I like Bournemouth – its faces, places and spaces

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Reading the High Street: A Narrative Workshop.

This workshop encouraged participants to reflect on how Bournemouth has inspired authors of fact and fiction over 200 years. We explored several extracts together, discussing the similarities and differences between Bournemouth then and now, and the possible motivations behind each piece. At the end of the workshop we encouraged participants to write down their own interpretations of the high street in the style of the authors we explored. This article is Kit Pearce’s interpretation of the high street following his participation in our workshop.

I live in Wallisdown. Walk from there to Bournemouth town and back many times a week.

It’s almost exactly three miles to reach Esquires Coffee House, Old Christchurch Road. By the time I arrive, often around 8am, I’m ready for breakfast.

I make it a relaxing hour-long walk, taken at an easy pace, feeling each footstep, looking and listening, noticing novel scents and odours. Listening to a podcast maybe, but with enough ‘bandwidth’ to hear bird life. Robins sing plaintively in autumn and winter as I cross St. Mark’s graveyard; they sing more expectantly come spring (of course). Sparrows querulously quarrel with family members. I might detect a nuthatch, better still, a greater-spotted woodpecker, depending on the season.

Passing through Talbot Village now, I take a side-track along dusty or muddy woodland paths, heading for Bournemouth University’s Talbot Campus, which (amusingly to me) is on the Poole side of Wallisdown Road, the former boundary between those two local authority areas, now a unitary authority amalgamated with Christchurch.

In 2014 or so, this became a regular diversion, on seeing the artist’s impression of the new behemoth that became the University’s Fusion Building, which opened in 2016. (Behemoth because not only is it huge but also impressive and wonderful!) I took photos regularly of its construction, never imagining I would often stop for mid-afternoon coffee there years later, returning homewards. I love its atrium, the three trees within it, the clean lines of its banks of tables, of the wooden-cladding of three tiered floors surrounding it, how the large upper windows frame skies and cloudscapes, all the more glorious in fiery winter sunsets.

Soon I cut away from the busy tree-lined arterial road and cross Meyrick Park, listening for solo performances from jenny wrens, thanking them for sharing their morning song, which erupts with such joy their tiny bodies tremble with the effort. If sunlight catches autumn leaves just right, or sun rays (any time of year) break through tree canopies, just so, I will often stop in my tracks.

Some fellow park users run for health. Some walk, with or without a dog, at varying paces. Maybe Jim and his dog, Darwin (a great name, and a good dog’s name too!). Convivial nods and glances are silently shared with regulars.

Subliminally, sensory ribbons of awareness are thus woven within me day upon day – broad or narrow; colourful or wan, quietly or loudly.

A change of place and soundscape. I’ve reached Bournemouth Square. Esquires Coffee House isn’t far now. Barely ten minutes. I hear the roar of buses, the screech of brakes. It’s an important interchange here. Gulls, connoisseurs of grey (but not grey in any other way) are now heard. Adult herring gulls voice the traditional sound of the seaside, whilst juvenile gulls squeak and whine, expecting parent gulls to still feed them. Pigeons coo, if they’re being sociable. Otherwise, they silently compete for scraps of food, giving the evil eye to those who grab tiny morsels ahead of them. Generally, it’s every bird for itself. Few are looking for company, unless it involves spare food. There may be an isolated clap or two – or nature mimicking an audience clapping – if an overfriendly dog or child gets too close to pigeons. One or more take fright and flight. They climb almost vertically, their wingtips striking each other in their first one or two wingbeats. (They are almost unique within the bird kingdom in this astonishing skill.)

Now I’m sharing a more confined space with many strangers. The pace is different too. Some zip by on bikes, skateboards or electric scooters. If I’m late, there’s Calum, one of the town centre Big Issue vendors. If I’ve time, we’ll chat and I’ll buy a copy.

Sadly, in this last quarter of a mile, I will pass many homeless people. Some will be cold. Some will be wet. Most need a good meal. Almost all need new clothes. All need a home of their own. The open air in the town centre is not a home for anyone, least of all a place to bed-down. Yet there are many empty upstairs flats in the town centre, many new homes are being created. None will be for these homeless people.

