When friends who are unfamiliar with Plymouth come to stay here, I pin an imaginary Blue Badge to my lapel and conduct them on personalised if sketchily informed tours of the city’s history and culture, with a particular bias towards aspects that are of interest to me. This usually goes down well enough, as our friends either share my interest or pretend politely that they do. In any case, I try to gauge their mood and call it a day if I sense their enthusiasm for history waning and their appetite for refreshments waxing.
Our last visitor was intrigued by the Elizabethan remnants that are evident in the original port of Plymouth, the Barbican quarter. It was from here that the Mayflower set sail in 1620, carrying emigrants determined to establish a colony in America. They boarded their ship by descending a set of stone steps that were subsequently named after the vessel. I was once there, reading the memorial plaques, when a bewildered looking American couple asked me where the steps were. “These are they!” I answered. “Oh”, they said, looking embarrassed and underwhelmed at the same time. I guessed they were expecting something grander than the modest, stone portico built in the Greek classical style over the top step – something more ‘American’ in scale, perhaps, complete with ticketed admission and a visitor centre? I didn’t have the heart to explain that these were probably not the original steps anyway, but a best guess as to where they might have been. Anyway, we had a brief chat about their return to their ethnic origins and he told me his surname was Pound. “You can’t get more English than that!” he quipped.
Fortunately, the Barbican survived the total demolition once proposed by the city council and, twenty years later, the more direct attempt made by the Luftwaffe. Nowadays, it’s a picturesque fishing port that attracts tourists to its once under-appreciated olde worlde atmosphere, not unlike many other settlements along the southwest coast of England. Last Sunday, I took the train to one of the most renowned of them, Penzance, stopping along the way at a series of devoutly-named places – St. Germans, St. Austell and St. Erth – and the rather forlorn-sounding Lostwithiel, before arriving at the end of the line. There’s something that excites me about small towns where railways terminate and ferries stand by ready to take you further – in this instance to the Scilly Isles. (Other favourites are Mallaig and Oban on the west coast of Scotland, where ferries sail to the Western Isles.) I don’t feel it at big ports like Dover, Hull or Southampton, where the scale is bigger, less personal and lacks the romantic promise of isolated islands.
Otherwise, I found Penzance to be a bit of a let-down: there really is nothing ‘piratey’ about it and the buildings that stretch along the seafront are a hotch-potch of style, function and scale. I suppose all towns have bland, utilitarian aspects to them, apparently built without reference to visual aesthetics. Walking the mile or so along the seafront, I came to Newlyn, a seriously workaday fishing port that is associated with a famous school of late 19th century painters, which is hard to credit on a grey Sunday in March, with a light drizzle borne in on a south-westerly lending it all the attraction of an industrial estate.
It all might have looked better the following day, when the sun shone down and I took my bike for a spin closer to home to check out a splendid Georgian villa that has survived – just – the era of suburban expansion. The owners, the city council, have yet to fulfil a promise to turn it into a museum and it’s all fenced off. I hadn’t realised it’s called Pound House, in recognition of its original owner, but I can now augment my blue badge tour with the information that some of his descendants live across the Atlantic. Massachusetts, as I recall.
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