We had three days (2 nights) camping in Essex. Brilliant weather, a very pretty part of England and a couple of small pilgrimages to make. We knew (see earlier postings) we had to check on sites before leaving home, as the ones signed on the road or in the roadmap are so depressing you'd never venture anywhere if that was your only choice.
We did in fact look at quite a few of these along the way, in case they were miraculously alright, but I can report that they are not. Someone somewhere thinks that lots of long lines of plastic boxes up on breeze-blocks, with a cheapo bar and the smell of chips wafting over, makes for a decent place to relax. It does not. Even with a spectacular view and a peaceful area, this kind of setup is poor, intrusive, insulting, hostile, ugly, and mercenary. How come the owners and the planners think this is OK? What on earth do people do in these places? How come the French and the Germans and the Italians and the Americans can get these places to look ok, and offer basic decent civilised conditions and services to their customers, and we cannot? Why does anyone stand for this?
Anyway, through diligent researches on the net (thanks mainly to the Camping and Caravanning Club) we had a list of alternatives with us... no electricity needed, but we did need a WC on site. We wanted somewhere quiet and with something going for it.... and at last we found it, as I will explain later.
Meanwhile we drove through the amazing lanes and byways of that part of Essex between the River Crouch and the Blackwater. It is a low-lying marshy peninsular, little populated but with pretty towns and villages along the way. It is not all that different from tracts of Kent where we live, but on a bigger scale, and clearly people have more money to spend in Essex than in the Jutish peninsular.
As a result, the houses are mostly done up to the nines - with railings, gates, walls, twiddles, paint, gold trim, lions, driveways, security systems, new windows, pargetting, topiary, extensions and more. Another very noticeable difference is that barns and stables and sheds belonging to old farms are not, in the main, converted to houses, so each establishment still has its appurtenances and supporting outbuildings and very handsome that is to see. In Kent, sadly, the pressure of space and money has allowed most of these lower buildings to be made into separate households, which almost always looks squashed and awkward, and is a diminishment for the main house.
But it has to be said - there is something very funny about the degree of upkeep of the Essex houses - as if the owners expected to be on telly any day now and are in readiness. They really do go in for every kind of aggrandizing embellishment, of which the gold-topped but still rather spindly railings are the silliest.
The message everyone seems to want to send is that the owners of these houses are rich, and have a lot of money, and a lot of stuff to protect and keep secure, and therefore they need all these railings and electronic gates, and even if they can't really afford much stuff inside they will make sure the outside looks as if they can.
My word, the houses are very very smart and grand. Indeed. If I were setting up as a builder, I would go and do it in Essex. I cannot imagine where all the money has come from, but I kept having images of the WAGs (wives and girlfriends of footballers) all keeping up with each other. This is not a modern phenomenon, either. As we went to the furthest outflings of the area, the number of tiny, poor, single-storey shacks and originally humble dwellings increased, even though they were mostly very 'done up'. I imagine that for a hundred years or more, enterprising youngsters made their way away from the rural poverty of their homes to London, and sent money back when they could. The nearer they were to London, the more money flowed into these old villages - and commensurately, the further from London or transport, the poorer these old communities remained. There are very few similar buildings in North Kent that I know of - I think they were cleared away long ago. It would be interesting to know more about this aspect of social history. But the architectural heritage of Essex is bold and distinct and clearly people love their houses. It is wrong of me to mock.
We had lunch in Burnham-on-Crouch, in bright sun. Fish and chips in a shed on the quay.
So - we made our way with some difficulty out to Bradwell, where there is an ancient old nuclear power station nearby. The difficulty getting there arose from the fact that a stretch of road leading to the village across the marsh farmland is apparently in private hands and closed off, without any warning, and necessitating a 15 mile detour. Silly.
The nuclear power station was not our destination. We were heading for an even more ancient powerhouse - St Peter's Chapel, out on the sea wall. This is an amazing place, one of the oldest churches in the land. It doesn't have a complicated history, but writing it down makes me almost quake to think of how long it's been there, and how things have swung around - how quickly great civilisations come and go, and how they can leave so little behind.