Few walkers are looking up now, or looking around. Tunnel vision now. Few will look at or speak to the people who have been on the street all last night and will be again much of today and all tonight too. Many haven’t time to stop, even if they wanted to. They might be heading to work, often stony-faced, masking a lack of eagerness to start their day, contrasting with those in the park. The dominant smells now will be cooked food.

Most pedestrians are silent, heads craned over bright screens, as they stride by, anonymous. Listening is different here for many; not to another beside them but to someone they are invisibly tethered to via the hidden signals from their smartphone. Who knows how near or far away ‘the other’ within their ear is? One-side of a snatched conversation is overheard: “How are you, darling? Sorry I had to leave early. Gotta be at my desk early, hon.”

Shops are readying to open. Staff have arrived super-early and are finishing setting up. Most cafés are open, but few retail outlets yet. All are awaiting the rush hour, their first customers.

The only remaining departmental store in town is being reincarnated as Bobby’s (an iteration even earlier than Debenhams, itself a Bournemouth landmark for decades). Bobby’s and the town centre too, are reinventing themselves at pace. Whilst the face of many – many other buildings too – are brightening, being renovated, their inner spaces are being repurposed, refitted. Intermittent sounds of powered drills and saws, of hammering and loud crashes of unwanted panelling or whatever, now punctuate the town centre.

Once emporiums of a former empire, how might a departmental store find its place in this space in the twenty-first century? Bobby’s is experimenting with becoming much more about communities, rather less about commodities – i.e. not only catering for shoppers and diners. (It’s here that Bournemouth University’s Coastal Communities, Coastal Stories: Reading the High Street – A Narrative Workshop was held in Fred’s Room there – who is Fred? Does anyone know? Do we need to know?). Reaching our floor, we at the workshop are greatly outnumbered by an army of workmen – no ‘work-women’ amongst them in sight, though women will be working away unseen on each floor, their work never quite done, often unseen.

In Old Christchurch Road now. Behind often imposing and grand facades of different eras, insides are speedily gutted and remade here too, the latter infinitely more disposable and short-lived than their facades. Can the road take any more eateries? Apparently, many businesses, local and national, are willing to risk that it can. Here another department store is undergoing a rather different transformation: The House of Fraser will be a different sort of ‘house’ soon: ‘Brights House’: a student housing complex of 129 en suite studios (teeny-tiny study flats?) is being created. For weeks on end, the guts of the store are being ripped out, tipped into skips lining the street before newly empty ones ready themselves for more creative destruction. Eight ‘Class E’ commercial units will be created on the ground floor too. (Should the signage be read as ‘classy’ commercial units? Probably not. More eateries, most likely.) Neighbouring Beales is holding its breath, awaiting similar redevelopment soon. If these once grand stores could speak, what might they say? What do they say about our changing town centre? What – or who – will be the commodities when the workmen disappear and new town centre inhabitants arrive, starting a new process of place-making?

I’m arriving at my destination. As all regular walkers know, it’s all been about the journey not the destination, all about the spaces traversed, a corridor of awareness and presence, transformed inwardly into my own place.

Julio, (pronounced Hugh-lio) from Italy greets me. He’s going to tell me porridge is off today. We both know it won’t be. Or that he’s busy right now. It’s gonna take twenty, sorry. (We both know he’ll have served me within five.) He’s as glad to see me as I am to see him. And here’s Alina, from Bratislava, sitting at the next table, just before starting her own shift here. Two male baristas (moon-eyed freshman students) pretend they’re not fawning over her. Hearing an exhalation of mild exasperation, which they totally miss, I tell her that in the Second World War it’s said that bromide in their drinks kept soldiers minds on the job, as it were. She raises a manicured eyebrow, and winks, signalling she knows how to handle ‘the lads’ – and similarly any ‘over-familiar’ male customers, with her usual charm and elan.

Not me though, I’m focussed only on pouring strong black coffee into my thick steaming porridge, stirring chopped nuts and dried-banana slices into the softening, ever darkening porridge. (It’s a ritual. These things matter as you get older.) It’s slurping. So am I. I like this place. Bournemouth town centre too. It’s many faces and places and spaces. It’s in me. Its therapy.

© Kit Pearce

02.10.24.