Marlborough lies… in the valley of the upper Kennet, and at the edge of the great forest of Savernake… The streets terminate apparently, where they have terminated for all time that matters and precipitate you at once into the country, or on to the downs. In short, it is as compact as it is venerable of aspect, for if the individual houses are not all old, replacement and repair being inevitable to human existence, there is almost invariably a veteran at hand to catch the eye, and even to impart something of its mellowness and composed demeanour to its neighbours of a more prosaic day. Marlborough is, in truth, held to be by those who have seen it as among the quaintest and most picturesque of English country towns. The long half mile of wide street that is at once its glory and its greater half runs eastward from the college precincts, which from their ancient feudal site command the whole of it, a situation quite in keeping with its ancient story. It is a quaint, old-fashioned, picturesque old town. Marlborough is a quiet old-fashioned town of considerable dignity and charm in the upper valley of the Kennet surrounded on all sides by the downs. It is a place of great antiquity, but this does not appear, or hardly, in its houses or churches, owing to the many fires which have devastated it, especially that of April 28, 1653.
The words “old”, “quaint”, and “picturesque” used in the above extracts from A G Bradley writing in 1907, Frank R Heath in 1911, and Edward Hutton in 1917 mark a view of Marlborough as a place that has come through from an imagined pre-industrial time. For Marlborough the watershed was 1841 when the Great Western Railway relegated and isolated the town from the, then, major changes in industry and transport. No longer could Marlborough be regarded as a thriving coaching town but instead it sank to a shadow of its former self. Its future fortunes were to be linked to the success of the College. As Marlborough College’s reputation and success grew, the town of Marlborough became increasingly in its shadow just as the original town had once been in the shadow of the Norman castle. At such a point, when the future seemed one of decline and the present one of stagnation, only the past possessed attraction. This attraction or charm was made visual in Marlborough’s townscape seen by writers like Bradley and Heath as quaint and picturesque. A picture of the town was created which came to encapsulate an imagined former time. Its past was seen as noble and venerable. It was no coincidence that the Town Hall was contemporary with this picturesque perception. Completed in 1902 in an imagined 17th century style it summed up the way that the then influential people of Marlborough wanted their town to be seen. Prominently displayed above the stone balcony is the town’s coat of arms.
This search for a past appealing to the senses, a kind of non-synchronous aestheticism, combined with a yearning for a sentimentalised past that could serve as a backdrop to an unsatisfactory present. The wish or dream for a return to an imagined better past could never bring it back. It relied on its effect by separating the real past from the present. Time was ruptured and made discontinuous. Taylor, in “A Dream of England”, commented,
The pre-industrial reverie, though it allowed the dreamer to take control, involved a search for a relation between past and present, which depended on their absolute disruption. Since the actual past was erased, the pre-industrial dream made it available through artifice. It resurrected the past in terms of aesthetic pleasure, deciding that it was “quaint”. The pre-industrial dream created a past that was available for consumption. The relation of this dream to the past was nostalgia, or desire for an impossible union.
The artificial past thus created was a non-threatening anodyne. Since the construction of the Town Hall this imagined, dreamt past has come to pervade the High Street. The re-facing of the building now serving as “Lloyds Bank” in a “Tudor” style in 1929, the virtuoso wood carvings on numbers 104, 105 and 106 carved in 1925 and again in 1960, and the former “Woolworths” building constructed in the 1960s in a stylised gabled 17th century manner are just a few examples. The wooden carvings, however, were more than a soporific fancy. The Free family, who then owned the premises, had carvings made of the arms of the monarchs who granted charters to Marlborough. They also had carved into a door, pictures representing moments and myths of Marlborough’s history. King John is shown, as is the castle. The story of a cat rescuing her kittens from the fire is shown by a carved cat carrying a kitten in her mouth. The past represented in Marlborough’s built environment is an artifice “available for consumption”. It is an imagined, dreamt past. A walk around the High Street is, in one sense, a somnambulation: a sleep walk. It is not; however, a walk through time as the real past has been disrupted and left behind. The past and present can never meet because the past has been dreamt.
