-less legions. Relief comes from The Plough, a replica of a dark oak Victorian bar torn down, inevitably, for the Arndale, and a fine display on the town hall riots. One of the cases includes singed and salvaged legal documents, now the shape and colour of cartoon toast, a policeman’s straw helmet and the XII from the fallen town hall clock. I still get a shudder when I get as close to history as this. If anything, that feeling only increases with time. These cremated items make English history, or the aspects that appeal to me (rebellion, setting fire to things, funny hats), easier to grasp and relate to. Continuity equals identity. It’s not unlike supporting a football team. Surely we should all have our own period or theme as we do a team. Perhaps yours is represented by the two framed photographs of Miss Electrolux factory 1976 and 1985 on the wall opposite the riots display? Look how pleased you are, Lorraine Sibley 1976, with your bonny smile and sash. See how the men on the production line gawp at you, Helen Drewell 1985, with your perm and trophy. Alas, a lass, those days are gone. As a museum placard near you says, ‘Luton business is now more office-based’.

I leave Lorraine and Helen because I have spotted something all museums should have – cases containing football memorabilia. As far as The Hatters of Kenilworth Road are concerned, it’s all there: photos of the jubilant League Cup winning side of 1988; a 1959 FA Cup final programme; a piece of Astroturf (‘Many famous players will have walked upon it’).

The Hatters are not a young club, though their history tends to be obscured behind Eric Morecambe, those pieces of Astroturf, David Pleat skipping in a Del Monte suit and hateful ID Cards. They are of a finer vintage than that. Luton Town were formed in 1885 and made their own bit of history a decade on when striker Frank Whitby became the first player in southern England to be paid. For decades they bobbled around, providing recreation for the hat and motor vehicle labourers of the town. In days of sepia and obligatory moustaches their supporters were a sight to behold – looking at old crowd pictures, it is difficult to spot a single fan not sporting a straw boater. They were still wearing their boaters when miraculous Joe Payne sprang back to life.

Payne was transported to Bedfordshire from Derbyshire coalfields in the early 1930s. On Good Friday 1936 he was left for dead. Disregarded, forgotten and fighting for a place in the reserve team, Payne had only recently returned from enforced loan exile with Biggleswade Town. Not once had the mining man dug his way into the Hatters first team. England froze that Easter, the coldest for thirty years. By Easter Sunday it was clear that the aching limbs of Luton’s goal-getters were not to be healed in time for the following day’s match with Bristol Rovers. ‘Who shall save us from the evil of an underwhelming performance?’ asked the directors. From the dark emerged Joseph Payne. ‘He’s been playing centre-half for the reserves all season, but maybe he could save us, maybe he could score?’ And so it was that on Easter Monday the resurrection of Joe Payne occurred.

Payne scores his first after twenty-three minutes and goes into half-time with a hat-trick. His fourth comes on forty-nine, his fifth – a controlling nod with the forehead, a smash into the roof of the net – on fifty-five. Two minutes later the double hat-trick is his and soon after the seventh and eighth. Twelve days earlier, Bobby Bell of Tranmere has scored nine. Nine? Pah, says Joe as he rattles another in. Four minutes to go. Can Joe do it? Can he become a record breaker? Pah, says Joe again, from his position on the muddy floor of the penalty area. He turns on his backside and diverts the heavy ball home. Joe Payne 10 v. Bristol Rovers 0. The resurrection is complete. Payne is re-born. ‘There was football drama in excelsis at Luton yesterday,’ says Tuesday’s News Chronicle, ‘What a debut! It was a debut unprecedented in the long history of soccer.’ The next season he scores fifty-five times in thirty-nine games as Luton win Division Three. Soon, England sniff and Chelsea pounce. Illness, injury and war hold Joe back and his career dies aged thirty-three. No one ever beats his perfect ten.

