The Times Magazine 15including Beatties, the department store that
was once at the heart of life here. On one of
the many boarded-up spaces, a blackboard
inviting locals to express views on what they
want to see moving in included the responses
“Weed store”, “Chipotle” and “Good shops”.
The official city statistics, available on WV
Insight, a council website, extend the tale of
woe: the city apparently “has one of the highest
unemployment rates in England”; it suffers
from “an amount of recorded crime above the
English average” and “has seen increasing levels
of deprivation in recent years”. “Life expectancy
for both men and women... is lower than the
English average,” and “child obesity is still
high compared with the English average”.
People sometimes ask why Times writers- mainly Caitlin Moran and I – bang on about
Wolverhampton so much. All I can say is
that you would bang on too if you had moved,
like us, from one of the least affluent parts of
Britain (of the 316 local authorities in England,
excluding the Isles of Scilly, Wolverhampton is
ranked the 11th most income-deprived) to one
of the most affluent. The town was actually not
that bad in the Nineties: it had vibrant nightlife
and briefly a branch of Gap. But switching
between the two, as I have been for more than
25 years, gives me whiplash, and frankly I’m
not sure why the more general divide between
London and not-London does not make
front-page headlines on a daily basis.
Leaving aside the profound cultural
differences, such as the relative popularity of
pies, the relative tendency for passengers to
talk to bus drivers, the relative probability
of getting scraps on your fish and chips, the
relative acknowledgment between drivers
and pedestrians at zebra crossings, the relative
amount of clothing worn to go clubbing, and
the relative chance of getting gravy on your
chips, the economic contrasts are stark.
The government’s levelling-up white paper
conceded that the “UK has larger geographical
differences than many other developed
countries on multiple measures, including
productivity, pay, educational attainment and
health”. It went on, “Pay in the top region for
earnings (London at £823 per week) is 1.5 times
greater than the lowest region (the North East
at £550 per week),” adding that “geography is
a key factor affecting equality of opportunity
and social mobility”. Look further and you’ll
find that while in Barnsley 15 per cent of
disadvantaged 18-year-olds go to university, in
London nearly half of them do. That average
life expectancy for men in Blackpool is about
74 years; in Westminster it is nearly 85 years.
That the ratio between GDP per person in
Britain’s richest places and its poorest is 4.8: - the largest of any Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development country.
As The Economist put it recently, “Britain
is highly geographically unequal... It is as
if America’s Rust Belt or the former East
Germany were home to half the population.”
What should be done? Well, no shortage of
plans have been presented in recent decades,
and the current government is wielding its
own 12-point strategy, to be fulfilled by 2030.
The points range from improving healthy
life expectancy to extending high-speed
broadband. And there have been countless
criticisms of the efforts, from the claim that
no new money is being allocated, to the
complaint that Boris Johnson just does not
have the mastery of policy detail necessary
to sort things out, to detailed analysis from
Bloomberg News that stated, “More than
two years on, in a period dominated by the
coronavirus pandemic, most of the places that
lagged behind London and the southeast of
England when Johnson came to power have
seen little sign of better times. In fact... they’re
more likely to be falling further behind.”
But when it comes to improving my
home city and other places like it, any effort
is better than no effort at all, and I welcome
any sincere attempt to stop the rot. And
rather than whine from a distance, I spent
several weeks this spring talking to peoplein Wolverhampton about what they think
should be done.
I solicited the opinions of three of
Wolverhampton’s MPs (Labour’s Pat
McFadden, and Jane Stevenson and Stuart
Anderson of the Conservatives). I approached
Mark Andrews, who has been senior feature
writer at Wolverhampton’s Express & Star for
27 years for his view. I visited a regeneration site
at Springfield Brewery (next to which I grew
up and attended school) and spent a morning
talking to staff and pupils at the deeply
impressive Thomas Telford UTC secondary
school. I called my oldest friend in the world
(Steve, whom I met at nursery, who still lives on
the street he grew up on); I met the University
of Wolverhampton’s pro-vice-chancellor and
the professor of brownfield research and
innovation at the new National Brownfield
Institute in the city, and I got in touch with
the office of the mayor of the West Midlands.
At the end of it all, I was left with the
impression that there are five main things
that Wolverhampton, and dozens of struggling
towns and cities like it, desperately need, the
first and foremost of which is a solution to
calamitous public transport woes. So many of
Wolverhampton’s problems come down to the
issues with buses, trams and trains. The city
is held back in part by poor connections to
London: it can, absurdly, take longer by train
to get to Wolverhampton from London (
miles in 2 hours, 15 minutes) than it takes to
get from York to London (174 miles in 2 hours,
4 minutes). If people have such a bad view
of Wolverhampton, it’s partly because the
train takes them through areas of maximum
industrial destruction, and the station, which
will always have a special place in my heart as
the venue for my first date (there was nowhere
for teenagers to go before the arrival of coffee
shops), is on the wrong side of the ring road.
If the roads are clogged up, and residents’
shopping decisions all come down to questions
of parking, it’s partly because the buses are
so bad that cars are the only option.
More generally, it’s a devastating fact
that, according to figures from the think tank
the Institute for Public Policy Research, the
government spends six times more per person
on transport in London than the north, and
that many towns and cities outside London
have struggled to recover from Margaret
Thatcher’s “reforms”. Deregulation in the
Eighties meant operators could pick which
routes to run and how much to charge,
and bus use outside London collapsed, fares
soared, services became unreliable and did not
link in a coherent way to train and tram systems.
Exempted from these, London has been able
to design routes across its own bus, train and
Tube networks in recent decades. Speaking on
Radio 4’s Toda y programme earlier this month,
Oliver Coppard, the recently elected mayorTHE GOVERNMENT SPENDS
SIX TIMES MORE PER
PERSON ON TRANSPORT IN
LONDON THAN THE NORTH
Sathnam Sanghera in Wolverhampton, June 2021TOM JACKSON