First we have the Romans gloomily deciding they need to defend Britannia from the menace of the Saxons - so as everyone knows they built a chain of fortresses round the south east coast - the forts of the Saxon Shore. The one they built here on this marshy spit of land may have been the one called Othona, but the name is not 100% certain. Anyway, it is described as being typically late 3rd century in style. Some of its outlines are still detectable but a large part has washed into the sea.
Roll on a couple of hundred years... The Roman history has faded away and we have Saxon England, divided into Kingdoms, and what is now Essex (East Saxons) had King Sigbert in charge who wanted to make his people Christian. He asked the Celtic Christian community at Lindisfarne right up the coast for help. They sent a missionary, an unusual man from what must have been an unusual family. He was one of 4 brothers and not only did he become a bishop and (later) a saint, but so did one of his bros - the famous St Chad. They had been part of a set of 12 Saxon lads taken on by the Celtic monks to help spread the word of God, and he was able to speak not only English but also Latin and Irish.
Cedd arrived in Essex in 653, and one year later was building this chapel right in the gateway of the ruined Roman fort - you can still see the Roman terracotta in the walls. His first church was probably made of wood but once Cedd had seen how stone could be used, he set to work, creating this tall, dark, stately and simple structure. Unusually, its diagonal measurements are identical to the inch, which is difficult to achieve and very rare, showing that he (or his chief mason) really did know what he was doing. A few tantalising fragment-details of the earliest period remain, such as a tiny piece of painted plaster, as well of course as the overall shape which is elegant and plain and very straight. There must have been a veritable village of buildings and activities round the Chapel - for the men and women who came to work there including a hospital, library, a hospital, a library, a school, an arts centre, a farm, a guest house and a mission base. From there Cedd established other Christian centres at Mersea, Tilbury, Prittlewell and Upminster. Another example is Southminster which is now a town of considerable size - much bigger than the deserted area around St Peter's. The church at Southminster (St Leonards), by the way, is a truly hilarious hodgepodge of building styles and materials, and well worth a visit. In 654 Cedd was also consecrated Bishop of Essex, but ten years later he died of plague while visiting another of his new Christian communities, at Lastingham in Yorkshire. 30 of his monks from Bradwell went to see him when they heard he was dying, and all but one caught the plague and died too. The only one to get back to Essex was a young boy. St Peter's Chapel was taken into the diocese of London and became a minster for the surrounding countryside.
No records remain from the time of the Vikings and the Danes but standing where it is, it must have suffered heavily. You can only imagine the terror, the violence, the fire, blood, book-burning and destruction. The whole site is so vulnerable.
More time passed.
The Normans arrived as conquerors, took the Chapel on, and it fell under the rule of St Valery on the Somme - a very similar landscape, as it happens.
Still it was standing there, tall and plain, out on the sea wall, and approached by the old Roman road.....all through the middle ages, through the years of plague and war, and eventually being sold into private hands and falling out of ecclesiastical use. It was used as a barn, and great holes were knocked into its sides, for entrances. By the nineteenth century it could barely have been recognisable as a church, as it was housing cattle and grain. But, of course, someone came along to love it and after extensive restoration and study, we have it today as a particularly lovely old place. The great thing is, you can definitely get a feel for what early stone churches must have been like all over the country, before denominations and dogma got in the way.
The view north from there, over the Blackwater estuary, is absolutely terrific, by the way, but the view out to sea is now ornamented (or disfigured depending on how you see these things) by windfarms etc.
We were inspired to try to get a camp-place overlooking the Blackwater, but all suitable fields are occupied by concentration-camp style Holiday Parks, and they are too dispiriting to describe any further.
We tootled on, and stopped en route at the lovely and ancient port of Maldon, where there are a lot of sailing barges such as we have at Faversham and where the very old church of St Mary's down by the quayside has lovely modern stained glass windows. One is dedicated to lads who fell during World War I, and it is a truly beautiful piece of work.
The town's parish church on the other hand, at the top of the hill, has a very curious triangular spire and the vicar who we met told us he was recently widowed and about to retire when he will move out of his astonishing Grade I listed black-and-white medieval vicarage into a council house in Suffolk. It made me think of how Cedd had faced changes in his life, too. Maldon, of course, is where they produce sea salt though we could not find any for sale in the town. And it is apparently the place where the first Tesco supermarket was built. Maybe there is a connection between these two facts.