The Hatters’ maddest period began in the Brylcreamed surroundings of 1950s English football. In 1955 they launched themselves into a brave new world of Division One football and board promises of a stadium fit for 35,000 Lutonians. ‘We will get a lot of the support which goes to London at the moment,’ promised the chairman. Town finished tenth in their first year, their attacking football winning luscious praise. They were fighters, too. Before a match at Birmingham, their coach crashed and span off the road. By 5 o’clock, the shaken players had won a point.

For a couple of years Luton built patiently and bedded down with the Establishment. In 1957-58, it was they who finished directly above stricken Manchester United in the season of the Munich Air Crash. That year the Hatters were the bane of golden Wolverhampton Wanderers, beating and drawing with the champions. It all became too heady for the Bedfordshire boys. They had tasted champagne and wanted more. More, more, more. The board broke free of frugality and threw the cash around. Down Division One they fell, the price of compromised principles. Belief in youth faded, belief in high wages shone. Oh for another Joe Payne, another resurrection. The moneyed boys were only good for one thing, the FA Cup, that glamour puss of a pursuit. In 1959, Luton reached their only ever final.

In the run up to the match, Luton – town and club – did not believe it could lose. Town had hammered opponents Nottingham Forest 5-1 a few Saturdays earlier. Local businesses contacted Kenilworth Road to book the FA Cup trophy for their post-final window displays. But, as the big day approached, Hatters in posh hats did not see fit to send their players to a hotel, far from the maddening crowds. As the clock struck midnight the night before the game, full-back Ken Hawkes was answering his front door to Lutonians desperately seeking tickets. The Hatters in bowler hats who selected the team did their bit to beckon defeat, dropping Gordon Turner, the hotshot hero of the fans, the reincarnation of Jesus Joe Payne. Even the FA helped Luton lose the game before 3 p.m. came, objecting to acting manager Tommy Hodgson’s outsize straw boater. On the pitch, the mental and physical tiredness of the players was married to complacency and they lost 2-1. Forest triumphed with ten men after goalscorer Roy Dwight was stretchered off in the first-half much to the horror of his nephew Reg, later Elton of Watford. Luton were scathed and scarred by what happened at Wembley. The next season they were relegated, and within six years had sunk to Division Four. FA Cup hangover pains had turned out to be liver disease.

By the time my 1981 mooring came around another resurrection was underway, its unlikely creator a pinch-toned man from, of all places, Nottingham. David Pleat’s Luton strolled to the Division Two title in 1981-82. The manager’s grasp of basic arithmetic helped. Before the pack had found their calculators Pleat had grown an attacking squad capable of exploiting the new three points for a win system. Draws had been robbed of their value. Win, win, win, loadsamoney, win, win, win, was in. The club, headed by a Thatcher-mad director then chairman (and take that any way you wish) – David Evans MP – embraced the cut-others’-throats philosophy. The following term in Division One, Pleat refused to defend. When his side won at Maine Road to preserve themselves and relegate Manchester City (survival of the fittest, Mrs Thatcher, survival of the fittest), much of football rejoiced.

Turning from the case of Kenilworth jewels I descend shrieking stairs to the museum shop. Tending to its neatly stacked shelves and obligingly wiping dust from the book I buy are two museum workers. One is a middle-aged woman touring a marvellously Cockney accent, the other a stylish man in his mid-twenties who should really be the shy guitarist in an Emo band. Both are bashfully friendly and charmingly proud of their workplace. When they hear I am from elsewhere they scramble for an old photocopied history of the museum, which I later notice contains notes added in biro. An expensive interactive guide available for iPad download this is not, and all the better for it. We move quickly through the issues affecting Luton: whether the Hatters goalkeeper should be dropped, the rebranding of the Arndale, the English Defence League. ‘Immigration and racism are only a problem when the EDL decide to march,’ says Emo guitarist. ‘We have our ups and downs like anywhere, but generally it works.’

