Iron Bridge, No Knickers

Ironbridge World Heritage Site, TF8 7JP

April 2022

At the entrance to Disneyland, California - a few thousand miles from Shropshire - there is a sign that reads something like ‘Here you leave today, and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy’. Entering the Ironbridge gorge is a bit like that, leaving the concrete madness of Telford behind as you travel down the narrow, winding roads to the cradle of the industrial revolution. I think that near-time-warp is at the root of many of what I feel to be faults in the World Heritage Site; I’m not sure I like its version of tomorrow, or fantasy.

We travelled down for a few days staying at the Valley Hotel (reviewed elsewhere on this blog) rather expecting to be immersed in the 18th century; much of the time, however, we found ourselves to be all too aware of the twenty-first.

***

The first thing most visitors to Ironbridge do is to go to look at the famous bridge. Impressive it is indeed, constructed in the days when the only means they had to move around large metal parts on land was human-, or animal-, powered. But to get to it you have to walk along narrow pavements beside a busy road; indeed, so busy that, at times, Viv and I had to give up on the idea of conversation. A 20mph speed limit applies to this road, but is widely ignored, as visitors can see from the smiley sign that tells drivers their speed - at least half the vehicles we saw were exceeding 20mph, and a few 30. (Speeding seems to be accepted among the locals; on the way home, our taxi back to the station was doing almost 40mph along The Lloyds and Coalport Road, both subject to a 20mph limit.)

Speeding cars are bad enough, but HGVs use the route too. How on earth large tipper trucks come to be permitted to drive through a UNESCO World Heritage Site is beyond me.

***

The traffic and narrow pavements make it difficult to window shop, which is a shame, for there are many interesting little shops there - antiques and vintage seemingly popular, also an off licence which had whisky from Yorkshire in its window. If it hadn’t been almost £70 a bottle I might have tried some. Pubs there are a plenty, some not so good (The Tontine, right by the bridge, rather reminded me of a pub by the station in a rough area of Leeds I used to have reason to frequent which often looked as if a fight had taken place there the night before) but The Coracle micropub is a definite hit. We ate in the curry house two doors down one night and were able to take draught beer along; a wide range of craft beers was on offer at The Coracle, and the host and customers were all friendly. 

Other food outlets I’d recommend are La Casita - a tapas bar hidden away above another restaurant - and Darbys, good (if a little pricey) for breakfast. Darby’s opens at 8, early enough to provide an alternative to ghastly hotel breakfasts. The chips at the fish and chip shop were good, the pie and fishcake we had less so, perhaps they had been kept warm a little too long. 

Good cuisine is available; there is The Valley Hotel, also The Water Rat just out of town towards Buildwas, past the railway bridge, and The White Hart closer to the village centre. Like many establishments, they’ve all had a tough time with covid, staff may be inexperienced and times are restricted. A lady at The White Hart went to great lengths to show us the dinner menu, only then to have to tell us that they weren’t serving dinner for another hour.

***

It is difficult for retail businesses at the moment: Joe Public is polarised, some still frantic about hygiene, wearing masks and avoiding anyone not wearing one, others are damn glad to see the back of masks, social distancing and plastic screens. If you ask me, too many businesses in Ironbridge were still ‘Covid nervous’, with signs up requesting masks be worn, and containers of hand gel by their entrance. That is perhaps a reflection on their customers; tourists, in particular, at this time of year will not be families, but the retired, perhaps more nervous regarding health matters than under 65’s like me.

Indeed, there were a few rollators and zimmer frames in use by pedestrians around the centre of the town. I’m not sure how they would have got on on some of the side streets and footpaths, for they are steep and steps common; good for photographers and artists maybe, but not for the less mobile. 

I did at first want to go to the museums: at least, Blists Hill Victorian Town and Coalbrookdale Iron Museum. That was until I found out the price: £21.50 each for Blists Hill, and £10 for the Iron Museum. Blists Hill sounds interesting - but for two over sixties (no discounts for age or disability, by the way), £43 is a heck of a lot for perhaps three hours passing the time and no doubt spending money in shops and cafes too). We declined the opportunity to visit either. 