The sun was lighting all the land with brilliant gold and we went on our way, looking for our pitch for the night. We headed inland and eventually, after some more looking, settled at a privately-owned field at Retreat Farm at Little Baddow, in the gentle and glorious valley of the Chelmer-Blackwater Navigation. That waterway is one of the gems of England and everyone should go and see it.
Built in 1790 to assist trade in and out of Chelmsford from Maldon, the Navigation offers ten miles or so of clean, clear, swiftly-flowing water, and a lock every mile. There is a well-kept old towpath, perfect for biking or riding, or push chairs, come to that. Great willows, ashes and poplars line the banks, the fields beside the water are managed as old-fashioned meadows, the birds sing their hearts out, the fish dart through the water, and all is well with the world. Paper Mill Lock offers tea and scones and boats for hire. It is truly gorgeous. The campsite was more or less perfect. We had a delicate thoroughbred horse nibbling the grass in his paddock just outside our tent, and walks and quietude and simple decent loos and showers, and the sight of hot-air balloons on the horizon. St Cedd would have been astonished to see them, and we in our own way were astonished too.... that these places DO exist, if you can find them.
Monday, 15 June 2009
Tuesday, 26 May 2009
Britain's disgusting campsites
We have just had a week's camping holiday in southern England. Our planned destination was up on the Welsh borders near Hereford and Shropshire but bad weather there encouraged us to go south and we spent our holiday in and around Chichester, West Sussex.
'We' = my husband Andrew and I. If you don't know us, y0u can read about some of our earlier travels on www.mussettsatsea.blogspot.com
This time we set off on Wednesday afternoon May 20th, and had a brilliant day threading through the by-lanes of Kent heading for some unknown destination. We can recommend Truffles, the teashop in Henfield, where we sat in a sheltered spot out of the wind in their tiny garden with its potted olives and mirror wall, and ate scones and cream in the sun. We also bought a washing-up bucket and some other bits from the old-fashioned hardware shop across the road, and in their Budgens store we bought what turned out to be a pack of delicious fresh scallops - chilled and presumably fairly local. Excellent stuff.
We had not booked into a site for the night and called on several en route. These were shown on our standard road atlas, so we did not have any detail about any of them in advance. The first at the wonderfully named village of Small Dole some miles from the coast, was a broad open field with some caravans and tents dotted round the edge. It was pleasant enough and only £8 a night, with loos and washing-up facilities near the owner's house, but we craved the sea, so went on.
The next site appeared to be very prim and proper with clipped hedges and neat gravel driveways at the entrance. It had a lot of boxes on it - permanently-placed 'mobile' homes - some with gardens or decking alongside them. But it also had stretches of lifted turf and building works in progress, and nothing to say what was going on. We went deeper into this slightly unsettling community and asked a couple where the tents were allocated. "It's closed," they said. "New owners." Shame no-one had put anything up on the road signs or even at the gate.
We decided to head for the Arundel area, as a friend had recommended the river Arun as being a worthwhile destination, and we were in high spirits as the afternoon rolled along. But, we found sites were either closed or invisible. Maybe the English camping industry has suffered a catastrophic collapse in recent years - there is a mismatch between the information on these general road maps and the 3-D experience. There aren't that many of them, really a surprisingly few number. Ideas about finding small, quiet, green, natural sites are clearly well out of date, and we thought longingly of sites we have known in the past - especially Church Knowle at Corfe, the location for Mike Leigh's wonderful 'Nuts in May' movie.
Eventually we booked into the site at Ford, south of Arundel. Here, Helen the owner cheerfully took our money (£12.50 a night), bade us use the 'tranquil' lower paddock and gave us a slip of paper with a fierce key-code for entry to the loos and showers.
We had a small field to ourselves, screened by a 'hedge' of reeds full of warblers, and looking radiant in the late afternoon light. Our new tent was easy to put up. It was all rather exciting. We walked up to the river banks and strolled along to the amazing old railwaybridge (no longer able to swing open) where trains roll and clank past every few minutes.
We turned back south along the bank to the old Canal basin created early in the 19thC for the short-lived Arun-Portsmouth canal, and spoke to Jason living on his houseboat on the mud, and wondered if we should buy one of the moorings he has for sale. Around us the birds sang, we could see right across the marshes, the ancient church across the fields, the wild flower all around us. A rat ('vole' said Jason) blundered about, blind but still fairly active. Jason showed us an old photo of the boat next to his, 'Palatina', a G20 yacht of beautiful lines built in the 1890s for a rich rich gentleman. This gorgeous creature is now topped with a hideous set of boxes and cabins, her fine diagonal teak lines marred with flaking paint, and a sorry sight she is now. But 'home' to someone.