The way that a dream of the past relates to it, Taylor argues, is nostalgia. For nostalgia to have real meaning there must be something to want to return to. For people this could be memories of earlier happier times. Departure from a place and the surfacing of memories of it later can also bring about nostalgia. In George Orwell’s novel “Coming Up For Air” the smell of horse-dung triggered memories for George Bowling of his childhood village,
The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time, I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually “in” the past.
But for George Bowling, when he finally summoned up the courage to return to his childhood village, “Lower Binfield”, he found to his horror that it bore no relation to the place that he remembered as a child. His dream of the past related to a set of remembered experiences of a place before the First World War. It was a real past and he had interacted with it as a child as his present. But as an adult it wasn’t just Lower Binfield that had changed. He had changed too. For George Bowling nostalgia was as much a desire to return to his childhood as it was a desire to return to Lower Binfield.
“Coming Up For Air” was a work of fiction but it must have echoed Orwell’s own perceptions of nostalgia. One of its themes was that growth was a bad thing. Lower Binfield’s population had swollen from two to twenty-five thousand, a major factor in destroying any sense of place that George Bowling might have had for his childhood town. Marlborough’s population has not increased substantially. It is still very much a small English country town. Nostalgia often seems to be linked with size. Marlborough was the inspiration for Alan Ivimey’s chapter entitled “Round the Town” in his “Pilgrim’s Pleasure – The West Country” published in 1959. In it he wrote,
Nostalgia means homesickness to the point of illness. Sickness for home. Presumably this notion of home implies some limitation in size, “because our hearts are small,” as Kipling put it. It is impressive to see inside a little weaver’s cottage in Dunfermline, which is the birthplace of the millionaire Andrew Carnegie. But it would be less so, surely, had he been born at No. 617 in a block of flats.
So we shall look for towns of small size, because those are the ones with this individual quality of home most markedly apparent… Life and usage made these towns what they are, and it is possible, with some trouble, to strip each century’s development away like the skins of an onion till we find the original core…
Take Marlborough, for instance. Its most obvious features are its impressive and, indeed noble High Street and the fact that it stands on the Bath Road.
Much is made of Marlborough’s apparent changelessness. The long, wide High Street, marked by a church tower at each end, has been the abiding impression given by commentators over the last five hundred years. Take away the cars and the tarmac and Samuel Pepys would probably recognize the place, albeit with a different town hall on the same site.
Changelessness is the antithesis to modern life. It provokes feelings of continuity, unity and comprehension. It is strongly linked with nostalgia which Lowenthal argues,
…mainly envisages a time when folk did not feel fragmented, when doubt was either absent or patent, when thought fused with action . . . in short, a past that was unified and comprehensible, unlike the incoherent, divided present.
Marlborough, in a sense, can be seen as a sanctuary from the changes, disunity and incomprehension of modern life precisely because it appears unchanging.
This is not to suggest that nostalgia, as felt in Marlborough, is at odds with the present. There is no desire or attempt to resurrect the living and working conditions of past people in Marlborough. Nor is there any felt need to return to the past. But there is a very clear sense of wishing to preserve the built fabric of the past, even if that means dressing up the existing fabric in imagined styles of the past as in “Lloyd’s Bank” and the Town Hall. Nostalgia, in Marlborough, is not bent on a return to the past, imagined or otherwise. But instead it has acted to resist change because change itself is seen as potentially pernicious and destructive. Changelessness implies content and content implies peace. The noise of traffic makes this difficult yet a short walk up one of the back-alleys off the High Street does, indeed, bring quiet. A printed guided walk produced by Kennet District Council declares,
Throughout Britain such quiet ways are being lost and the fine street or noble facade is preserved in puzzling isolation. Here they remain for the future in “an integrated town plan”, where urban peace is related to urban bustle and both are related to the landscape which is their setting.
