When Northampton became new

The fabulous Mounts swimming pool where I did my mile - picture from the Architectural Review

I was just reading about the ‘new’ bus station in Northampton being demolished and it reminded me that I lived in Northampton when it was built in the first place, having moved from its original location in Derngate. Similarly I remember the Chronicle and Echo building moving from the corner of the market square to its new location on the Mounts and now that's gone too along with the Chron itself which has sadly turned from a daily into a very poor weekly newspaper. This post is just a bit of a trip down memory lane for me about the time that I grew up in Northampton- during its transition from sleepy market town to 'Third Tier New town' in the late 60's and early 1970’s.

To me during my childhood, Northampton meant the Mounts. The fire station where my dad took me on open days, the pool where I did most of my swimming certificates and much later on the police station where I had to produce my documents for the very first time! (Can't recall what I had done but it was some type of driving offence I expect. No computers then. You actually went and got told off by the scary Sergeant behind the counter). To me, those three buildings sum up the last time I thought Northampton looked its best, along with the busy market square on a Saturday, the cattle market, Abington Park  (with its annual County show) and the County Ground where I got completely hooked on  lower league football as well as discovering punk when some of the best bands played at the cricket pavilion.

We moved to Northampton from Wellingborough in 1967. Dad was a toolmaker and cycled to work at Plessey, (gone now: off Kingsthorpe Road, near Grose’s Vauxhall garage), on the other side of town. Mum was a health visitor. Our house was a 1950's bay windowed semi - 9 Beechwood drive on the Westone estate, which for those of you that don't know it is on the Wellingborough Road - just past the junction with Booth lane on the way out of town.

The significant thing about the Westone estate was that, at the time, it was the very edge of Northampton. When I was a lad, you walked to the end of Beechwood Drive, climbed over the fence next to the ‘private keep out’ sign and from then on there were just rolling fields of corn as far as the eye could see. It really was stunning. There was next-to-nothing between the end of our street and Ecton and Earls Barton, stretched out along both sides of what at the time was the main transport artery - the A45 Wellingborough Road. I think all of this land was owned by the Mackaness family who also owned Billing Aquadrome.

Westone was built in the early 1950's around the Westone Hotel, which had been home of the Sears shoe family and post WW2 was a convalescent home before becoming a hotel - the Beatles stayed there when they played the ABC apparently.  There was a row of shops near the hotel which comprised a hairdressers, a newsagents where I had my first paper round, and a hardware shop where I used to get the small pots of paint for my Airfix kits, of which there were many. Most of the models were bought at the model shop on the Wellingborough Road which is still there. All but one of the shops are now gone and have been converted to houses.

I walked past these shops to get to my first school: Weston Favell County Primary school, which then was entirely separate from Weston Favell Upper school next door. The Primary school was head mastered by the fearsome Mr Rickard assisted by Mr Amos his evil deputy. The only teacher I remember was Ms Roberts who also lived on the Westone estate. One day someone lit a banger and put it through her letterbox. It wasn't me. Her house backed onto the 'horsefield', which oddly never had any horses in it but was where everyone rode their bikes and played football. Rachel Jones, the first girl I ever kissed lived in a house whoe garden back onto the horsefield and I used to take her cans of Spar coke which cost 2p.

At this time Northampton had green buses that went out of town, the ‘County’ buses, and red ones for the town and they all lived in the old bus station which was in Derngate, where the Derngate centre is now. You could drive all the way down Abington street - which I understand is being reintroduced now to try and revive the shopping area and you went to the pictures at the ABC. McDonalds hadn’t been invented so you had to go to the Wimpy which used proper plates. The Co-op arcade was a favourite destination for mum as was the brand new M&S over the road and the central library next to the arcade. Dad used to get parts for the car at the utterly brilliant Sheltune on the Kettering Road - next to that (and gone now) was an art deco Saab garage which was the last in Northampton where white coated pump attendants came out to serve you.

Once, a dead (obviously) stuffed whale visited Northampton on the back of a lorry and became a huge attraction parked up and displayed on the market square for week or so. That is about the only significant thing I remember from this period although I'm sure other things must have happened. I wasn't a Cobblers fan at that age (I made that lasting mistake a bit later) but at the time they were busy being one of the only clubs to ever go straight from the 4th to the 1st division and then all the way back again. Not quite in consecutive seasons, but still pretty impressive. I saw Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the Odeon on the Market Square when it first came out and The Alamo at a cinema in Grove Road. Later my first ever official date was with a girl I've completely forgotten the name of to see Jaws at the ABC.

