This month I am at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival performing my show Sky, 20.40, Pleasance Courtyard (you can get them here). If you’re about please come along, if you know someone who’s at the Fringe or in Edinburgh maybe forward them this email? Below is a section from the show about how Stevenage was formed that was included in the Penguin Random House Official Audiobook of the Fringe. If you’re looking for other shows check out; Jack Harris, Rajiv Karia, Sara Barron and Good Kids - I’ve seen them all over the last two days and their shows are class.
Stevenage is a working class town partly due to how it was created. And it was created - it’s the world's first new town and was built in response to the carnage of the Second World War. There were 2000 people living there before the decision to make it a New Town and when it was decided that it was a good spot for relocation they built homes for 50,000 people and then they, like, opened the town.
They had to recruit people to come and live there - you can’t just open a town and expect word of mouth to spread. It’s a town not a Sourdough pizzeria in Peckham. I know it sounds counterintuitive to speedily engineer a supposedly organic process but It would have been a dereliction of duty not to advertise it; you can’t just sit there and say “advertising is gauche, we want organic buzz, we’ll just wait until it gets a positive review in the Observer”
They had to go to those lengths - it’s hard to open a town! Have you ever tried to open a town?
To illustrate the complexity - a mate of mine recently tried to open a bird feeder and that was hard enough. I say opened a bird feeder - my mate bought a bird feeder. And did you know that it takes two years to “bed in” a bird feeder? You have to fill it with food and then wait - you have to maintain the location, keep the type of food consistent, not change the surrounding area too much to build the birds trust and then they might deign to eat from the free gourmet buffet you’ve constructed for them. One day you could be absent mindedly sweeping the garden, move it a foot and the who two years starts over again.
Then if you want to get real acclaim of course you have to pay the sexier birds in the neighbourhood to post positive things about the feeder on their Instagram accounts and ideally you’d organise a seemingly organic but in actuality carefully choreographed visit from a famous bird - now think about all of those challenges to getting something as trivial as a bird feeder up and running. But they had to do it for a town!
My Nan and Grandad ended up in Stevenage through this recruitment process. They lived in South London when they were first married and where they lived there was a temporary office set up in a shop front called The Stevenage Shop and it was run by something called The Stevenage Corporation and inside there were people whose job it was to sell you on coming to the town.
I always think, the guy in that shop, that whole situation feels like the task from an episode of the Apprentice set in some Soviet dystopia where Sir Alan makes the people wearing River Island suits facilitate a large scale social engineering project rather than just say, running round a market buying random shit or set up a laundry service for dogs.
At the start of that Apprentice task Sir Alan would have to be there like “OK you lot, you horrible, horrible slags, your task this week is to convince all of the working class people in vast swathes of London to vacate the council flats that the post war consensus and social safety net currently affords them and move out from the areas they have been embedded in for years - to the arse end of no-where. Crucially there are two rules to the task: 1. You cannot mention under any circumstances that in roughly 27 years, thanks to a political turn of events unthinkable at this current moment, the council houses they currently occupy are going to become very, very valuable indeed. And 2. You also cannot tell them that in 45 years their grandchildren who foolishly aspire to careers in the big city will be forced, due a brutal housing crisis, to move right back into self- same the council houses they’re about to vacate and for the privilege of living in them they’ll be required to fork over half of their paltry wages to some bloke called Jeremy who did well in the Nineties”