Country town > Articles > The Wilmslow Boys

Cheshire, October 1999
Welcome to Cheshire. More precisely, that golden triangle of Cheshire that stretches between Prestbury, Alderley Edge and Wilmslow, the suburban trim’n’tanned aspirational nirvana that is the Virginia Water of the north. We must assume a dozen weddings over a weekend in Cheshire. Weddings are a bit of a local obsession. While national marriage figures drop, in Cheshire weddings are booming; you can almost hail an antique white Roller with ribbons in the street. A wedding costs a great deal of money, so that’s a good thing, and your neighbours and friends can see every penny of it spent. Weddings are uncomplicated, romance with sex and drink, and there are photographers to prove that it really existed, and mantel shelves and occasional tables that bear testament to what a good time your life is?

But more than all that, weddings are symbolic of new beginnings and a bright future. They are hope over history. And if Cheshire believes in anything apart from discount cards, it believes in hope for the future. Everyone is here through choice because they’ve broken away from history, escaped class pre-destination, proved the headmaster’s assessment wrong, got on and got out. Cheshire is the arranged marriage of cash and cachet. A true love match.

It’s easy to mock Cheshire, but then that’s hardly a reason not to. Cheshire is mock everything: mock gentility, mock Tudor Gregorian, mock family, mock style, mock casual and mock happiness. Cheshire thumbs its nose job at mockery. More Ferraris call this twisty lane, 30mph place home than anywhere else in Britain. There’s more champagne sprayed over Alderley Edge than anywhere else in Britain. There are more millionaires to the square mile here than anywhere else in Britain. And every garden gnome, carriage lamp and novelty door chime here has been earned, if not entirely paid for. This is Hello! Country, Posh-and-Becksville, Cheshire twinned with Dynasty, a faux Florida with rain.

Earlier this year the curate of St Bartholomew’s Church in Wilmslow got himself transubstantiated into the national news with a shot to his congregation in the parish magazine. They were, he said, a godless, pagan lot, more interested in money and snobbery and motors than saving their souls. If you could save a soul with a 10% cash deposit or put it on the credit card, then they’d all be on the waiting list for a pair. One for running about in, the other for showing off with a personalised number plate.

Bearing the curate’s reprimand in mind, I didn’t come to Cheshire empty-handed. I brought it a present, something it needed. I brought it Jeremy Clarkson. For a place where the showroom is a cathedral of pilgrimage and the double garage a family chapel, Clarkson is the Second Coming. People don’t mob him so much as genuflect to him, and they speak with awe and in tongues: “Five valves, ABS, Gti with spoilers, eh, eh?” “Mazda, Toyota, Vauxhall, Honda, Lada, amen.” They sway after him in ecstatic Hare Krishna lines, chanting: “Jezza, Jezza, Jezza, Jezza, Clarkson, Clarkson, Jezza, Jezza.” Here the car is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible insecurity, a yearning of the soul. It fills the garage of spiritual emptiness. When you’ve got the back-pocket folding, when you’ve made it out of the smoke, how do you let people know? You buy a car that is three times your bank manager’s annual wage.

Cheshire is surprised and not a little hurt by the ridicule it attracts from us in the media. What have they done to deserve the sneers, I’m asked defensively by the Stuart Hall (that’s his title up here: the Stuart Hall). They’re not bad people. All they’ve done is follow the instructions on the box and in the glossy magazines. Got on and consumed, cut their lawns, learnt to ski. If Clarkson is God up here, then Hall is Elijah, Cheshire’s longest-serving celebrity, a man whose best friends’ party list is the Cheshire phone book.

We are sitting on a blustery patio with a pair of men whose nicknames end with O. It might be Chico and Harpo. They’ve been playing doubles with Jeremy. Actually they’ve spent an hour calling each other poufs and double-faulting. In the middle distance, cows set their noses to the north and watch the battleship-grey clouds roll in. This part of the country gets more rain than anywhere else in Britain. It trundles in from the Atlantic, remorselessly pissing on Cheshire’s fireworks.