Obviously in those days every summer was fabulous - we had real seasons in those days - and weekends were spent at the wonderfully named Billing Aquadrome in a caravan, or over at Wicksteed park in Kettering - both of which I expect are still going strong. If you were feeling really exotic you may have spent time in the shadows of the cooling towers along the Bedford Road at the Midsummer Meadow outdoor pool. Obviously, proper seaside was mostly out of the question - Northampton is about as far away as its possible to get to the coast and Dad's new Morris Traveller couldn't have made it that far very often, but when we did go it was usually to Hunstanton or Kings Lynn and of course at that time for most of the population 'abroad' was a complete mystery. 

If you were leaving school at that time you may well have gone to work at Barclaycard, which used to be at the bottom of Gold Street as it turned into Mare Fair or at the impossibly techno Carlsberg brewery at the bottom of Bridge street. Sorry to disappoint everyone who believed the ‘brewed in the UK by Danes’ advertising slogan of the 70’s but there were definitely no Danes in Northampton!

Also at this time the Chronicle and Echo building was situated at the top right hand corner of the the market square - where Boots is now (and where I had my first Saturday job). Next to that was a lovely old Victorian shopping arcade which exited somewhere near the Mounts pool and Police Station. The arcade would be treasured now (as they are in Cardiff where I live) but at the time must have seemed horribly old fashioned and along with all of the neat rows of terraced housing on that side of the town centre were demolished to make way for the Grosvenor. 

All things considered this was probably the end of Northampton's golden age, or at least the end of the period where it could call itself a pleasantly sleepy little market teyn with its own people and recognisable character. Northampton was on the cusp of massive change - from childhood memories where every day really was sunny, nothing bad ever happened and Dad cycled to work every day to darker days where suddenly everything was made of concrete and something called the Eastern District was about to appear. Mum had to go a work at the new and impossibly bland Northampton House, Middle schools were invented specifically so that I didn’t have to go to Upper school for a least another three years and football awareness came with the realisation that my home town team were and still are truly rubbish. That didn't stop me going to see them goodness how many times though and I still do from time to time. 

Against this idyllic backdrop something terrible was about to happen - Northampton was designated as a new town. (At this point I'm going to direct you to an excellent book about all things concrete - Concretopia by John Grindrod - which explains the whole new town thing in great and fascination detail).

Planning started in Northampton around about 1965 but if memory serves building didn’t start at the end of our street until about 1971

The Westone estate and everything on the Eastern side of town, stretching from Northampton boat club in the valley on the Nene, past us and up to Lumbertubs lane became submerged in what was designated as the new part of town, the Eastern District. It's difficult now to explain the impact that this had. From the end of my street I watched as field after field vanished to be replaced by little cardboard houses that were thrown up in what seemed like days. There was a bit of a planning fight when an enormous and quite beautiful Oak tree was sacrificed to build the Alexanders Ford garage (now gone) and the vast new shopping centre, that had something called the 'Supercenta' in it when it opened and a truly grim pub called the Swinging Sporran. The Weston Favell shopping centre is a truly ugly building without any architectural style or merit. It was built so that none of the people in the new estates had to venture into old the town centre, which was probably a blessing because it’s too small to cope and bedsides, travelling to out-of- town shopping areas in your car was by then a very modern thing to do.

My street became linked to all of this by a plastic tube bridge which also meant that traffic increased 10-fold as people came to park outside our house and walk through the tunnel to the new shopping wonder instead of actually driving there and using its car park.

The Eastern District - truly the end of Northampton as we knew it

Lumbertubs, Thorplands and the rest were filled with 'overspill people' from London. (I never really understood what an ‘overspill’ person was). At the close of one school term I remember well our headmaster telling us that next term we would be joined a by a lot of new pupils and that we should make them all welcome. When the new term came there were indeed countless new kids - they had marched up the road in a gang on their first morning. The school seemed to have doubled in size. They all talked funny and stuck together. It was definitely a them and us situation. We didn't talk to them and all they wanted to do was fight and cause trouble it seemed.