Nostalgia is here made up of a vision of changelessness for the future as much as the present, an acceptance of modern life (“urban bustle”) with the possible temporary escape from it (“urban peace”), the concept of Marlborough High Street as a unified entity linking the participant with a changeless past flowing forward into the present, and, above all, Marlborough’s setting within a wider landscape. The last point reflects the almost paranoid way in which Ivimey’s ideal of “towns of small size” has been adopted as modern development around Marlborough has been vigorously resisted.
“Change”, Ivimey wrote,
. . was always within the ambit of small-towniness. Now it is towards the ambit of suburbia, which is something quite different, because a suburb is not a real unit; and a small town is. The very resistance to this process is something new, too. Our ancestors did not cling to past usages, because the new ones did not quarrel fundamentally with the old.
In Marlborough, new usages are very much in conflict with the changeless old. Modern developments are resisted because they appear to threaten the character of the town as perceived through notions of quaintness and the picturesque. Suburbs hem the town in and they distance the landscape within which the town is set. Marlborough, as a “picture”, would, with extensive suburbs, be undeniably altered. In a way the surrounding landscape is seen as just as important as the town itself. The landscape becomes the natural backdrop to the town. Marlborough “lies in the lap of downs.” The downs are, in fact, named after the town, being called, “The Marlborough Downs”. For this symbiosis of town and down to be maintained the town must remain small.
Smallness is perceived as attractive and necessary to reach the quintessential essence of a town like Marlborough. In representations of Marlborough small is beautiful. “Quaint” implies small. The High Street in Marlborough is regarded as its heart and its essence. Tourists rarely leave the High Street as this is where an idealized past is represented. The whole concept and definition of what a town is, is brought into question here. The modern idea of a town usually extends to a place with a far larger population than Marlborough. Modern representations of Marlborough have been aimed at tourists and they stress the importance of the surrounding landscape. The downs, Savernake Forest and Avebury are now very much within Marlborough’s orbit with the easy accessibility offered by the car. A Marlborough “Mini Guide” published by the English Tourist Board links the “ancient history” of the downs to Marlborough’s “picturesque” setting,
Marlborough is situated in the picturesque rural north-east of Wiltshire. Much of its great natural beauty is environmentally protected and it offers the discerning visitor a unique blend of ancient history and modern attractions and facilities.
Marlborough has been heralded as, “The Gateway to Ancient Britain”. It has become the centre for exploring the prehistoric monuments to its west. A link has been created as the town itself is very much a product of historic factors. The picturesque has been extended from the town to its surroundings. This extension has necessarily led to a concerted move to keep the town small, and without extending suburbs, in order to enhance the effects of the landscape. From the Town Hall steps, trees and green fields can be seen behind the tower of St Peter’s Church. From The Green, Savernake Forest appears as a green umbrella, dominating the town.
The obsession with keeping the town small and protecting its vistas of environmentally protected swathes of down and forest has contributed to some exclusion from working in the town for local people. Industry has been allowed to decline and die. The college is the town’s biggest employer. The last vestiges of its industrial past disappeared when “Wingrove and Edge’s” tannery closed in the 1980s completing the demise of Marlborough’s “traditional” industries. The only mention of a tannery now is on a blue heritage plaque commemorating the fact that the Great Fire of 1653 started in the backside of a High Street tannery during the process of oak-drying. “Hayden’s” bakery, also a large employer, moved to Devizes in the 1990s hammering in another nail in the coffin of local employment prospects.
When Marlborough is compared with Devizes, a neighbouring town, an interesting picture emerges. Devizes and Marlborough have similar political, social and economic histories. They both grew up around a Norman castle, they both acquired charters from medieval monarchs, they both became major agricultural centres with regular markets and fairs, and they both grew fat on the proceeds of the coaching trade. Both were corporation boroughs before the reform act of 1832 and both were influenced strongly by a local aristocracy. Both acquired railway branch-lines and both lost them in the 1960s.