***

A taxi driver told us that Blists Hill was £14 before the pandemic; we weren’t the only ones to have commented on the price to him. Undoubtedly the museums will have lost money during lockdowns, but they can’t just expect people to accept a 50% price increase to compensate: they should have lobbied their MPs to stop lockdown. I also wondered whether the chief execs of the charities running the museums were enjoying the same, or higher, salaries they did three years ago… answers on a postcard please …

The good thing is, you don’t have to pay to see history around Ironbridge, fortunately. As well as the bridge in the centre, to the east of the town, set back from the road but close to the river, we found the Bedlam Iron Furnaces, shelter beneath what I originally took to be a rather stylish petrol station canopy. We weren’t the only tourists there taking photos, but the main use of the car park area seemed to be for locals, heading east out of Ironbridge, to turn their cars round and drive back through again, no doubt having sat nav problems and adding to the traffic overload back by the bridge. We also found some old lime kilns beside the old railway line to Bridgnorth, now a public footpath.

***

More modern industry is evident at the other end of town. Close to Buildwas bridge lie the remains of Ironbridge Power Station, a coal-fired industrial conglomeration that, in its day, generated 1000MW of electricity. The chimney has gone, but there are still a number of former electricity supply buildings on site. The local authorities have eyes on the site for housing, which will overload the local roads still further with traffic. I can’t help feeling that, with the water from the Severn being available for cooling, it might be better kept in industrial use - especially if the old railway (still in place) were used for access. A coal-fired power station might be unacceptable in these times of high electricity costs (due to our enthusiasm for wind power), but why not nuclear, or are the locals - mostly not terribly well off, by the looks of things - quite happy to pay two grand a year for energy? 

The madness of energy policy, and a population that has been conned into thinking that wind power is a good thing (what do you do when the wind isn’t blowing?), reflect a societal failing that is visible elsewhere in Ironbridge. Around 9am on each of three days we made our way along the main road, past the village school: no doubt, I thought, an institution where the young (under 12) children would be taught all about man’s spoiling of the planet, the evils of fossil fuels, and how we should all ‘go green’ to save the planet. They need to talk to their parents: the - quite large - car park opposite the school was always full at these times, with parents dropping off their offspring, no doubt too lazy to indulge in the exercise of a walk themselves, and depriving their children of it. And, from what I saw, the vast majority of the cars were of the old-fashioned, internal combustion engined, variety.

The school itself did display a feature of our times: slogans. Four arches summoned the children to school along the ‘Pathway of Knowledge’ , emphasising the importance of ‘serving the community’. I didn’t understand that sign: did they mean the school was serving the community, or that the children were, or should be? In what way are the powers that be teaching those children that they will ‘serve their community’? All sounds rather too Maoist for me, I’m glad I got through education before school leaders started to think about signs, slogans and mission statements. I felt sorry for the poor kids, how confused they must be.  

***

I’m afraid Ironbridge, or the authorities that run it, doesn’t know what it is. A tourist attraction with museums? Then why have so much traffic going through it? A World Heritage Site? Ditto. A run down, former industrial village being taken over by wealthy retirees looking for a nice quiet cottage by the river? So why promote it to tourists? Why rip off the tourists with exorbitant charges for the museums, which will only encourage them to wander along the narrow pavements and get in the way of the locals who seem to need to drive everywhere if those locals want a tranquil place to live?

Ironbridge seems to epitomise the illusory state of much of the UK economy: on the surface it looks ok, but underneath nothing makes sense, and when, in the future, things get tough (if they haven’t already) the tourists will stop coming and their money will stop rolling in. There’s no sign of any strategic planning that makes any sense: why not close the road through the village to all non-essential traffic, and have electric minibuses ferrying people around, between the museums and a Park and Ride car park that apparently exists in Telford? (I say apparently, in our four nights and three days there, we never once saw a P+R bus). The outward display of a tourist idyll with interesting shops is pure cover for a rather rough, noisy, traffic-dominated, badly co-ordinated, expensive post-industrial urban-decaying mess; rather, as the Scottish expression goes, ‘a bit fur coat and nae knickers’.