Ah, the English Defence League. I wondered when they might crop up. This, after all, is where they first protested, where they first donned their Stone Island cagoules, where they first caused fear and loathing. They started as the United Peoples of Luton, and their particular brand of incendiary street hate was moulded by a local tanning salon entrepreneur, Tommy Robinson. Robinson gathered a ragtag platoon of refugees from far-right parties and football banning orders, often both. Their work began when another reasonable, measured local group, affiliated to Al-Muhajiroun, took to burning flags in streets and celebrating the deaths of British soldiers. Both groups seem to be part of a New England that depresses me: angry, Intolerant England. The England in my mind always had its moaners and its reactionaries, but never were things so venomous, so full of hate. Where I imagined anger it was a uniting, solidifying factor – the miners’ strike, the anti-war movement or, even, here in Luton the Peace Day Riots. Never was it so divisive. Always it was about people from everywhere. Perhaps I am too simplistic about all this; perhaps my intolerance of intolerance ignores genuine concerns, often working-class ones. Perhaps in this case distance is not the place to write or judge from. Fuck it, though.

When I read that the Lutonian trend of wilful disharmony and manic street preaching is historic, I do not know whether to take comfort that perhaps these times of ours are not as grimly novel as they seem, or be depressed that nothing changes. Toxic voices scarred Luton life way before Robinson found his megaphone or minority barkers of a distorted Islam emerged. In the late ninteenth century it was the Reverend James O’Neil’s turn. O’Neil used a gang of loyal disciples to ensure mob rule in a career of fractious meetings, and was once charged with assaulting his churchwarden. He presided over a town that had long uneasily tried in the name of harmony to restrain the most extreme of its people from everywhere, those that turned free speech into a bad thing. A worker at the Chase Street Mission spoke of the prevailing rambunctiousness, commenting ‘the work was hard and very rough ... those who attended having the freest idea as to their liberty of speech and conduct.’ It is possible to see friction as part of Luton’s historical DNA, then, but it is also possible to see it as part of present England’s uneasy truces and states of anger. Most of all, then and now, it demonstrates that those who shout loudest get heard, no matter that they represent only the few. That is an England worth trying to change.

In a cafe not far from the park and its museum I sit and talk with three old ladies. Each woman is speckled with gentle facial hair. They share a pot of tea and tell me about the way things used to be. This soon becomes a triumvirate rant against anyone who does not look like them. It is as if their earpieces are not helping them hear, but allowing Alf Garnett to feed them a script. ‘Oh it’s changed. Yes, for the worse. Much worse. There were no, you know, black faces in them days. I’ve nuffink against them, but they’re, you know, different.’ So is it the few shouting loudest, or is this the majority view? It probably comes close to the mutterings of the many, but not for a second do I think these are vitriolic views. If only people actually mixed here those views would disappear, so they cannot be that entrenched. These are fears of difference and a refusal to reap the rewards of being a mongrel town – when I ask, these women have sampled nary a speck of rice from Luton’s incredible menu. Theirs are views that have long been aired in Immigration England. Indeed, two of the women I speak to have Irish surnames and one Scottish; Lutonians probably spoke of their relatives in similarly hostile terms. ‘Anyhow,’ one of them finishes as she shuffles between tables towards the door, ‘it’s not as bad as Coventry.’

As we crawl towards the far end of town my taxi driver asks me why I am here. I have barely finished explaining before he offers his view. ‘It’s generally fine here. The likes of the EDL don’t speak for the town. Or the mad Mosques. They’re a tiny minority of ... well, I won’t swear as I’m at work.’ After he has taken me for the kind of fare that makes a Yorkshireman who lives in Scotland come out in a rash, his parting words are, ‘I’ve lived here all my life, and most of us get on.’ He has dropped me at a local community centre. Inside the locals are partaking in ‘participatory democracy’, voting on which projects should receive council funding. It is either an inspired way of guaranteeing community ownership or a sly method of passing decisions over funding cuts to those that will suffer from them. Either way, it is tremendously good, noisy fun. Young boxing boys bob and weave between the pensioners of the Evergreens group, their white hair providing a cloudy skyline. A pair of teenage girls requiring £500 for their hospital music project canvas for votes, and a children’s martial arts group show a little old man karate chops. It is a vision of what Luton could be. The boxing club impresses me most. Through his Polish translator their Ukrainian coach points me to the man in charge, a Luton Asian with a robust south-east accent. As a chubby Irn Bru-topped boy of eight or nine jabs with dangerous proximity to his crotch area, he tells me how the lads that attend his club come from every background possible. ‘If they can punch and behave, we don’t care what they are.’