They didn't all go to the existing schools though. A new one had been built for them, Lings Upper, which quickly gained a reputation it has probably never recovered from.

My mum, who was a health visitor serving the Eastern District, told me that these people had come from very poor areas of London, where their houses were being demolished. They were told they could move to brand new houses in Northampton if they paid off their London rent arrears. Most of them couldn't of course, so the London councils wrote off their debts and all of these people were shoved up the M1 to a place, our place, which they had probably never heard of. Where ordinarily a town grows organically over hundreds of years so that you barely notice, N'pton must have grown be a third in just 5 years or so. The Eastern District went on for miles but never really became integrated because the new dual carriageway, Lumbertubs Way, separated it from the rest of old Northampton. I don't think the people really integrated either. We were never told how to help them and they never put themselves out either. 50 years on it all looks a bit better. The trees have grown. But its still horrible. Its still the Eastern District. You still don't go there. They still talk differently and they still don't support the Cobblers because they're not from Northampton.

And that as they say is that. The Eastern District has been joined by Western, Southern and Northern ones too and most of the people that inhabit them and who commute to Milton Keynes, London or wherever will never know that once upon a time Northampton was a small, sleepy quite pretty county market town, not the anonymous mess it is now. I just happened to live there  through its period of change. It didn’t all seem like a bad thing at the time - I guess we thought the Weston Favell shopping centre was very modern and when it was being built it was certainly a brilliant place to play.

The upshot of all of this is that you have to be a certain age to really say that you’re from Northampton. Under a certain age and either  you or your parents are Londoners who have no real affinity with the town and that I guess is the blight of many of the 70’’s new towns. The whole concept irreparably damages the original without really adding anything useful to it other than a lot of cheaply built houses.

I've no idea what Northampton is like to live in now - I moved away 22 years ago but ultimately its not difficult to judge the whole new-town project as a very unhappy period for Northampton and many other similar towns probably. A great shame really.

Update November 2018: I first wrote this post in 2011 and it was populated with pictures I borrowed from the internet. I’ve just been back to Northampton for the first time in years and had the opportunity to look round and take some pics of my own. I was really disappointed. It does now look a terrible mess, especially the town centre. I had a pint in the Black Lion in Guildhall road and got talking to a bloke who had lived there his whole life. I asked him what it was like now. He said it’s a dump. I’m afraid he’s right. I may well have my rose tinted glasses on when remembering my childhood and I really don’t mean to be mean but it really hasn’t turned out well has it.

Beechwood Drive where we lived when we moved from Wellingborough. That extension above the garage was built for me when my brother arrived and we ran out of bedrooms. We had central heating fitted at the same time

100 yards from our house used to be the edge of town. Then it became the Eastern District accessed via this bridge which took you to the SuperCenta. This view used to be fields as far as the eye could see

St Johns Convalescent Home on the Wellingborough Road just opposite the Trumpet and the Westonia fish bar. We spent many happy days in those ground and playing football on the lawn. M,ark Whit lived there because his mum was the matron and his dad the gardener. The cellars were packed full of  ex-patients suitcases - really spooky

Lumbertubs: the first of the Eastern district estates. I'd like to say that it has aged well, but it hasn't

This used to be the site of Weston Favell County Primary School and next door Weston Favell Upper School. I broke my arm on that playing field during a rugby match 

The farm in the corner of our school playing fields. I remember it when it was actually a working farm. It became our school youth club. It's where our punk band first rehearsed and where, unbelievably, I first saw Bauhaus

The now mostly defunct row of local shops in the Westone Estate. The one in the corner was a brilliant hardware shop which sold everything, including all the airfix paint you could ever need. My first paper round was for Mr Nesbitt, further down the row.

The once proud Market Square - England's finest. Well, at least its still there I guess.

Northampton House - ex HQ of the health authority. Mum was based here and hated it. Not looking too good today. What is it now, flats?

The view of the Grosvenor carpark without a brutalist bus station in the way to spoil the view. Honestly, what a mess this part of town is

Abington Street looking and feeling really quite dismal. Closed shops everywhere, and very sadly late at night people sleeping in many doorways