Cheshire is an unremarkable county. Set on the Welsh Marches beneath Lancashire, its name comes from the Latin for Place of the Legions. After the Romans left, it reluctantly became part of the Saxon kingdom or Mercia, then foolishly resisted the Normans. There is a myth that King Harold survived Hastings to live as a hermit in Chester. The county was made palatinate under the Earl of Chester, a title that now belongs to the Prince of Wales. During the civil war, Cheshire was so equally divided between royalists and parliamentarians that they tried to declare a draw, but in the end the King got Chester and Cromwell got Nantwich. The industrial revolution that transformed the northwest largely bypassed Cheshire. Though bisected by canals and railways, it remained a lump of clay-clagged farmland. It produced the meat and milk for its industrial neighbours. If you wanted a country to represent the serviceable weft and web of our island story, you couldn’t do better than Cheshire. Its two staples were cheese and salt: hard cheese and the salt of the earth.

In arriviste Cheshire terms, Prestbury is salt in a silver cruet. It’s old money. It probably means you’ve got Paul Simon on the Range Rover CD instead of the Corrs. Prestbury is a pretty enough village, with cobbles and half-timbers and an impressive Norman church, but that’s just a front. Actually, it is the seething pit of hell. If hell is other people, then the other people’s hell is Presbury people. I’ve always known that the devil’s most preciously loved vice would be smugness, and Prestbury is smug central. It wrote the book of smug revelations and you can buy it in the church. Called simply Prestbury: A Little Piece of Olde England Still Survives, it goes: “So Prestbury retains something that is really England. It is quiet even when the day-trippers are here and there seem to be more visitors than ever wandering the village main street gazing in the olde chocolate box windows. And some always say they wish they could live here. It’s something to do with the village friendly feeling. That’s why Prestbury folk are not too proud to pick up sweet papers or beer cans. A sort of home pride.”

Home pride, pass the Uzi. You get the drift. The barely unspoken “You filthy oiks with your sweet papers and beer cans. You can press your crusty noses up against our fake bottle-glass windows, but join us and live here? In your dreams.” This is a place where the council won’t put up street lights because they’re common, and won’t allow an Indian or Chinese restaurant because they lower the tone. More specifically, un-white people hanging around the place being industrious would be a style solecism wrecking the mellow colour scheme. Brown people are immigrants. Immigrants live in poor areas. Prestbury is not a poor area. Ipso facto, it can’t have brown people or street lights. The presence of an Indian restaurant would qualify the prestige of their his-and-hers BMWs and, you know, not one person in this self-satisfied corner of olde England would see that as racist. They’d point out that they don’t allow McDonald’s here either, or young offenders’ hostels or naked morris dancing.

There is a pub that used to be named the Saracen’s Head but has a sign calling itself the Black Boy. This is the place where, on election night, according to the local grave-digger (a man who is sadly under-utilised), the friendly folk huddled so terrified you would have thought the Sandinistas were massing in the hills. No group in England is as appalled by the threat of hands-on-socialism. Most of them have never experienced it as grown-ups. As it turns out, they needn’t have worried.

I sat on a bench in this little bit of olde Newe England devoutly wishing I was an artillery spotter, and considered what a vile, deluded mockery Prestbury is. A dormitory fantasy of a place, constructed out of holiday Aga and blow-job novels and bucolic daytime soap operas, a childish Edwardian Shangri-La with a greengrocer that only sells flowers, and no peasants or dung. A furtive local sidled up to me holding a pad and a ballpoint. “You’re with Jeremy Clarkson, aren’t you? We heard he was here. I just wondered if he’d…you know, for the wife.” Sure, he’s just hanging out in the long grass round the back of the graveyard. He’s a predatory homosexual, you know.

On to Alderley Edge. In the minute pecking order or Cheshire, if Prestbury is old money, blazers and tweeds, caps and huskies, then Alderley Edge is a new money and more money. It’s Dolce e Gabbana sandals, Prada rucksacks and suede-peaked baseball caps. Alderley Edge is where Manchester footballers bring their tin-opener-voiced, pony-mad, disco-found brides to set up home. It’s where loveable, long serving characters from Coronation Street settle. The real Rovers Return is a Mexican cappuccino bar. This is the funky, sociable, envious home to fast-food millionaires, mobile-phone chain-store owners, carpet layers who won a corporation contract, brickies who got smart and got into plant hire, out-of-town do-it-yourself merchants, and above all the franchise – that little fallout of corporate success that is a licence to print money. They franchise anything from crispy chicken dipping sauce to Punjabi terracotta tiles, to plastic bolt-on things, to sports cars.