A cheery chap called Malcolm comes over. As a native of South Shields he is as exotic as anyone here. He came to Luton forty years ago to labour on building sites and never returned. Now, he runs several community groups. After a good chat about how appalling fish and chips in Bedfordshire are (‘curry mind, is another matter’) Malcolm invites me to a Crimestoppers meeting the following Tuesday night. When it suddenly occurs to me that he thinks I am a Secret Millionaire I head for the exit, stopping to sign a Luton in Harmony pledge on my way out.

After the tatty gardens and fried chicken depots of Dunstable Road it is a relief to arrive at Luton Central Mosque. Its dainty minaret pokes out above houses to my left, just as the floodlights of Kenilworth Road do to my right. Temples, temples, everywhere. The mosque is situated in a leafy street of withdrawn houses. Its sudden scale hits me in the face as if my rowing boat has crashed into a hidden cruise liner. Men wearing startlingly bright white scarper into the building, late for prayers. One gives me a smile and the universal eye-roll of a man being late for something. There are probably people in Luton who fear this building, both its insides and its imposing frame. Indeed, when it was built enterprising racists hung a pig’s head from its crescent moon (no perpetrator was ever caught). I think it is spectacular. I think it brings life and drama to a timid street in a town short on architectural ambition. But as I am essentially hanging around in a mosque car park staring at people, I move on to the main drag of Bury Park.

Bury Park is an England I have never seen before. It does not look like the north, east or west. It does not even look like the south. It is fervidly different and, well, foreign. Shops battle and their hawkers howl to see who can sell the very brightest products, from fabrics to fruits that look to me like GM experiments. Jalabi mountains that Willy Wonka would find excessive cover entire windows and street grills add a delicious smell-track. I peer in at the Luton Halal Meat Centre. Eight women stand with their backs to the windows, their heads covered in a variety of shawl designs and colours. Each emerges laden with a blue plastic carrier bag full of fresh meat. Not a single shop unit lies unoccupied, an impossible phenomenon in most towns. England bemoans the demise of her high streets, but here they thrive. Here Tesco Metros are unheard of. It is just a shame that the same English who reminisce about butchers, bakers and candlestick makers are not here. The only other white faces I see are those of bargain- and stomach-hungry Poles. Shopping is a social occasion about talking on corners. Unexpected items in the bagging area do not give you that. Perhaps the people ‘from here’ are just jealous.

As a naive idealist I am stunned by the extent of wilful segregation in Luton. I think back to Sheffield. On Saturday there I saw multicoloured couples and nights out, on Sunday a posse of faiths being pursued individually, but in harmony: Catholic, Muslim, anti-capitalist. I remember a man in his twenties on the way to chapel opposite the Ruskin Gallery. A sari-wearing toddler ran into his path and fell. With a smile that suggested his day had just been made, he picked her up and returned her to her parents. Laughs were shared. All that seems to be shared here is suspicion, some of it mutual, most of it enmeshing people from trying anything different.

Just off Bury Park a wooden board advertises Beech Hill Conservative Club. As I walk in I am rebuked: ‘Woah, woah, woah, come back here.’ Suspecting that they have scented a lefty I crawl back to the door expecting to be slung from it. ‘That’s 50p, sir,’ says the doorman. My coin hits his empty mini-safe with a clang, causing the four or five Lutonian Conservatives present to look over. Even the Queen’s portrait seems to scowl at me, while David Cameron looks on incredulously in a large framed photograph above the bar. This England lives cheek by jowly jowl with Immigration England. We are but a row of houses from halal meat and Urdu bookstores, many of them staffed and frequented by sons and daughters of Her Majesty’s Commonwealth and His Cameronsty’s free market. I pass through a darkly beautiful snooker room, its giant oak tables charismatic and steady. In the back lounge, Hatters fans in orange, black and white talk about the Conference play-offs between sips of wildly cheap and decent beer. Perhaps this Conservatism thing isn’t so bad. In one corner, lads and dads play pool. In another, lads and dads stare silently at a Liverpool v. Manchester United FA Cup game disfigured by player racism. The lads and dads are in their fortnightly process, phoning in the rituals without any effort, comforted by routine. It is their identity, just as those over the wall in Bury Park have theirs. Rarely do the two mix, despite the fact that they have much in common. I am startled when a man of Asian appearance in a spark-bright Luton top walks in and engages in Party chat. This is my prejudice; tell me yours. We are all guilty.