Back at the tent, ready to cook our scallops, we realised our 'tranquil' field was in fact a nightmare of roaring traffic noise... a fast commuter road was just behind the thick hedge and while we could not really see any of the tormenting traffic, we could hear every rev and screech as the bikes, cars, lorries and vans hurtled past. It went on quite late into the evening, well past our bedtime.
Even with the warblers singing just six feet from our tent, we could not hear them above the sound of the rush hour traffic.
We spent the next day exploring Arundel - the castle, the priory church with its unique divided denominations - like a patient with a partial brain-transplant... 'Look, here I am, this is ME! but that bit over there, well, that's me too, but it's different, it's not really me, it's .... (whisper) Roman Catholic!!!!!' (or from the RC side ' 'We don't talk about what's behind the grille...it's too painful.......').
We went to Littlehampton (warned off in advance by Jason who spoke darkly of Bosnians and other foreigners) but apart from a strict traffic regime, it seems like many other small English market towns: down on its luck, perhaps, but who is to say if that is due to the modern rage for internet shopping or the departure of its last great wave of enthusiastic incomers, now mouldering away in Residential Care Homes? We didn't meet any Bosnians, anyway, then or the next day.
We went to Bognor Regis - and what a surprise! Tiny, unchanged from the 1920s, really, with a few clubs and arcades, and all the heat drawn out of it by Billy Butlin's extraordinary double-decker chalet city half a mile away. I remember a holiday at Bognor when I was probably seven or eight (before BB built his holiday camp), and thought it would be a great bustling place like Brighton, but really it is like a tiny version of Deal, with a short stubby pier and a few pretty buildings and some slightly dispirited-looking neon signs. Another great film location, surely.
We did notice the huge proportion of Indian and Chinese restaurants everywhere, though, in all these holiday towns. We wondered how would you recognise an English restaurant these days, anyway, since we have all diligently pursued 'foreign' food for the last 50 years - curry, pasta, pizza, Tex-mex, etc etc. Jellied eels are hard to come by but Fish N Chips hold their own.
That night was our last at Ford, we were really driven away by the noise. But to be honest, I was also cast down by that keycode which had to be accurately remembered each time you wanted the loo, the 50p per shower (with its frankly tepid water), the tiny shower cubicle with nowhere to hang your clothes or put your shoes out of the wet, the stupid car barrier to stop people coming in (why?) which you have to open and close every time you want to leave the site or get back in, the terrier barking at you when you try to get into the shop to pay your fees.... It's all so bodged and stingey, somehow. The security is necessary no doubt to avoid the place being invaded by outsiders, or vandalised, but surely things don't have to be like this.
On the other hand, I must say it was a pleasure to have bird-watching lessons from the owner and to hear and see Cetti's warbler frolicking in our reeds, so it was with some regret that we set off site-hunting again.
We were heading for the Bosham area and we set off again in high spirits. The sunlight was glorious and everything in England looked full and fresh, with cow-parlsey along the lanes and roses and valerian and aquilegias and peonies filling the front gardens. Again we needed to find somewhere for the night.
We just could not find some of the sites. They were completely invisible...clearly shown on a map but impossible to find on the ground. Some have enticing brown road signs giving you false hope....they too lead to nowhere. One was at Goodwood, somewhere near the races, where apart from all the gates and entrances for owners, trainers, buses, cars, etc. there is a country park but nothing correlating to a campsite. The other was near the divinely beautiful village of Slindon, and apparently somewhere near the National Trust lands there, but despite extensive searching we could not find it. We asked a lady walking her dog. "Campsite?" she said with a shudder and a rising tone to her voice. "No, there's nothing like that round here!"