Alderley Edge is the place for the middleman’s cut, for geezers who saw a gap and went for it, made a space, used their heads. It is an ugly place. It has a railway station that’s two sizes too big, an inheritance from the last century, when Manchester’s cloth merchants and mill owners moved out here and built chalets and laurelled mansions that are now the most sought-after properties. The low-slung High Street is a collection of car show-rooms, estate agents and newsagents sandwiched by cafés that have franchised the names of more exotic locations: Cuba and Capri, Sorrento and St Tropez, all selling the same Bedfordshire battery bird in a bap.

On the street, furious women in sunglasses slam the doors of all-terrain runarounds and march into little boutiques that sell what used to be called “notions”: comedy alarm clocks, executive desk ornaments and pot-pourri. The first thing you notice about people here is their colour, a hue unknown anywhere else in the world. The colour of fired-earth kitchen tiles, applied with all the care of a French polish. Everything else about them is gleaming white, snowy jeans and T-shirts a size too small. And off-white hair cut either as variations on Charlie’s Angels or Ally McBeal that makes their owners continually nod and toss like a mare bothered by flies. White and orange are the county colours, representing biological cleanliness and healthy vitamin C.

In a newsagent we buy a copy of Cheshire Life, a glossy magazine that yearns for a question mark after the title. It’s thick with ads for cars, bridal photographers, fitted kitchens and private schools, and looks like a spoof of a 1980s Tatler. Hundreds of social pages with passport photos of identical radioactively glowing women in white hair worn as a loose chignon for the evenings, holding flutes of champagne, their grinning husbands in designer dinner jackets with that dash of stand-out-from-the-crowd personality that only a brocade waistcoat and Day-Glo bow tie give you. My favourite article was on Dee Cattom, a sad but cosmetically smiling lady who says, “I’m 45 going on 25,” in the mistaken belief that it’s clever and amusing. Dee was, as she readily admits, so desperate to join Cheshire society (“beautiful county, beautiful people”) that she had herself built in Cheshire’s image. “I’ve had a brow lift, nose job, tummy tuck, jaw re-set and gone from 32AA to 34DD.” She’s also been fitted with a yellow Lotus Elise number plate, S111 EXY, which at £27,000 cost only the skin off her nose more than the plastic surgery. “I don’t regret one minute under the surgeon’s knife. Now I really feel as if I belong here in Cheshire.” There’s really no answer to that.

Attracted by some boggling particulars in an estate agent’s window, we go in. “Oh, would you mind?” says a girl with a mansard bra extension and no room for development, holding paper and pen. “It’s for my brother. He’s mad about Top Gear.” As Jeremy scrawls, I whisper: “He’s gay.” We spend a good hour in the shop. If you’re thinking of buying property in Alderley Edge, I do recommend you consider an estate agent: there’s hours of hysterical fun to be had. We began by trying not to be London style snobs, to keep our metropolitan insouciance zipped, but the sheer volume, the boundless gaudy vulgarity of it, overwhelms you, and you just have to howl with derision. Here is a short compendium of things you need to have to get on in Cheshire:

A bar. It can be of the traditional Dean Martin sort with maroon buttoned leatherette, matching stools and illuminated shelves. Or it could be the rustic halved barrels with horse brasses, pumps and a stuffed fish. Or, discreetly, a globe that lights up and doubles as a cocktail cabinet. You must have a music system prominently displayed, with speakers like dwarfs’ coffins and you must have curtains made out of Liberace’s knickers, incorporating enough two-tone dressing-gown cord to fly a kite. You have to have a freestanding kitchen island, terracotta tiles and lynched utensils hanging at concussion heights, a his-and-hers bathroom vanity unit with infinitely reflecting mirrors. You’ll need an inglenook display space for porcelain dolls, and a Wimpole Street occasional table of magazines. Ceilings are low and everything that could be described as a feature must be exposed (that goes for your wife too). What you won’t need, and I never saw one, is a bookcase, but you will need somewhere for your video collection. Stylistically, feel free – in fact, indulge yourself. Old El Paso is a popular theme at the moment, as is your chintz Mrs Tiggywinkle look. As for pictures, use them sparingly. But do mix traditional prints of horses, churches, etc, with modern stuff bought in the open air when drunk on holidays. Of course, you can never have enough wedding photographs.

