Worcestershire is a county in the middle of England on a north-south axis, and the City of Worcester itself lies roughly in the middle of Worcestershire. The city is about thirty miles southwest of Birmingham and the built up part of the West Midlands, an area rich in marginal seats and a key electoral battleground. It is forty miles east to the Welsh border, and perhaps sixty miles up the river Severn to Bristol. Oxford is an hour to the southeast by train on a good day, and London a further hour in the same direction.
It is a perfectly subjective judgement from someone who grew up there, but it feels further from all of these places than it really is.
The city has always been a transport and administrative centre, built around an important crossing of the busy Severn, and situated in fertile rolling countryside.
- A cathedral city: Worcester has a once very powerful Diocese dating back to around 680. The county was initially rich farmland under monastic control, and was an important strategic barrier against the Welsh. The spectacularly untrustworthy King John (1166-1216: died of dysentery), whose intransigence led to the Magna Carta, is buried in Worcester Cathedral.
- Early industry: the wealth that helped build the Cathedral came from the manufacture and distribution of cloth and clothing. But from the end of the 16th century, these activities declined, in the face of growing domestic and international competition. Worcester came to specialise heavily in gloves during the eighteenth century. This industry was in turn destroyed when the government removed the import duty from foreign gloves in 1826.
- Industrialisation: the town never really experienced the heavier industrial growth that shaped the industrial cities just a short distance further north. A certain amount of manufacturing developed for the Victorian market: two notable survivors are Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce and Royal Worcester Porcelain.
- Industry today: the city still maintains some high quality specialist industrial production, in machine tools and performance engine parts, but the proportion of manufacturing employment is below the national average. Worcester is no single company town, and there is no particular zone within it where the remaining industry clusters together.
- Transport: Worcesters original dominance of regional transport, and the associated benefits of taxing the traffic, were steadily reduced from the Elizabethan period by the growing importance of other Severn Valley towns such as Tewkesbury to the south and Stourport further north. The city regained some of its former importance with the construction of the Worcester-Birmingham canal, but the town was bypassed by the main London to Birmingham railway line. It now sits alongside the M5 motorway, but is some distance from a commercial airport.
- Recreation: if this is a story of long-term decline, or just relative insignificance, it is also a story of steadily rising living standards for some of the population. The city still retains many large, sturdy Georgian houses, a racecourse, a cricket ground and several parks. At one time Worcester became a fashionable spa town, before being overtaken in this respect by nearby Malvern.
- Tourism: an important part of the local economy, with the surrounding countryside suitably redolent of Elgar, small wild animals and market gardening. The city today, with its Cathedral and Close, river gardens, and a string of well-preserved Tudor buildings is still popular with tourists, particularly Americans.
- History the Faithful City: Worcester is famous for its part in the English Civil War, and celebrates its Royal allegiance in its motto, The Faithful City, or City Faithful in War and Peace.
- One of the first skirmishes of the war was fought in 1642 on the outskirts, and the last and decisive battle was fought in 1651 at the heart of the city. It was from this defeat that Charles II fled from his defeated Scottish troops to France, and an improbable number of local venues claim themselves as hideaways along his escape route.
- The Royalist City narrative obscures some interesting sectional history: whilst the landholding gentry of the countryside were predominantly Catholic and Royalist, many of the city merchants were Protestants sympathetic to Parliament. Partly to appease this merchant class, James I had improved the independence of the city with a mayor and a civic administration. Unfortunately for the Royalist cause, the new administration promptly invited radical puritan preachers to Worcester, who would probably have been resident throughout the later conflict.
- Population and employment: the city is home today to some 85,000 people, and Worcestershire County and City has a total population a little over 500,000. The unemployment rate is low by national standards, and the city has a feeling of rather careful, modest affluence. There have been several recent property developments and road improvements, while it lacks those rows of new, empty offices that indicate speculator confidence.
- Living standards: in some respects Worcester is a remarkably healthy place to live. Mortality and cancer rates are slightly below the national average, and the accident rate is lower by 25 per cent. Perhaps most interestingly, the suicide and self inflicted injury rate is 40 per cent below that for England. Arriving from any big city there is a noticeable improvement in the quality of the air and water (except at times of catastrophic flood), and traffic in the city, whilst often congested, does not feel like the malicious threat it can seem elsewhere. Worcester is a very low-lying county, and the air was at one time considered conducive to torpor: eighteenth century doctors sometimes recommended a spell in Worcester as a cure for insomnia.
- Crime: recorded crime is some 10 per cent below the national average, but local surveys indicate a high level of the fear of crime. As in the rest of the UK, more than half of all recorded crime is burglary, theft and the handling of stolen goods. Drug offences form a slightly higher proportion of the total than is usual for England and Wales, violent crime a slightly lower proportion than usual. The city centre has the usual sense of Saturday night menace in certain areas, and drugs are quite freely available in the nightclubs and many of the pubs and bars.
- Education: attainment at primary and GCSE level in Worcestershire is around the national average, whilst post-16 performance is slightly below the benchmark. Truancy rates are a shade below average in the secondary schools, and there is a generous sprinkling of independent schools across the county and city. Most of these demonstrate significantly better results than the maintained schools, and there is the usual suspicion and rivalry between pupils from the different sectors.
- Ethnic minorities: Worcestershire has a very small ethnic minority population, at only 1.5 per cent of the total population compared to a nationwide average of 5.5 per cent. The city itself has a somewhat higher proportion, but at 2.1 per cent this is still low. In the ward with the largest minority component the figure reaches 10.9 per cent. These communities are predominantly Pakistani, with smaller Caribbean and still smaller Indian populations. As in many towns there are a number of Indian restaurants, mostly owned and run by Bangladeshi and Pakistani families, clustered together on one of the streets just outside the town centre.
- Politics: despite, or perhaps because of Worcester Woman, the city elected a Labour MP for the first time in 1997. Worcester had previously voted Conservative, even in 1945, although then only by four votes.
- In addition to the nationwide swing to Labour, the county had undergone boundary changes in 1995 that left the city constituency an urban centre in a doughnut of significantly more rural and Conservative areas.
The new MP, Mike Foster, was immediately thrust to prominence by winning first place in the private members bill ballot and making good his promise to introduce legislation to ban fox-hunting with hounds. Its enactment was blocked by House of Lords opposition, but the issue will return to the national and local agenda if Labour wins a second term of office.
From the centre outwards
To give some idea of the place, imagine wandering outwards from the city centre. There are no big out-of-town malls, so the city centre is still the major shopping destination. The high street is pedestrianised, and runs a bit less than a mile from the Cathedral to the central train station. The shops are the usual blend of major chains and a few independents, with smaller boutiques sharing nearby streets with bars, restaurants and knick-knack shops closing and re-opening under new ownership every few years.
Within half a mile there are a couple of schools and a technical college, a hospital, the town hall, the central bus station, the main library, the cinema, most of the entertainment venues and most of the citys historic buildings.
Outside this there is a belt of residential housing: some beautiful but un-manicured Georgian squares, some terraces, some blocks of flats. Also in this belt lies the river with its meadows, dominated by a racecourse, a cricket ground and the playing fields of the cathedral school.
Further out are industrial estates, housing estates, later suburban developments. Two miles from the city centre the ring roads close around, and the rest of England begins.