I sidle through Bury Park and a boisterous mosque charity appeal to the street that takes me to Kenilworth Road. Out of one world and into another. The ground sits at a right angle to back-to-back lanes of terraces so that one of its stands appears at the end of each. A grotty alleyway is all that stands between. As I file along it I notice flyers on lampposts that read: ‘You Are Entering a Sharia Controlled Zone. Islamic Rules Enforced’. They contain red circular No Smoking-style graphics promising ‘No Alcohol’, ‘No Gambling’, ‘No Music or Concerts’, ‘No Porn or Prostitution’ and ‘No Drugs or Smoking’. To escape the complexities of these posters (Who? When? Why?) I remind myself of a joke from my schooldays: ‘I don’t swear, I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. Oh bollocks, I’ve left my fags in the pub.’

This tunnel of doom leads to Kenilworth Road’s main entrance. It is a Portakabin village that defies its scales of grey to flow with matchday buzz. No matter the surroundings, this atmosphere seems to doughtily survive outside football grounds. It is the equivalent of cockroaches after a nuclear attack. Behind glass screens in the ticket office, sharp women offer giggly service, clearly enjoying their work. With an outsize ticket ensconced uncomfortably in my wallet, I walk around the ground to the Bobbers’ Club supporters’ bar. Its door is next to the away-end turnstile and opens to a wee heaven under the stand. A formidable Yorkshirewoman takes my entrance fee (50p again) and directs me in. Beneath the sloped contours of the terrace above fans pack in, pausing occasionally to tell each other stories about the photos on the walls. I perch next to three old boys, hoping to hear yarns of yore. Alas, they are talking at length about double-glazing companies, which fits entirely with my lazy prejudice about the house-proud south-east. I think of a wartime Cockney evacuee to Luton quoted in a history of the town: ‘Heaven preserve me from ever becoming like Lutonians ... All they think about is their homes. House-proud, that’s their trouble.’

Behind us, an excitable man-child is parading up and down shouting the names of Luton’s centre-halves over and over like a weird train. With his poetry recital shortly to move on to full-backs, I exit. ‘We’re here for Pat Butcher’s funeral,’ shouts an Alfreton lad on his way in.

Eric Morecambe, whose lounge I now pass, would have approved of these surreal offerings. Perhaps it was he, while a member of the board here, that designed the main stand. After heaving my way beyond the turnstile I become lost in a warren of steps, corridors, bunkers and walls until somehow I am back in the open air. The architectural plans must resemble an Escher drawing of a scrapheap. I eventually find my wooden seat, again among teenage fans. For the third match in a row I feel like a particularly uncool Fonzy, destined to hang around with high-school kids.

Happily I seem to be in the ‘loud’ end of the ground, though these things are always relative (happiness and volume, that is). Those around me seem fixated with Watford, which I suppose is novel. They scream songs of steaming in and Boxing Day scraps. I am definitely in my thirties now, because some ditties offend me. ‘Twenty years of HIV,’ they sing to the tune of The Red Flag, ‘Elton John is history/so keep the Aids flag flying high/cause Elton John is gonna die’.