The one style that is never going to catch on in Cheshire is minimalism. It may be the fashion at the moment and Cheshire may well watch fashion like a Northumbrian monk watches for Vikings, but minimalism just doesn’t compute. The idea that less is more only applies to skirt lengths. No, up here your home is an Egyptian mausoleum of all the kit you need for the afterlife.

Alderley Edge is the afterlife: life after Lancashire. House prices are fantastically high for the northwest. I asked the estate agent what most people were looking for. “Oh, somewhere to prominently display a skip. It’s vital that you can be seen throwing away the virtually new Smallbone fitted kitchen while putting in the new Smallbone fitted kitchen.”

Driving up millionaires’ row, with its Edwardian Lutyens knock-offs and it’s 1970s haciendas and a you-can’t-go-wrong Jacobean, you can see that no opportunity to shout, “Oi, Mr and Mrs Lucky Bastard have arrived” is overlooked. Gardens are pub-bright with lots of geraniums and red-hot pokers and little spiky palm trees. The cars never see the inside of a garage, because you wouldn’t notice them there and because the garage is full of archaic games and pinball machines. There are nonchalantly dropped mountain bikes, swimming pool gazebos, arc lights for tennis courts and the de rigueur electric gates, as if no burglar would have the nous to push his way through six inches of privet. Attached to every single home is a conservatory – there must be a couple of dozen conservatory millionaires up here. Ornate ironwork and glass lean-tos are mandatory, and you can see why: you can see through. They are the perfect Alderley Edge room for people who want to live in glass houses and throw parties.

Jeremy turns the Cadillac out of town and we drive in silence. “You know,” he says after a while, “it’s worrying. Some of that stuff looked a bit like the stuff I’ve got at home – only a bit, mind.” Yes, that is worrying.

In the grey, sodden country that surrounds Prestbury and Alderley Edge, crossed with motorways, intersections and round-abouts with bright geraniums and spiky stunted palms, along with the essentials of out-of-town shopping centres, automatic-louvred security blind warehouses and more car showrooms with grubby flags, we come across gated private estates like Dark Age forts in a dangerous land. They have classy feudal names like conference centres. These arching culs-de-sac are an idea imported from America, but here in Cheshire who do they think they’re trying to keep out? The fences and barriers, speed bumps and empty watchmen’s huts are the trappings of wealth, the buffers of avarice. What they’re actually keeping out is the gnawing doubt that all the things you’ve dreamt of don’t really amount to very much. Hideous little family homes with gratuitous Victorian and Gregorian detailing, all hung about with baskets of geraniums and carriage lamps. Outside the gates, landfill landscaping sports first-growth scrub and weedy saplings. “Cover for child molesters and peeping toms,” notes Jeremy. If Prestbury is olde hell, then these drizzle-washed private internment camps are a sort of new purgatory, and proof of the old warning that you should be careful what you pray for – you might get it.

Now the big one: Wilmslow. I had trouble getting Jeremy into Wilmslow after dark. “I don’t want to go,” he whined. You’ve got to, it’s important. “You go – they’ll only point at me and tell me about their Porches and repeat what I said about their Cherokees.” And they did. Drunkenly they queued up to talk torque. Girls asked him to autograph their thighs in mascara: “Can you put, ‘To a 911 driver with love’?”

Most country towns the size of Wilmslow are no-go areas after sunset. Their pedestrian precincts and American-style bars are given over to gangs of vomitously aggressive youths and shrieking Greek choruses of underage girls, and prowling police cars, but not Wilmslow. This is the centre of Cheshire nightlife and it attracts partying folk from as far as Blackpool. It rather resembles Miami Beach as imagined by Catherine Cookson. We’d been told of a couple of bars to try. “That’s great for the naughty forties and randy birds,” said a squeaky-voiced bellhop. “Anyone can pull there.”