We did manage to find the next one, which was not too far from Fishbourne, the Roman palace we hoped to visit, but - my God - what a dump. This had a sign bragging of new management but the frontage was a long, Tudor-bethan 1930s bungalow-portacabin hybrid, with dirty windows, sagging roof, and no sign of life. There was a sign saying visitors should call at Reception but there was no sign of any such place. The ground was an acre or so of dirty boxes and clinker. Old metal cow-gates were lashed shut with fraying binder twine, everything looked abandoned and neglected and if a starving dog had come out snarling I wouldn't have been surprised. All the 'buildings' on these places are square/rectangular/cubic but otherwise very Gothic in character - spooky, pikey, ghastly, grubby and somehow hostile. They have an unwelcome but palpable class quality to them - something very low or lowering, and you can detect rules, spoken or unspoken, hemming you in from the moment you arrive.
Further towards the Channel, we saw other sites - with no cover or windbreak, not a tree in sight, and again, the endless rows of 'mobile' homes up on brick props.
Can people really have holidays in places like this? Times to enjoy themselves, unwind, relax?
Do the owners of these grim places ever do customer-satisfaction surveys?
Have they ever tried to look at things from the point of view of a camper?
No wonder so many of them have gone out of business.
It's a crying shame, because the English landscape is so lovely, and the idea and practice of a simple camping holiday is so much easier these days, and it's all so beneficial to children, and so inexpensive and sustainable.
We finally settled in relief for a Camping and Caravan site at Westbourne - again a broad open set of fields, with a workman installing a new wooden boundary fence by the flowerbeds. He'd have been better occupied (we later found out) putting in a few more loos, or washing-up sinks, or even emptying the rubbish bins. There was a Boot Fair going on in one of the fields when we arrived and the cafe was doing a great trade in greasy full English breakfasts or sausages and chips. We signed in for 2 nights as there seemed to be plenty of space. However, this was now Friday night of the Bank Holiday weekend and the space was filling up fast. We hoped not to be too crowded, and in the end we did manage to retain a bit of open ground around us.
The best thing about this site was to see so many children playing - yes, playing! like they/we used to do in the old days. Throwing balls to each other, kicking balls around, playing some sort of cricket, flying kites, running about, playing hide-and-seek, spending time with their dads, laughing and larking about. There is a wonderful unmistakable sound to this kind of activity - children being happy, unselfconscious, calling to each other, arguing, helping each other, teaching each other the rules of whatever game. I haven't heard this sound for a very long time. It was like going back in time.
Walking to and from the loos and showers we heard and saw all these snippets:
"Seven, eight and nine, twice. That's nothing!"
"No, seven and eight are fifteen, two, And again, seven and eight, that's fifteen four... " (Ah, Crib!)
"Christian, swap ends!" "No!"
"Anyone got 20p?" (for the shower).
A girl with the family electric kettle plugged into the socket by the hairdryers, getting free electricity to boil the water for tea.
A man living solo in a HUGE American camper bus, putting his white canvas tyre covers on and off each day.
A naughty girl being made to sit cross-legged on the ground right up against the family car bumper for being bad (the naughty corner).
A long patient queue for the two tiny washing-up sinks after every mealtime.
A man putting up a bright green canvas tent and flysheet, with old-fashioned wooden pegs....when I asked him about it he said the tent was 60 years old and the flysheet at least 40. It had those two metal spikes at each end, sticking up about 3" above the canvas and reminded me of our camping holidays as children, especially in the Gower, with Daddy getting worked up in rages about hammering, guy-ropes, campbeds, etc.
Our outings from this site were exceptional - to Fishbourne with its mosaics, to Bosham and Dell Quay, round the Chidham peninsular, to East Wittering (where we bought fresh mullet from the fisherman) and West Wittering with its privacy and lovely sands, to the Weald and Downland Museum with all that timber-framed history, to West Dean with its stunning south lawns and gardens, to Chichester Marina and along the western end of the Arun-Portsmouth Canal (what an interesting history), where we saw a man working on his pinnace, the RNSP Fusil, another lovely boat in a sorry state but no doubt in his hands it will come back to elegant life again. (At the W&D Museum we heard a little girl say "But where is the open air museum?"). We had an icecream at the Canal Basin in Chichester itself and watched two small rowboats filled with teenagers make their unsteady and circular way out onto the water (£10 deposit per boat, £1 a head, maximum of six in a boat).
