Way out West (incorporating Way up North)

go East young man...

Today I had to go to Bury St Edmunds, which sounds like an archaic and peculiar instruction, but in fact was an opportunity to pitch for a piece of design work, about which I may have more to say later.

The market town of Bury St Edmunds is at the top end of Suffolk, near to Newmarket, and seems to me to epitomise a wealthy medieval market town. At a guess, wool, beer and religion were the engines that propelled this town, the brewery (Greene King) still dominates the town, indeed the regency theatre that I was visiting today owes its continuing existence to the fact that it was used as the brewery barrel store during the period when most such buildings were destroyed in the name of progress and property development.

I have a theory, which would have had me drummed out of the Theatres trust or any of the other beardy sandal preservation societies, that the fact that we still have so many good old theatres is due to their having been commandeered for unsuitable purposes, and consequently overlooked. Our biggest benefactor, perverse though it may sound, is probably the bingo; at least if a theatre is being used for bingo it is being kept heated and ventilated and the worst of the holes in the roof will be plugged. The worst thing you can do to a large and complex building is lock it up and leave it; there is a very large old theatre in Dalston which is now in such a poor state that it will never recover, just waiting for the right cheque book I'm afraid, preserved for years by its unpopular location and inacessibility, it is right next to the East London tube extension (don't start me on that!), and will be characterless luxury flats before you can say £££ (I believe that a luxury flat can be defined by the fact that it is smaller than a normal flat, but does have granite worktops).

All this is unlikely to occur in up-town Suffolk, maybe twenty years ago, when the wrecking frenzy reached its peak the local demographic could have supported luxury flats, judging by todays' charity shop feeding frenzies, and the extra-ordinary number of pensioner buggies (dozens! it was safer to walk in the road), but now, I think all that has gone and the town is slowly settling back into the fens.

Part of the project I was pitching for involves creating a sound collage epitomising the place, so my walk through the town was partly for research purposes; I have never been anywhere so quiet, on a market day all you could hear was the rumble of car tyres on the cobble stones, church bells ringing the quarters and the persistant whining of electric buggies. Even the stall-holders conducted themselves in polite and level tones. If I do get the comission, I might have to rethink my ideas.

posted by Lampy @ 10/05/2005 07:05:00 pm