Pizza

Illustration: John McGowan

I went to an opening a few weeks back. Not living a Beckham lifestyle it was a treat to get first go at a hot new establishment. The place in question was The Hearth, Lewes’ new pizzeria/bakery in the hipster venue of the old bus station. Bit of a mob scene to be honest and not as exclusive as my fantasy, but the food was delicious and the complimentary wine a cut above. It did make me wonder though, why Lewes is so well endowed with Italian eateries.  By my reckoning there are currently six, but I’m sure it’s been as high as ten in the heyday of Si and that strange one that used to be on South Street. Does Lewes like pizza that much? And would one sushi bar be too much to ask for?

It’s odd, this phenomenon of similar shops clustering together. It would seem reasonable to assume that similarly-themed businesses would spread out. “I’ll take Lewes and you take Ringmer,” kind of thing. Make sure everyone has a particular sort of shop handy. When you start to look though, it turns not to be like that at all. From film producers in Hollywood and hi-fi shops in Tottenham Court Rd, through to book shops in our own high street, it seems that similar businesses often want to be near each other. In fact it is sometimes even a formal economic policy to develop business clusters. The idea behind these is to drive inventiveness, specialist skill development and inward investment, all in a single location.

This suggests that the decision to open another pizzeria in town is not necessarily a mistake, as it might at first appear. Rather than everyone getting a smaller slice of the pie (an appropriate metaphor if ever I saw one), Lewes, like Silicon Valley, could instead become a magnet for entrepreneurs, discerning consumers and venture capitalists. We already have a bunch of pizza restaurants offering innovation in the form of fads like jars of pickled vegetables and leather chairs (Prezzo), faux-realism (those pretend wooden tables in Ask), and sourdough spirituality (the aforesaid Hearth). There are also more lasting verities like family (Famiglia) and being classier than Pizza Hut (Pizza Express). It might get to the point where fancying a pizza means the phrase, “let’s go to Lewes” isn’t far behind.

All of this might drive the opening of more restaurants, potentially creating a local equivalent of Douglas Adams’ “Shoe Event Horizon” where it is economically impossible to open anything else but a pizzeria. It’ll go nicely with the coffee takeover we’ve already had. If you like pizza this is obviously good news. However, even if you could live on the stuff, don’t you ever get a slight craving for something different now and then? All those hungry people coming into town might sometimes be wooed away too. By a little branch of YO! Sushi maybe? Or Brighton’s finest, Murasaki. In fact if the YO! or the Murasaki people are reading I’d like to point out that we’re just up the road, the town is full of pizzerias and some of us fancy a quick nigiri platter before our next deep pan slice.

Diggers

“Come and get evolved” beckoned the sign. Amazing when you think about it: knowing how messed up the sign reader would be and offering a superior life. It’s a combination I’d only seen in ads on the sides of religious buildings. A second sign gave a thumbs-down to cars and a big yes to bikes. The camper vans parked on Rotten Row looked like they shared a few million miles between them. Still, it was reassuring to know they wouldn’t be trashing the planet further by hot-rodding up the 20 yards of driveway from the gate.

The occupation of the old St Anne’s School site in May and June this year already feels like a hallucination. Walking by now you only know it happened because of the new fences and trespass warnings. I’m left wondering though what it was all about. What did the St Anne’s Diggers, self-dubbed “STAND”, actually achieve before they were removed? What, in short, did STAND stand for?

They did of course highlight the neglect of the St Anne’s site and pose the question of what to do with it. (What do you do with land in Lewes if flogging it off for housing isn’t an option?) Local blogger Dave Bradford provided a good summary of the history here. It’s led to a public consultation and open day. Raising awareness of environmental issues was also a given, but with an interesting twist. When I trotted up there for some digging myself (of information rather than soil) I encountered more scepticism about our local environmental movement than I was expecting. The flagship initiatives -Lewes Pound, solar panels, organic veg boxes and the like- seemed generally considered the blingy trappings of the rich who can “buy green lifestyles”. Which of course they are. You don’t hear much about poor people in environmental debates, unless it’s contempt for their love of cheap flights or of shopping at Tesco, so this was quite refreshing.

The broader agenda of the Diggers themselves on the other hand seemed less coherent. Beyond testaments to how well behaved the protestors were (and indeed everyone was incredibly polite), the main point seemed to be to demonstrate sustainable, self-sufficient living by gardening. Just exactly how this was going to work was unfortunately never made clear and, judging by the number of commodities in evidence not grown on site (tins, tents, stoves etc), that old devil money had already crept into the Garden of Eden. The point has been made in these pages before that the trouble with everyone returning to the land to save us from environmental catastrophe is that it’s an idea belonging on the compost heap of heroic failures.