The contrast with Devizes, in many ways displaying parallel historical developments, is stunning. Devizes, despite having no obvious economic advantages to Marlborough (Marlborough is much closer to the M4), has attracted industry at Marlborough’s cost. Massive housing development has taken place around Devizes, and the Hopton Industrial Estate on former Ministry of Defence land has attracted large numbers of companies including the former Marlborough based Haydens. Whereas Marlborough is full of the ghosts of past industries, Devizes has gone a long way to keep them alive. Its “traditional” industries are still represented in the prominence given to “Wadworth’s” Brewery. Its 1885 red-brick, Northgate Brewery dominates the Market Place and its beers are still delivered to local pubs on horse-drawn drays.
There is no industrial estate in Marlborough. A move to create a small industrial estate in the 1990s, a mile north of Marlborough at Baybridges, was shot down in flames in a storm of protest as being environmentally insensitive, being built as it would have been in an area of outstanding natural beauty. Membership of the Marlborough Civic Society, which had been most vociferous in its opposition to the Baybridges proposal, shot up when a by-pass was proposed for the town. As soon as Wiltshire County Council decided not to proceed with the by-pass, membership dropped again.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that resistance to change has acquired a god-like status in the town. There is a human cost of this quest for the picturesque as Marlborough’s working people are effectively denied jobs in their own town. Most housing in the last century has developed at the edges of the town but never in sufficient quantity to qualify as a suburb.
The historic heart of Marlborough, around the High Street, has seen a decline in population since the 19th century as its working class were progressively moved out. The land to the north of the High Street, on the slope where fields and paddocks predominated only a century ago, has become an exclusive area of some of the most expensive properties in the town.
By the 1980s, fetishising of the quaint and the picturesque had so altered Marlborough’s former working character that wealthy people wanted to move in, in order to live in a “nice” place. The 1980s saw the conversion of the old brewery premises into a mini-plaza of select shops. To cater for the newcomers, resistance to change weakened as executive homes were built in numbers at Barton Park and College Fields to the west of the town, all neatly hidden from the Bath Road. The Town Mill was demolished to allow high-class flats for the wealthy retired. A similar development took place at Riverside Park on former meadows of St Peter’s Church. The image of “The Castle and Ball” hotel and “Polly Tea Rooms” in the High Street is one of exclusivity and luxury. The town has become an “historic” dormitory for the wealthy, a place where it’s “charm” and its false notions of the “picturesque” could be displayed to the coach loads of tourists passing through.
Entering the town from the west along the A4 there is little hint of the town of Marlborough until the College is passed and the High Street is entered. The enclosed bridge over the A4 connecting Field House (built 1910-11) makes it clear that the traveller is not passing the College but going through it. The Memorial Hall, the art deco Science Block, and the Chapel, not only complete a symphony of appropriation, but they also serve to hide Marlborough Mount, Marlborough’s primordial feature and around which the Normans built their castle.
The Mount is of profound importance within Marlborough’s history. It is described as,
…second only to Silbury Hill. Almost 100m in diameter and 18m high, this huge mound was reshaped in 1650 with a spiral path winding round it and a gazebo at the top. Today Marlborough Mound is in a sad state, overgrown, tree-covered, and with a large water tank on top. Red deer antlers were found buried in the side of the barrow in 1912, finds which are strongly suggestive of a neolithic foundation deposit. The mound has, as far as is known, never been excavated. It seems likely, from its size and its low-lying site next to water that it belongs to the “harvest hill” type of large round mound, a ceremonial monument with no primary burial.
…second only to Silbury Hill. Almost 100m in diameter and 18m high, this huge mound was reshaped in 1650 with a spiral path winding round it and a gazebo at the top. Today Marlborough Mound is in a sad state, overgrown, tree-covered, and with a large water tank on top. Red deer antlers were found buried in the side of the barrow in 1912, finds which are strongly suggestive of a neolithic foundation deposit. The mound has, as far as is known, never been excavated. It seems likely, from its size and its low-lying site next to water that it belongs to the “harvest hill” type of large round mound, a ceremonial monument with no primary burial.