Finally, yesterday morning we heard the weatherman on the wireles say at 8am that a great line of thunderstorms was coming up to S England hitting Hampshire, Sussex and Kent - and that propelled us into a rapid departure. From being IN BED we had everything dismounted, roughly packed and flung into the car in 25 minutes. We drove away as the rain arrived, leaving behind us a queue for the loos, another queue for the washing-up sinks, the rubbish bin gates locked to prevent any more being put into the overspilling mountain of garbage, the smell of drains where the manhole had had to be lifted the night before to clear some blockage or other, the cafe firmly shut, yet more girls wailing that they need 20p for the shower, no-one on duty and a grim, British determination to stick it out because this was a holiday.
Surely, surely, we can do better than this.
They do in France, and Germany and Italy and America and even in some places in England.
WAKE UP CAMPSITES!!!!
'We' = my husband Andrew and I. If you don't know us, y0u can read about some of our earlier travels on www.mussettsatsea.blogspot.com
This time we set off on Wednesday afternoon May 20th, and had a brilliant day threading through the by-lanes of Kent heading for some unknown destination. We can recommend Truffles, the teashop in Henfield, where we sat in a sheltered spot out of the wind in their tiny garden with its potted olives and mirror wall, and ate scones and cream in the sun. We also bought a washing-up bucket and some other bits from the old-fashioned hardware shop across the road, and in their Budgens store we bought what turned out to be a pack of delicious fresh scallops - chilled and presumably fairly local. Excellent stuff.
We had not booked into a site for the night and called on several en route. These were shown on our standard road atlas, so we did not have any detail about any of them in advance. The first at the wonderfully named village of Small Dole some miles from the coast, was a broad open field with some caravans and tents dotted round the edge. It was pleasant enough and only £8 a night, with loos and washing-up facilities near the owner's house, but we craved the sea, so went on.
The next site appeared to be very prim and proper with clipped hedges and neat gravel driveways at the entrance. It had a lot of boxes on it - permanently-placed 'mobile' homes - some with gardens or decking alongside them. But it also had stretches of lifted turf and building works in progress, and nothing to say what was going on. We went deeper into this slightly unsettling community and asked a couple where the tents were allocated. "It's closed," they said. "New owners." Shame no-one had put anything up on the road signs or even at the gate.
We decided to head for the Arundel area, as a friend had recommended the river Arun as being a worthwhile destination, and we were in high spirits as the afternoon rolled along. But, we found sites were either closed or invisible. Maybe the English camping industry has suffered a catastrophic collapse in recent years - there is a mismatch between the information on these general road maps and the 3-D experience. There aren't that many of them, really a surprisingly few number. Ideas about finding small, quiet, green, natural sites are clearly well out of date, and we thought longingly of sites we have known in the past - especially Church Knowle at Corfe, the location for Mike Leigh's wonderful 'Nuts in May' movie.
Eventually we booked into the site at Ford, south of Arundel. Here, Helen the owner cheerfully took our money (£12.50 a night), bade us use the 'tranquil' lower paddock and gave us a slip of paper with a fierce key-code for entry to the loos and showers.
We had a small field to ourselves, screened by a 'hedge' of reeds full of warblers, and looking radiant in the late afternoon light. Our new tent was easy to put up. It was all rather exciting. We walked up to the river banks and strolled along to the amazing old railwaybridge (no longer able to swing open) where trains roll and clank past every few minutes.
We turned back south along the bank to the old Canal basin created early in the 19thC for the short-lived Arun-Portsmouth canal, and spoke to Jason living on his houseboat on the mud, and wondered if we should buy one of the moorings he has for sale. Around us the birds sang, we could see right across the marshes, the ancient church across the fields, the wild flower all around us. A rat ('vole' said Jason) blundered about, blind but still fairly active. Jason showed us an old photo of the boat next to his, 'Palatina', a G20 yacht of beautiful lines built in the 1890s for a rich rich gentleman. This gorgeous creature is now topped with a hideous set of boxes and cabins, her fine diagonal teak lines marred with flaking paint, and a sorry sight she is now. But 'home' to someone.
Back at the tent, ready to cook our scallops, we realised our 'tranquil' field was in fact a nightmare of roaring traffic noise... a fast commuter road was just behind the thick hedge and while we could not really see any of the tormenting traffic, we could hear every rev and screech as the bikes, cars, lorries and vans hurtled past. It went on quite late into the evening, well past our bedtime.