Discarding the concept of an ‘aids flag’, I think again about Poisonous England. Football is part of the disease and its infection has spread in the span of my lifetime. Toxicity has been fanned by the rise of the internet messageboard. There was always rivalry and there was always scrapping, but rank hatred? I am not so sure. Though inexcusable, casual violence all of a sudden seems aptly named. David Pleat once recalled that many of the good luck letters he received ahead of Luton’s Maine Road judgement day came from Watford fans. Inside thirty years, that has become unthinkable. I have yet to see a dark face in this Luton crowd. I was ready to argue that football could be the very thing to bring Luton together, but how can anyone feel welcome in a venue that wishes death on pop stars?

All around us at Kenilworth Road is the neon branding of Stelios’s orange and white army. The stands are festooned with Easyjet destinations, which must act like word prompts to a bored supporter’s wandering mind. Behind a goal Alfreton’s hardcore stand with their backsides rested on seatbacks, the Bobbers’ Club below them. Many appear fixated with the stand to their left and opposite us. This entire side of Kenilworth Road is a tunnelled double-glazing showroom stretching the length of the pitch. Behind its conservatory doors and windows televisions can be seen blaring Soccer Saturday to corporate attendees who would rather watch others watching football than watch it themselves. It is raised slightly, to accommodate three rows of half-empty seating at its front. Behind it run the streets of Bury Park, with the minaret of Luton Mosque viewable beyond a floodlight.

In mosque-white shirts and red bottom halves, Alfreton defy divisional mathematics to emerge from the traps faster, stronger. Their right-winger G-clamps the touchline, stretching Luton wrack-like. He slides his tiny frame between opponents, an Oliver Twist squeezing sprucely through the crowds after a pocket picked. At the back, a centre-half who once scored an own goal from thirty-five yards gallops around calmly snuffing out home advances, his stride as pronounced as a cheetah on stilts. There is a defiance about Alfreton’s early play, a prickly undercurrent perhaps best explained by the fact that while they have eighty-nine supporters present, 5,569 baying Lutonians are here. Unfortunately, unexpected away-team dominance makes for giddy mistakes. The right-winger’s dribbles start to trundle out for throw-ins and the goalkeeper brazenly hoicks a series of back-passes straight to his Hatters counterpart. Each time he runs up to take a goal kick he is confronted with a sort of ‘wwwwwoooooooohhhhhh’ noise. This turns to a ‘You’rrrrrre shiiiiiiittttt’ when he makes contact with the ball. This, I think, I have never witnessed outside lower division football, and I spend a good few minutes contemplating the cut-off point (the top half of League One, I decide).

Luton harass their foes into a glut of corner kicks. Repeatedly, their own No. 11 curves crosses in artfully, prompting the Alfreton keeper to nervously hot potato the ball. ‘Non-league,’ sing the fans around me, ‘You’ll always be non-league.’ They are not, you will have gathered, the most forward-thinking, positive of supporter groups. In fact, it takes them half an hour to muster a chant championing their team rather than upbraiding another. Where I sit the crowd is almost entirely made up of males. ‘Lino you’re a cunt, lino you’re a cunt’ sings a man to my right until said lino helps in the award of a dubious penalty. When the referee points downwards to the glory spot, the people around me are divided. Some celebrate as if a goal has been scored. Others shake their heads, as they already know their team will miss. They don’t miss – 1-0.

With the ball still rippling the net my teenage associates flee towards the neon snack bars of jumbo hotdogs and stone cold chocolate. At half-time I chance upon the Nick Owen Lounge. Somehow, I had forgotten Owen’s chairmanship of this, his beloved club. His lounge is, appropriately, not unlike an old breakfast TV set. It takes the form of one room in an oddly triangular shape, with a bar at its centre. Owen’s set designers have opted for Dulux’s Nineties Dentist Reception range. I ingest a Guinness while a man with a ponytail shouts ‘You’re shit and you know you are’ at a bar-girl. A fuzzy screen brings us images of Luton arriving back on the pitch, and the match recommencing. Very few people move. Conversation surrounding me remains unencumbered by the match everyone is nominally here to see. Topics include holidays (‘Bloke in the next room was a Scot, so obviously I got on with him.’), Tesco alcohol offers and future away-day arrangements. A hat-trick of matches and I am still to hear anyone present talking about the football.

