By Ian Watson
What other town boasts a monumental piece of public sculpture in its main street celebrating DNA, on the grounds that Francis Crick went to school locally?
And not for nothing did Parliament meet in Northampton for 40 years (quite a while ago)! A significant place! This, despite (or because of) its Great Fire (1675), quite like in Nero’s Rome or Daniel Defoe’s London. And despite its mighty castle being reduced by Charles II to a tiny scrap you may pass without notice, supposing you walk from the station; that was because Northamptoners made boots for Cromwell’s army. And despite town planners of the brutalist Sixties wreaking havoc on the Market Square, destroying a beauteous Victorian shopping arcade. A Market Square (800 years of trading!) boasted by some to be the largest in Europe, or in England, or at least in Northamptonshire.
Yet much of delight remains. Limiting one’s scope to within 10 minutes walk at most from the Fishmarket (consulting the map you’ll receive on arrival at Newcon5), there’s the round Church of the Holy Sepulchre, founded by Simon de Senlis, first Earl of Northampton, to commemorate his return from the Crusades, a duplicate of the church in Jerusalem, minus all the squabbles about ownership of its various parts, and unlike Jerusalem virtually minus tourists. The definitive book about Northampton from 4000 BC to the mid-1990s, Alan Moore’s Voice of the Fire, provides a disconcerting insight into the brain of Simon de Senlis, as well as reminding us that Northampton really enjoyed burning witches, who were merely hanged in other parts of England.
And talking of churches, pop down The Drapery, 5 seconds from the front of the Fishmarket, past the Spanish restaurant La Tasca, to be confronted by All Saints Church, rebuilt in 1680 after the aforesaid Great Fire, with its Inigo Jones portico and ceilings by Sir Christopher Wren’s Chief Plasterer.
Pass All Saints on the right, and immediately you behold the gorgeous neo-Gothic Guildhall adorned with statuary. Turn right from the Guildhall a few yards down Guildhall Road and you’re at the Northampton Museum & Art Gallery, its ground floor dedicated to boots and shoes, a long-time habit in Northampton, celebrated by the recent comic masterpiece of film Kinky Boots, and due to lots of oak trees and cattle and (for some reason) a clay subsoil, says my source. In the Museum is a feast of fetish footware, the boots from Tommy the rock opera, a boot worn by an elephant crossing the Alps in a pre-WW2 movie, and many more wonders. Give your feet a treat! Why should only the eyes enjoy tourism?
Nearby, towards the end of Derngate, at number 70, is Rennie Mackintosh’s final masterpiece, a townhouse of 1917 now beautifully restored.
If you choose to walk up Abington Street you’ll encounter a giant Last in the middle of the street. (Note: not a giant lass.) A hundred yards or so more will bring you to the DNA archway. Pass through this, as if participating in a truly modern and scientific fertility rite, and a hundred yards or so more will reveal the statue of Charles Bradlaugh, pronounced Bradlaw, Britain’s first atheist MP. Booted out of the House of Commons for refusing to take the oath, he was re-elected time and again by the stubborn non-conformist shoemakers of Northampton between 1880 and 1886 when he did finally condescend at last to take the oath, maybe preoccupied by the fact that in the same year he was prosecuted on account of a pamphlet advocating birth control. His conviction was quashed on appeal, so he had the Last Laugh. Of course you all know what a Last is; it is the complete opposite of elastic.
The only remaining question is why Newcon5 is being held in a Fishmarket, not a Shoemarket – but undoubtedly the Fishmarket used to sell sole!