England’s forgotten county

Lincolnshire's wild North Sea coast at Sutton on Sea.                   Photo: Clive Simpson

 

England’s second-largest, yet least well-known, county comes under the literary spotlight in a new book full of evocative and often elegiac descriptions of landscape and wildlife, alongside fascinating reflections on the area's history, countryside and people, from prehistory right up to the present day.

 

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IN THE early 1960s my parents relocated from their birth town of Derby (it was only consigned city status in 1977 despite having always had its own cathedral) to start a new life in rural Lincolnshire, the second largest county in England.

I was therefore destined not to grow up in the peaks and valleys of Derbyshire but in the flat Fenlands surrounding the small market town of Spalding, renown at the time for its tulips, sugar beet and potatoes. It is where I attended secondary school and subsequently began my journalistic career on the local newspaper.

So, it is with residential impunity and a little insider knowledge, that I can assert with some authority that the county of Lincolnshire has always had something of a reputation as a political, economic and cultural backwater. By the same token, the propensity of its adult population - at least up to the present time - to vote conservatively in such large numbers was always a bit of a mystery to me.

In the referendum of 2016 it was not hard to predict therefore that such entrenched voting behaviour would culminate with a huge tranche of the county - and most notably the towns of Grimsby, Boston and Spalding - voting to deliver one of the country’s highest collective ‘anti-Europe’ votes.

But the sprawling county, with a surprisingly varied topography allied with an indistinct coastline that barely defines its boundary with the North Sea around The Wash, is so much more than the political summation of its largely ageing and traditional population.

All this, along with Lincolnshire’s unexpected role in defining significant eras of the nation’s history, is brought into sharp focus in the excellent new book ‘Edge of England - Landfall in Lincolnshire’ by Dublin-born novelist and poet Derek Turner. It’s publication by Hurst in the summer of 2022 was as impeccably timed as the content is revealing.

Unsurprisingly, the reader soon learns that after spending two decades exploring and reading about England’s “forgotten county” Turner is now a solid gold Lincolnshire “Yellowbelly” resident himself, keen to pay a long overdue homage to the land of big skies, mega agriculture and an ever-changing way of life.

While much of the book’s prosaic beauty lies in acute observations of time and place, noted in detail on every page via Turner’s poetic turn of phrase and language, the historic importance and influence of the county also comes as a revelation in itself.

Laying out his raison d’etre for his book in the introduction, Turner states that the “proverbial mentions” of Lincolnshire he found during his extensive research were all seemingly “disparaging”, showing the county as “decaying, boorishly rustic”, and even a target of “diabolical ire”.

When asked about Lincolnshire not many, he says, responded with a good word, while others seemed “nonplussed” even to be asked. “The mere word could almost be a conversation killer,” he writes. “Lincolnshire started to look like a continent apart - a large, and largely blank, space, almost islanded by cold sea, great estuaries, soggy wastes, and a filigree of fenny waterways.”

In the book’s opening, Turner defines the county as “an ill-defined, in-between transit zone lazily assumed to have no ‘must-see’ sights and little that was even interesting”. 

He goes on to say the county was “notable chiefly to agronomists and economists as a high-functioning English version of Ukraine, sometimes even called ‘the bread-basket of England’, where steppe-sized harvesters combed squared fields between equally angular chicken sheds. It was a county very hard to comprehend”.

Turner readily describes his book as "amorphous" and his narrative duly wanders amiably through the different regions, building as it does so a fascinating - and no doubt to many readers unexpected - portrait of landscape and place.

Indeed this county-wide tour covers pretty much every quarter, taking the reader from the "huge and muddy maw" of The Wash and the flat, reclaimed fenland of "South Holland" to Lincoln "the City on the Cliff" and the beautiful Wolds, before heading north-east to the Humber and the once great fishing town of Grimsby.

Turner thinks the county is already less distinctive than when he moved there because every day it becomes “a tiny bit more like everywhere else”. There are “more roads, more traffic, more bland homes, and fewer small shops, fewer mouldering old buildings, fewer quiet places, fewer wild animals”.

Lincolnshire, he also observes, has more than its fair share of bungalows with plastic windows, caravan parks, garden centres and chicken farms. “Is it so surprising that so many passing through shake their heads and tap the accelerator?” he asks.

The book is punctuated too with poignant insights and anecdotes, such as: “Lincolnshire people, like people everywhere, have often misused their environment, would probably have exhausted it long ago had they had the means, and must often have resented their lot. But some at least must have loved where they lived, finding a locus for patriotism in the disregarded plain, just as other English see Jerusalem in Barking or Huddersfield.”

As a true convert to an “unfashionable” county, Turner says he first alighted on the prairie-like plains and marshes of Lincolnshire in search of his own “understanding” and, in doing so, discovered a “huge new side to England”.   
                                           
“For all its problems - past, present or projected - Lincolnshire is still a county like no other,” he concludes. “This is an England time half-forgot, where you can still find an unabashed past inside an unpretentious present - and freedom and space on a little offshore island.”

