The Times Magazine 13couple of years ago I interviewed
Nick Jones, the entrepreneur
behind Soho House, the chain
of exclusive members’ clubs.
The guy is a straight-up business
genius, but I don’t think he had
been briefed about our meeting
and, looking back, I gave him a
hard time. When I wasn’t making
things awkward by bringing up the
lack of racial diversity of the club’s members
then (“We have a very multicultured view
of our membership,” came the nervous
reply), I was asking why Soho House wasn’t
opening more clubs outside London, like in
Birmingham. “I love Birmingham,” he said,
sounding a little panicked. “I know you’re
trying to catch me out.” What about my home
city of Wolverhampton then? “I think it might
be challenging to make it work there, but I’d
be willing to give it a go.”
The response made me laugh at the time,
and it’s still funny years later. I love Wolvo,
so much so that I tweet about it every other
day, mention it in features every other week,
visit around twice a month and have made
it a theme in three books, but the idea that
a swanky branch of Soho House would
open there is as ludicrous as the idea that
Wolverhampton Wanderers would move
Molineux Stadium to Islington.
Indeed, it has been no surprise
whatsoever that the government has made
Wolverhampton, which backed Brexit and is
home to two constituencies that turned blue
at the last election, the focus of its levelling-up
agenda, with the city being visited in recent
months by politicians including Michael Gove,
Boris Johnson and Robert Jenrick, who was
born in Wolverhampton and educated at
the same Wolverhampton school as me,
but nevertheless kicked off a tour of UK
towns, to promote the new Town of the Year
competition, in a place that actually became
a city in 2001.
There is a larger gap between London
and Wolverhampton than there is between
London and Paris, and observing the
economic and cultural differences is the
closest thing I have to a hobby. What are the
differences? Well, first of all, there’s the public
transport. From my home in London, there
are buses every three or four minutes to
take me anywhere I want to go in the capital
for just £1.65. In Wolverhampton, I recently
spent 40 minutes on a weekday morning
waiting to get a bus into town, and when
it did arrive, it cost £2.40 and travelled
so slowly that it would have almost been
quicker to walk. Then there’s property prices:
a single parking space in London recently
went on the market for £350,000, a price for
which you could purchase three terraced
houses in inner-city areas of Wolverhampton.When it comes to retail, Wolverhampton
and London are different planets. The popular
shops that are not available in the city centre,
by which I mean the area within the ring
road, include Reiss, Zara, Waitrose, Gail’s, Pizza
Express, Whole Foods, Pret, WH Smith and
Leon. Suffering from a wardrobe malfunction
before a book event, I recently walked around
the city centre for an hour and was presented
with a total of seven blazers to choose from,
between four shops. In London, there would
be thousands of options within a Tube ride
to Oxford Street. In London, there have
been several high-profile campaigns to stop
supermarkets such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s
from opening outlets on swish high streets,
whereas in Wolverhampton, there have been
several campaigns to get these supermarkets
to open branches. In London, there are, within
a 20-minute walk of my home, more thantwo dozen coffee shops. In Wolverhampton
city centre, we’ve had to do without a
Starbucks for several years (the only one
being inaccessible, inside the University of
Wolverhampton), there is no Caffè Nero, and
for at least a decade I’ve resorted to McDonald’s
for caffeine fixes when at my parents’.
Even in the internet age, it’s possible to
buy many print publications on the average
London high street, but I recently spent half
an hour walking around Wolverhampton city
centre on a Saturday morning to find a copy
of The Times – obtaining one eventually near
the station. (I spent the same amount of time
trying to find a toilet, when the one in Costa
turned out to be broken.) My local London high
street has two empty shop units, and one of
those is already under offer. Walking around
the very centre of Wolverhampton, I stopped
counting empty shops after 13 premises,A
WOLVERHAMPTON’S RECORDED CRIME RATE IS ABOVE
THE ENGLISH AVERAGE; LIFE EXPECTANCY IS LOWER
Enoch Powell, a Wolverhampton MP for more than 20 years
and notorious for his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, April 1969ALAMY, GETTY IMAGES Queen Square, Wolverhampton Wolverhampton Art Gallery