Gulliver’s Milton Keynes Club Site, Buckinghamshire

Another fine day greeted us on this the first day of the meteorological summer.  Chris was intent on checking out two of the nearby cites, the first and most distant of these being Luton, that of international airport fame. So we set off just before 9am, travelling just over twenty miles south on the A5 and found our way into the city centre and a multi-story car park building.  

Our first introduction to the city after parking up was the frustration of finding our way out into The Market which was apparently just a short distance away within the same complex. We walked up and down the concrete stairs looking for an exit, soon joined by a middle aged local woman who agreed the whole business was quite complicated. With her help, we found our way out into the city street, and set off looking for the vibrancy of city life. The overwhelming first impression was one of drabness however it was still early and probably not the best time to be judging the life blood of a city.

We found our way to the library in St George’s Square and while the friendly chap behind the counter was unable to offer any map, he did suggest we set off on foot "just five minutes up the road" to Wardown Park and the museum. It took us nearer half an hour, although we did do the return to town minutes less, but were glad we made the effort because it did seem that this was about as much as Luton could offer the tourist on "a day out in Luton".

The Park is situated on the River Lea, well upriver from Hertford where we had become well acquainted with this stretch of water. Here it is not much more than a drain, especially as it flows away from the park and down through the city’s plumbing. The lake which hosts the regular crowd of water birds and a fair bit of rubbish, was formed by the widening of the River Lea during the development of the park in the Victorian era. The Park provides a green expanse for the sari clad and headscarf wearing brigade out and about this morning and is also home to the Luton Museum and Art Gallery.

The area was once a farmhouse and country residence, the latter taken over and rebuilt by a local solicitor named Frank Scargill in the late 1870s. He retained the name of the original farmhouse, “Bramingham Stott”and resided here with his family until 1893. The house was then let until it was purchased by the Borough Council in 1904.

During the First World War, the house was used as a military hospital, then after a variety of other lives, it became home to the museum in 1930. It’s a great little museum and the house itself is a fine spacious building which one would feel quite comfortable living in even today.

I was particularly interested to learn about the genesis of Luton, or at least it’s more recent history. Right through to the 19^th century, Luton was just a small market town, well known for the making of straw hats from the 1600s, but by 1900 it had undergone substantial growth, much of that related to the hat industry. What had been very much a cottage industry, the work mainly carried out by women and children, grew to industrial proportions when big London hat makers set up branches in the town, wanting to be nearer the source of their raw material: straw plait. There was plenty of cheap land for sale in the town at the time, building development was not controlled, two railway lines provided good transport links, electricity was cheap from the town council’s own power station and the lack of trade unions kept labour costs down so enterprising people set up small workshops and factories, changing Luton into the centre of the women’s hat trade.

It was those same excellent conditions for enterprise that encouraged the transfer of other new industry coming to town between 1895 and 1910, most of them engineering companies; names like Vauxhall, Skefko, Haywood Tyler, Kent’s, Electrolux, Commer Cars, Jacksons – all became synonymous with Luton. 

Many parts of the country suffered during the depression of the 1920s and 1930s but Luton’s new firms expanded. Secure jobs, good pay and homes attracted people from different areas, many coming from the depressed regions although the majority came from London and the south east. From the 1940s onwards, workers arrived from Ireland, the Caribbean, South Asia and many other parts of the world. Luton’s workforce proved to be flexible and adaptable; the skills learned in one manufacturing industry were often put to good use in another. By the end of the 20^th century manufacturing industries had declined and been replaced by service industries and so many people who live in Luton today now commute to work elsewhere, a story repeated all over the country.

These days the population of Luton and the immediate area is up around a quarter of a million, about half of it white and the rest a mixture of races who have long called themselves citizens of the United Kingdom. Our impressions were of a working class bunch, a fact supported by comments and observations made during a political broadcast during the last week.

We returned to the car soon after midday and found our way west to Dunstable which is altogether a more pleasant looking town. We were looking for the Dunstable Downs, parklands found in our National Trust directory, and found the swathe of ridgelands a little to the south of the town. We were not the first there; I suspect that most there were not members but had parked up and fed the parking machine. For us with our membership sticker on the windscreen, parking was free. We took our eski over to a bench and dined with expansive views of the countryside laid out below us. Immediately below us was the London Gliding Club,  and to the south and north, folk could be seen walking into the distance. We watched the gliders land and then take off again towed behind the small plane, then circle high above us seeking the thermals, we watched dozens of families flying kites and a couple of paragliders swoop around the low chalk cliffs to the north. 

The Dunstable Downs are a chalk escarpment in the north-east reaches of the Chiltern Hills, and are crossed by a network of walking tracks, not least the Ridgeway, an old road walked for 5,000 years or more. The Ridgeway Link is the walk we came upon when we visited the White Horse two years ago, a walk stretching 140 kilometres and certainly not for us today, although we did enjoy the hour or so we spent walking through the fields and woods after our lunch.