Even with the warblers singing just six feet from our tent, we could not hear them above the sound of the rush hour traffic.
We spent the next day exploring Arundel - the castle, the priory church with its unique divided denominations - like a patient with a partial brain-transplant... 'Look, here I am, this is ME! but that bit over there, well, that's me too, but it's different, it's not really me, it's .... (whisper) Roman Catholic!!!!!' (or from the RC side ' 'We don't talk about what's behind the grille...it's too painful.......').
We went to Littlehampton (warned off in advance by Jason who spoke darkly of Bosnians and other foreigners) but apart from a strict traffic regime, it seems like many other small English market towns: down on its luck, perhaps, but who is to say if that is due to the modern rage for internet shopping or the departure of its last great wave of enthusiastic incomers, now mouldering away in Residential Care Homes? We didn't meet any Bosnians, anyway, then or the next day.
We went to Bognor Regis - and what a surprise! Tiny, unchanged from the 1920s, really, with a few clubs and arcades, and all the heat drawn out of it by Billy Butlin's extraordinary double-decker chalet city half a mile away. I remember a holiday at Bognor when I was probably seven or eight (before BB built his holiday camp), and thought it would be a great bustling place like Brighton, but really it is like a tiny version of Deal, with a short stubby pier and a few pretty buildings and some slightly dispirited-looking neon signs. Another great film location, surely.
We did notice the huge proportion of Indian and Chinese restaurants everywhere, though, in all these holiday towns. We wondered how would you recognise an English restaurant these days, anyway, since we have all diligently pursued 'foreign' food for the last 50 years - curry, pasta, pizza, Tex-mex, etc etc. Jellied eels are hard to come by but Fish N Chips hold their own.
That night was our last at Ford, we were really driven away by the noise. But to be honest, I was also cast down by that keycode which had to be accurately remembered each time you wanted the loo, the 50p per shower (with its frankly tepid water), the tiny shower cubicle with nowhere to hang your clothes or put your shoes out of the wet, the stupid car barrier to stop people coming in (why?) which you have to open and close every time you want to leave the site or get back in, the terrier barking at you when you try to get into the shop to pay your fees.... It's all so bodged and stingey, somehow. The security is necessary no doubt to avoid the place being invaded by outsiders, or vandalised, but surely things don't have to be like this.
On the other hand, I must say it was a pleasure to have bird-watching lessons from the owner and to hear and see Cetti's warbler frolicking in our reeds, so it was with some regret that we set off site-hunting again.
We were heading for the Bosham area and we set off again in high spirits. The sunlight was glorious and everything in England looked full and fresh, with cow-parlsey along the lanes and roses and valerian and aquilegias and peonies filling the front gardens. Again we needed to find somewhere for the night.
We just could not find some of the sites. They were completely invisible...clearly shown on a map but impossible to find on the ground. Some have enticing brown road signs giving you false hope....they too lead to nowhere. One was at Goodwood, somewhere near the races, where apart from all the gates and entrances for owners, trainers, buses, cars, etc. there is a country park but nothing correlating to a campsite. The other was near the divinely beautiful village of Slindon, and apparently somewhere near the National Trust lands there, but despite extensive searching we could not find it. We asked a lady walking her dog. "Campsite?" she said with a shudder and a rising tone to her voice. "No, there's nothing like that round here!"
We did manage to find the next one, which was not too far from Fishbourne, the Roman palace we hoped to visit, but - my God - what a dump. This had a sign bragging of new management but the frontage was a long, Tudor-bethan 1930s bungalow-portacabin hybrid, with dirty windows, sagging roof, and no sign of life. There was a sign saying visitors should call at Reception but there was no sign of any such place. The ground was an acre or so of dirty boxes and clinker. Old metal cow-gates were lashed shut with fraying binder twine, everything looked abandoned and neglected and if a starving dog had come out snarling I wouldn't have been surprised. All the 'buildings' on these places are square/rectangular/cubic but otherwise very Gothic in character - spooky, pikey, ghastly, grubby and somehow hostile. They have an unwelcome but palpable class quality to them - something very low or lowering, and you can detect rules, spoken or unspoken, hemming you in from the moment you arrive.
Further towards the Channel, we saw other sites - with no cover or windbreak, not a tree in sight, and again, the endless rows of 'mobile' homes up on brick props.