I leave them to it and decide to sit in a different part of the stand for what remains of the second half. Things feel happier here, with the women and children around me very unlikely to sing anything about Aids. Our seats are backless and there is nothing between us and the sky. I sense the contentedness that being outside and wrapped up on a cold winter’s evening brings. In front of me, a dad rests a son on each leg. We could be at a bonfire or a fair. ‘FACKING WAKE-UP CALL, LUTON’ shouts the dad when Alfreton nearly score.

After its early promise of craft and guile the game is now about graft and bile. Heavy-footed players labour about and tackle spitefully. The main noise is that of 50-50 ball thwacks, the abiding image of players’ visible, choking breath. This is ugly football under the orangey glow of Kenilworth Park. A few rows back a man rants: ‘He’s got his hands all facking over him, the cu–... Hello, John speaking. Oh hello there, sweetheart.’ His ringing phone has curbed a swearword and shown Non-Football Him, a him concerned about picking something up for tea on the way home. When the call ends and Football Him reawakens, a vocal campaign against an Alfreton player’s hair is the upshot. ‘Who cut yer ’air? Stevie Wonder?’ After he reads that the player’s surname is Jarman I am delighted by his intensely parochial response. ‘Jarman? Fancy getting named after a leisure complex in Hemel Hempstead, you ponce!’ A gloved finger taps twice on one of my giggling shoulders. It is a lady in a fluorescent coat. ‘Excuse me sir. Me and the other stewards, we’ve seen you writing on your pad. Are you press?’

I could carry on typing out this dialogue. I could tell you how I refused to tell the steward what I was ‘up to’, about how she informed me that they needed to know as ‘people can be nasty about Luton. People write bad things.’ However, I’m getting aerated just thinking about it. Is this another England – Paranoid England in the town where 7/7 began? Or is it an inappropriately officious woman? Or is it just funny? I expect to turn around and see a bunch of stewards laughing out the words ‘Haaaaa, got you mate!’ Instead, I turn and see a bunch of stewards staring determinedly back at me. Oh the damage I could wield with my 99p pad and chewed biro (lidless). They have basically foiled a terrorist plot. They are heroes.

Only the wonderful words of Luton fans can rouse me from my stupor. ‘We’re not a once great club like we once were,’ I hear one say. His friend goes on to construct the following sentence, a masterclass in inclusivity: ‘I wanna go up as much as the next person. You. This man in front. Him. This lady down here. Her behind us. Her there. Him with the trousers.’ The match finishes and half the ground jeers their team off. They have won 1-0 and are fourth in the league.

Back in town a genial Eastern European girl directs me to the station. I find it exciting that Luton is full of people from everywhere, and always has been. I think it gives the town a heartbeat. If you accept change and renewal as the lifeblood of a place, Luton is in good health. So much is about perception: if you like difference then this is the place for you. If you don’t then at one end of the scale you moan in a cafe, but get on with things and at the other you join a violently divisive group in some shape or form. Somehow it all, in the main, holds together. I think England should be about more than holding together. It should be about mixing together. This is never easy: who is capable of approaching a group of blokes in Bury Park and saying: ‘Excuse me. I’m white; you’re Asian. Let’s integrate’? Instead it is done in subtle ways, in food, in football, in young people boxing together. In his charming account of growing up a Luton Asian, Greetings From Bury Park, Sarfraz Manzoor attests to the power of football as a uniting force. Manzoor remembers how, following England’s victory over Argentina at World Cup 2002, he and two other Asian friends piled into a bar to celebrate:

When ‘Three Lions’ began playing on the jukebox, the entire bar, packed with whites, blacks and Asians, sang along. I sang too, with as much passion as I could muster. The louder I sang the more confident I felt in wearing the flag of St George; it felt like it was my flag too. The search for an identity I could feel comfortable with had, I believed, reached its destination.

This imperfect game of ours will not change the world, but it does have some answers.