For any potential visitor, armchair traveller or existing resident, whether born and bred in the county or a relative newcomer, this is so much more than a mere guidebook or informative travelogue.

Lincolnshire’s understated chronicles, unfashionable towns and undervalued countryside conceal fascinating stories, as well as unique landscapes - its Wolds are lonely and beautiful, its towns characterful, and its marshlands and dynamic coast metaphors for constant change.

Turner has produced a hauntingly beautiful and honest lament to a rural existence threatened by encroaching modernity, materialism and standardisation as well as the accumulating effects of climate change. If ever a county deserved a book all of its own then it must be the oft overlooked one of Lincolnshire. 

 

 

 

 

 

Editor's note: This review was written by Clive Simpson for the Central Bylines website and published under the title 'Testament to Lincolnshire' in January 2023.

'Edge of England - Landfall in Lincolnshire’ was published by Hurst in 2022, ISBN: 9781787386983. 

Purchase from your local independent bookshop!

Profits before people

Photos: Clive Simpson

It’s all railways in this neck of the woods at the present. The past six months have seen major work by Network Rail to upgrade the local track, signalling and level crossings on the relatively under-used GNGE line across rural Lincolnshire between Peterborough and Lincoln.

All this is not for the benefit of the poorly served rural community with more commuter passenger trains to Peterborough and Lincoln.

It's to pave the way for goods trains currently using the main east coast line between London and Edinburgh to be diverted cross-country and thus free up more space on the fast track for lurative passenger traffic.

With its six level crossings and a railway line that splits off the area’s vast new housing developments from the services of the town centre, the true impact of frequent goods trains passing through the market town of Spalding remains to be seen.

 Network Rail reckons its multi-million pound investment will mean just six daytime and six over night good trains a day. All will become clearer once diversions start from the middle of December.

This week we have also learned that Virgin Trains and Stagecoach are to take over the running of passenger trains on the east coast mainline from next spring after being awarded the franchise for the re-privatised line.

The new company will be known as Inter City Railways, a separate joint venture 90 per cent owned by Stagecoach but with the trains being branded Virgin Trains East Coast. Sir Richard Branson retains a 10 per cent stake.

This is pertinent to Spalding too because the local line connects directly with mainline Peterborough and thus could be very convenient for the residents of South Lincolnshire wanting to travel to London or further afield by train.

In truth, those of us in the area and using Peterborough as our gateway both north and south have - once we’ve arrived in Peterborough by car - had a good run over the past five years or so with the inter city service provided by East Coast.

The line ended up depending less on public subsidies than any of the 15 privately run rail franchises elsewhere in the country and the franchise has proved a lucrative cash cow for the state, bringing in around £1bn to the exchequer since 2009.

East coast is no stranger to the rail franchising controversy. For some, its public ownership has been a rather embarrassing success story - a stark contrast to the general disaster of railway privatisation that is so often an Achilles’s heel for free-market ideologues.

Handing east coast to Stagecoach and Virgin represents an ‘up yours’ to British public opinion, which largely despairs of our over-crowded, fragmented and rip-off rail network.

According to a YouGov poll last year, two-thirds of people in the UK believe railway companies should be run in the public sector, with less than a quarter opting for privatisation.

And that is not just Labour supporters, either. More than half of Tory voters opted for public ownership, and pretentious Ukip voters also say they are more likely to support a nationalised network.

The government’s dogmatic policy could hardly be more divorced from the pragmatic commonsense of the British people - but then we know there is an election just around the corner.

And things could have been worse. Instead of being run by a tax exile and a Scottish businessman - the latter perhaps best known for campaigning against gay equality - the whole east coast line could have fallen into foreign hands.

For the record, about three-quarters of Britain's railways are now run in full or part by subsidiaries of foreign, state-owned rail firms, including DeutscheBahn's Arriva, the Dutch-owned Abellio and Keolis, 70 per cent owned by France’s SNCF. Our government is also preparing to sell its stake in Eurostar, almost certainly to the SNCF, the majority owner.

Unsurprisingly, Mick Cash, the acting general secretary of the RMT rail union, described re-privatisation as nothing short of a national disgrace.

“While domestic public ownership puts money back into the coffers that can be reinvested in our railways, the private operators, overwhelmingly owned and controlled by European state rail outfits, suck out colossal sums in subsidies and profits,” he says. “That’s what privatisation means.”

One thing is for sure - by the time of the election in May 2015 we’ll have a much clearer idea of whether Inter City Railways is really delivering the kind of services it has promised.

And the people of Spalding will either be grid-locked with frustration or celebrating the fact that traffic chaos in the town was something of the past. Oh, and did I mention that the town’s MP John Hayes is the government’s transport minister?