Can people really have holidays in places like this? Times to enjoy themselves, unwind, relax?
Do the owners of these grim places ever do customer-satisfaction surveys?
Have they ever tried to look at things from the point of view of a camper?
No wonder so many of them have gone out of business.
It's a crying shame, because the English landscape is so lovely, and the idea and practice of a simple camping holiday is so much easier these days, and it's all so beneficial to children, and so inexpensive and sustainable.
We finally settled in relief for a Camping and Caravan site at Westbourne - again a broad open set of fields, with a workman installing a new wooden boundary fence by the flowerbeds. He'd have been better occupied (we later found out) putting in a few more loos, or washing-up sinks, or even emptying the rubbish bins. There was a Boot Fair going on in one of the fields when we arrived and the cafe was doing a great trade in greasy full English breakfasts or sausages and chips. We signed in for 2 nights as there seemed to be plenty of space. However, this was now Friday night of the Bank Holiday weekend and the space was filling up fast. We hoped not to be too crowded, and in the end we did manage to retain a bit of open ground around us.
The best thing about this site was to see so many children playing - yes, playing! like they/we used to do in the old days. Throwing balls to each other, kicking balls around, playing some sort of cricket, flying kites, running about, playing hide-and-seek, spending time with their dads, laughing and larking about. There is a wonderful unmistakable sound to this kind of activity - children being happy, unselfconscious, calling to each other, arguing, helping each other, teaching each other the rules of whatever game. I haven't heard this sound for a very long time. It was like going back in time.
Walking to and from the loos and showers we heard and saw all these snippets:
"Seven, eight and nine, twice. That's nothing!"
"No, seven and eight are fifteen, two, And again, seven and eight, that's fifteen four... " (Ah, Crib!)
"Christian, swap ends!" "No!"
"Anyone got 20p?" (for the shower).
A girl with the family electric kettle plugged into the socket by the hairdryers, getting free electricity to boil the water for tea.
A man living solo in a HUGE American camper bus, putting his white canvas tyre covers on and off each day.
A naughty girl being made to sit cross-legged on the ground right up against the family car bumper for being bad (the naughty corner).
A long patient queue for the two tiny washing-up sinks after every mealtime.
A man putting up a bright green canvas tent and flysheet, with old-fashioned wooden pegs....when I asked him about it he said the tent was 60 years old and the flysheet at least 40. It had those two metal spikes at each end, sticking up about 3" above the canvas and reminded me of our camping holidays as children, especially in the Gower, with Daddy getting worked up in rages about hammering, guy-ropes, campbeds, etc.
Our outings from this site were exceptional - to Fishbourne with its mosaics, to Bosham and Dell Quay, round the Chidham peninsular, to East Wittering (where we bought fresh mullet from the fisherman) and West Wittering with its privacy and lovely sands, to the Weald and Downland Museum with all that timber-framed history, to West Dean with its stunning south lawns and gardens, to Chichester Marina and along the western end of the Arun-Portsmouth Canal (what an interesting history), where we saw a man working on his pinnace, the RNSP Fusil, another lovely boat in a sorry state but no doubt in his hands it will come back to elegant life again. (At the W&D Museum we heard a little girl say "But where is the open air museum?"). We had an icecream at the Canal Basin in Chichester itself and watched two small rowboats filled with teenagers make their unsteady and circular way out onto the water (£10 deposit per boat, £1 a head, maximum of six in a boat).
Finally, yesterday morning we heard the weatherman on the wireles say at 8am that a great line of thunderstorms was coming up to S England hitting Hampshire, Sussex and Kent - and that propelled us into a rapid departure. From being IN BED we had everything dismounted, roughly packed and flung into the car in 25 minutes. We drove away as the rain arrived, leaving behind us a queue for the loos, another queue for the washing-up sinks, the rubbish bin gates locked to prevent any more being put into the overspilling mountain of garbage, the smell of drains where the manhole had had to be lifted the night before to clear some blockage or other, the cafe firmly shut, yet more girls wailing that they need 20p for the shower, no-one on duty and a grim, British determination to stick it out because this was a holiday.
Surely, surely, we can do better than this.
They do in France, and Germany and Italy and America and even in some places in England.
WAKE UP CAMPSITES!!!!
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