In a link to history, the Diggers of St Anne’s identified themselves with the Diggers of the 17^th century England. These were an interesting bunch who envisaged us all living in a network of egalitarian communities, tilling the soil in harmony. While they were basically crushed by bigger landowners, there also wasn’t much of a popular wave behind those Diggers either. Our society elected instead to have private property, consolidated estates, spices, tea, coffee, industry, iPads and a global economy. You may question whether that was the right choice but we managed several hundred years of prosperity on the back of it. For most of us that was considerably more appealing than the alternative of spending our short lives in grinding poverty. One of the troubles with taking your cue from history is that ideas which flopped back then don’t necessarily get any better with time.

So now we’re left thinking what to do with the St. Anne’s site. What the Diggers have at least shown is that it is easy to point out what our council have done wrong. Balancing public obligations, safety concerns, what’s useful and (crucially) how to pay for it is considerably more difficult. However, the public consultation is giving everyone a chance to get involved. There are some good ideas there. Some nonsense too but well worth a look.

As Josiah Bartlett, the fantasy U.S. President for all who are liberal at heart, said “Decisions are made by those who show up”. Don’t think we need more allotments? A green burial site? A wild space? Perhaps you have a better idea? And perhaps some thoughts on how to pay for it! Now it’s over to us.

The old St Anne’s School site will be open to the public for consultation on Saturday 13^th August, 10AM- 4PM.

Normans

Photo: Alex Leith

Just to be clear; that’s “Normans” rather than Norman. For those who need to recalibrate (and everyone else) here’s a question: what do Lewes and Sicily have in common? Both obviously have a history of exporting dodgy people abroad: Tom Paine (seditious in France and the Americas) and the Cosa Nostra. There’s also a sense of separation from, and occasional superiority to, the country to their north. Do you deny it? However the answer on the card is the presence in both of Norman castles. We all know about 1066 but perhaps may be less informed about the Norman adventurers who terrorised the Mediterranean at the same time. Both Lewes and Sicily were subjugated by the Normans and have big stone towers to prove they lost.

Lately I’ve been wondering about the consequences of these invasions. In Sicily the Hauteville dynasty didn’t do too badly, turning chaos into a stable government which enhanced Sicilian prosperity for a couple of hundred years. Given that 1066 is so central in British history just what did the Normans do for us? Was it all the “Norman Yoke” with foreign usurpers destroying our English ways?

It’s more intriguing because, like an England World Cup campaign, it could so easily have gone the other way. While the continentals possessed the quality strikers (lance-wielding, blood-curdling cavalry), the English had their traditional defensive hard men (in this case tooled-up with double-handed dane axes). Indeed if Wayne Rooney... sorry King Harold hadn’t had an awkwardly-timed away game at Stamford Bridge, William I might be remembered (if at all) as simply another French tourist who got a good kicking in Hastings.

It is clear that the Anglo-Saxon nobility had a rough ride post-Conquest. Their estates were removed and given to William-the-Conqueror’s buddies, such as Lewes’ William de Warenne. Many left the country. For the average Sussex peasant though, one wonders whether one feudal overlord would have been so different to another.  It’s clear that English standards of living hadn’t really recovered since the Romans left. One minute a cosmopolitan international empire, with indoor plumbing and wine; the next, intellectual decline, sharing huts with animals, and tepid beer. Mightn’t the Normans actually have improved things with their central authority, stone buildings and wine back on the shelves of the offie?

Perhaps so, but it can’t have been easy for the dyed-in-the-wool Rooks, what with those Up From Rouens literally lording it over them. Like DFLs a millennium later, the UFRs probably pissed people off with their poncy soft-furnishing shops and slick, metropolitan free magazines. French rather than Old English became the language du jour (though clearly not enough to stop my spell checker questioning “du jour”) and England was very much an occupied country. Increased central power meant both more efficient tax collection and a decline in the democratic structures of what had been a pretty sophisticated government. Next time you’re in town take a look at the Castle again. Is it the sort of thing you build with a contented population? I can’t help feeling it’s more in the “I’m in charge so don’t f#@k with me” vein. It wasn’t only the toffs who dusted off their passports in the late 11th century.

Still, as we’re being told by our rulers today, short-term pain is the price of longer-term gain. And indeed, a mere 700 years after Norman hegemony established a coherent English state, there we were at the head of a global empire. Sometimes it just takes politicians with the courage to make the unpopular decisions and clear up the mess left by the last lot. We’ll all benefit in the end.

Now, which Norman were we talking about again?