Well, Jeremy could. Jeremy pulled like Geoff Capes, like the old man of the sea. The bars were packed with people ranging from 16 to 60, all of them 25. And the first thing I noticed was how thin everyone was, how toned and worked out, the women all expensively dressed in Prada and Voyage, last season’s Dolce e Gabbana and Ghost. Not Kookaï versions, the real thing. And they all had white hair. It wouldn’t do to get fat and greasy in Wilmslow: you’d be letting your car down. The men were gelled dark yobs on best behaviour, leery geezers uniformly dressed in untucked Gap casual, the tasteful style choice for blokes who don’t know the first thing about anything. And they all looked beautiful. I don’t think I’ve been in a room in this country with more active pheromones.

A pretty girl with hair you could have eaten your dinner off spoke to me while she waited in line for Jeremy. “It’s my birthday today, I’m having a bit of a party. I got given this.” She flashed a vast ring. Oh, lovely, it’s very, em, discreet. She beamed. “Do you really think so?” Discreet is the most difficult look to manage in Cheshire. “What’s he like?” she asked, nodding at Mr 0-60. “Gay, I’m afraid.” Altogether the fashion was very Harvey-Nicks-last-week, but the music and the atmosphere were 15 years old, completely 1980s, Radio 2 favourites blasting away. The feeling in bars was of splashing out, going for it, live today, live better tomorrow. The 1980s was Wilmslow’s spiritual decade, and you might think that this was the last stronghold of ϋber-Toryism, Thatcher’s children hold out as the Saxons did against the Blairish Normans. And though I’m sure they’d all vote Tory to a man if they voted at all, would hang and flog everything that broke the laws of property, actually this place and these people are the legacy of, indeed the great success story of, socialism.

It was the Labour movement, the unions, the co-operative societies who crusaded to educate and empower and, most importantly, motivate the labouring classes that made Cheshire possible. Cheshire is what happens if you let people get on. From the outside it may look like a risible chimpanzees’ tea party aping Notting Hill or Godalming or Los Angeles, but it’s more than that. It’s the very end of the industrial revolution. This rocking bar in tasteless, crass Wilmslow is the graduation party of the old working class. Their children won’t be seen dead here, this is just a pit stop. Their kids with their private educations, their flattened accents, their university places and their gap-year travels will move on, calm down, button up, buy a Honda and become invisible among the rest of us in the shifting middle classes.

It had to be done. “It’s got to be done,” said Jeremy. I supposed so, but have you ever done it before? “No.” No, neither have I. Do you think it will be embarrassing? “Undoubtedly.”

Golf. We want to play golf. We sauntered – no, more sidled – into the club shop, and said we wanted the kit. Head to foot, the full Monty, as gaudy as you can make it. We want to be Men in Pringle. By the time we got into the buggy with our bags strapped to the back and our two-tone shoes going tippety tappety, we were hysterical. Dangerous, life-threatening laughter. Jeremy was laughing because we were funny. I was laughing because we were funny, and because when he’d gone to the changing room the man behind the till said: “I hear he’s gay.”

Golf is just as stupid as it looks, but harder. We got lapped three times on the first lawn. We swung our bats in the prescribed manner, but frankly it would have been quicker if we’d kicked the bloody thing. So we retired to the driving range and spent a frustrating hour ploughing. We eventually got the hang of it and went back to play a couple of flags at a tenner each. When you get into the swing, golf’s more like housework than a game. You’re forever brushing and smoothing and putting things back. It’s a lot like Hoovering, and like all housework, it’s never, ever, finished.

The clouds parted and the late-night sun washed everything, making the countryside if not actually breathtaking, then a bit panting. “So what do you think?” asked Jeremy, after a hole where we were only nine above par and I’d hit a very sweet fifth drive. You mean the golf? “Yes, what do you think about the golf?” The golf – well, it’s rather embarrassing. But you know, I quite like it. There’s a sense of achievement, like dusting the dado rail. “You know, I rather like it as well. I could take this up, but then I’d have to pretend to the wife that I had a mistress to get away at the weekend, and hide my kit in a friend’s house.”

This is it, then. This is Cheshire’s revenge. We’ve caught a dose of golf. “You’re not going to write that we enjoyed it, are you?” Jeremy grabbed my pulley. Oh, I think I’ve got to. “Christ, that’s torn it. That’s the end. I’d rather be thought a pouf than a golfer.” Ah, Jeremy, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.

• More from AA Gill
• More on the same theme