Traditionally believed to be derived from &ldquoMoela-beorh”, “Moelin’s barrow or burial place”. The prehistoric artificial mound which formed the nucleus of Marlborough Castle is reputed to be the burial place of the Irish magician, the mysterious Merlin.
In support of this theory, the motto on the borough arms reads “Ubi nunc sapientis ossa Merlini” meaning “Where are now the bones of the wise Merlin”.
It might be more relevant to substitute the motto, “Ubi nunc castrum Merleberg?” as the present-day visitor to Marlborough will now see nothing of the castle that gave rise to the town, unless he is fortunate enough to gain admission to the College, and doubly fortunate to possess the ability to imagine what the site around the Mount might once have been before it was so dramatically transformed.
In a guide to Marlborough College published in 1979, the author wrote,
To a part of the British public “Marlborough” has meant the College first of all, at least in this century, but the reader must judge whether education is a “nobler” use for our walks and buildings than that of castle, inn or home.
Marlborough has been bisected by the College. West of St. Peter’s Church the town of Marlborough ends and the College begins. Its pre-1843 history is not commemorated as it forms no part of the College’s identity. The “Castle Inn”, like the “Hart”, had famous people to stay. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, was laid up here for nearly a fortnight with gout in February 1767 en route from Bath to London.
On Boxing Day in 1836 the Duke of Wellington also arrived at the “Castle Inn”. He was travelling to Badminton to attend the wedding of one of his nieces but the snow was so bad that he was obliged to stay the night. Only with the combined efforts of six horses was his coach able to get through snowdrifts at Kennet the following day.
There are no blue plaques to these famous gentlemen as they stayed at the “Castle Inn”, which, as now part of the College, is not considered to be part of the town. The “Castle Inn” was the largest, and by far the most impressive, coaching inn in Marlborough from 1751, when the Seymours moved out to their retreat in Savernake Forest, to 1842 at the very height of Marlborough’s importance as a coaching town. Before the College arrived, the “Castle Inn” was considered central to the town. Consequently, its coaching history has not been commemorated through the blue plaques, although there is little doubt that if the “Castle Inn” had not been taken over by the College, it would have been. It seems certain that, at the very least, plaques to Pitt and Wellington would have been erected.
The College has no need of blue plaques having constructed its own commemorative history and identity through its buildings and constant reminders of its own boys and masters. Visits to the College Chapel and the Memorial Hall reveal a well-publicized pantheon of greats from the College’s founding fathers and famous sons to those who fell in the Great War. The only development that has been permitted within the huge College “zone” west of St. Peter’s, the Barton Park and College Fields estate of desirable homes, has its streets named predominantly from former College boys and masters (eg. Farrar Drive from Farrar, Master 1871-76; Betjeman Road from John Betjeman, poet laureate and College student; Morris Road from William Morris, designer, socialist, poet and College student; MacNiece Drive, Sorley Close and Sassoon Walk all named after poets who were College students. Shakespeare Drive implies that, if the famous bard had ever come to Marlborough, he would have been to the College rather than the town: the above discussion around Elizabethan patronage may be of enormous relevance here as the Earl of Hertford’s mansion was on the College site.)
In effect, the College has proved very successful in commemorating itself, but it has not shown interest in commemorating the town in which it planted itself 150 years ago. Yet it has moulded the town ever since. It has consistently added its voice to the opposition to the building of any industrial estate and, before the M4 was built in the early 1970s, it blocked the construction of a proposed relief road across the former River Kennet water meadows between the College and Preshute. It has continued its opposition to anything that might interfere with the visual appearance of the surrounding College environment. The aborted by-pass proposals in the 1990s were seriously concerned only with routes east of the town and, therefore, away from the College reflecting the continued influence of the College on local development and planning.
The gentrification of Marlborough is attributable to the influence of the College. The blue plaques in the town, in one respect, represent a reaction to the superiority and elitism represented by the College. It is not just the College that can have a great and famous history. In a desperate attempt to show that the town has its own links with a great and famous past, the plaques have re-identified the town as having its own separate ethos and its own history. But like the College, which as a public school brought people in from outside and therefore had limited connections with the town, the blue plaques have also brought in outsiders in the form of Wolsey, Pepys and Shakespeare whose connections are transitory in the extreme.
On a different plane, the plaques represent a mirroring of the College by helping to impart a kind of urban pedigree and by consolidating a bourgeois image redolent of the College itself. But by so doing, Marlborough’s indigenous, natural past is further obscured like the Mound in the College grounds.
To heighten the sense of the ancient and the venerable, the architecture of Marlborough College is dripping with imitations of a glorious past. The Tudor-style North Block (built 1893-9) is a classic example. These trappings of a perceived noble past have been repeated in the town notably in the Lloyds bank building in the High Street which is a reinvention of history. The Tudor styled black and white pastiche above its ostentatious colonnaded walkway complete with its mock-Elizabethan brick chimneys was originally constructed in 1885 following the demolition of a 17th century building. It is, therefore a Victorian building that was refaced in 1929. The sober, upright use of honey-coloured sandstone, like Waitrose opposite, lends a business-like, mercantile air to its ambience. Its true age is disguised by the prominence given to the date 1677. This has nothing to do with the building but, in fact, the year when Lloyd’s bank was founded.
Tudor is perhaps an understandable style for the College to have used at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. After all the Tudor Seymours lived here and Tudor had all kinds of associations with the world of education from the Tudor “grammatical” schools of King Edward VI and the Tudor buildings of the oldest public schools like Eton. The gaining of Balliol scholarships by College boys also encouraged visual association with the Tudor Oxford Colleges. Tudor, then, was a style that could lend dignity and legitimacy to a relatively new college like Marlborough. The town, in its attempts to reconstruct its own identity distinct from the College, chose a different style, the late 17th century William and Mary, to characterize the new town hall, built between 1901 and 1902. The 17th century was felt to be a high-water mark in the town’s history as it still is with the current interest in the 17th century represented by the Merchant’s House. The architect of the Town Hall, C. E. Ponting, quickly reverted to the Tudor with the construction of the College gymnasium, on the site of the old Marlborough Gaol, in 1908.
The guide to Marlborough College concludes with an acknowledgement to the “people of Marlborough”,
The all-embracing nature of a boarding school, a little world in itself during the term, makes relations between the College and the town a predictable mixture of pride and dependence, loyalty and irritation. The College is a substantial employer in the town across a wide range of whole or part-time jobs, trades and professions. The education it offers, its teachers, its pupils, every exam result it achieves, any chink of awareness it gives to those it serves, are all in the end dependent on the people of Marlborough. Some teachers have lived here long enough to be part of the town and not just of the College community; but it is to those who maintain the fabric of the place year in and year out, who have worked by families and generations at the College, bearing the attrition of its adolescent society, that any account of its past and present should, in the end, be dedicated.
It has to be accepted that, as a major employer (in fact the largest in Marlborough), combined with the length of time the College has been in Marlborough, its representation in Marlborough’s past is not just inevitable but desirable. It forms part of the working history of Marlborough as generations of Marlborough people have worked for the College. The selection of Marlborough College and St. John’s School (the local state school) in 1998 to take part in a government sponsored “partnership to bring schools together”, demonstrated the symbiosis of town and gown.
The real history of a place includes those influences that have changed the nature and identity of that place. Marlborough College’s history should and ought to be represented in the High Street as it is part of Marlborough’s real past. Far from copying the College or trying to emulate it through a presentation of a “great” history it needs to be understood that the history of Marlborough is the history of all and not just a selected few.