There are few pleasures like exploring an unfamiliar town on foot for the first time. A new series of posts on this website, In Praise of Ordinary Places, will look at Middle England towns that are overlooked by tourists (Oxford, Bath and Stratford-upon-Avon need not apply). This is the antidote to Crap Towns. I’ll speak as I find and won’t overlook ugliness, tackiness and misery. But I’ll also celebrate authenticity, unexpected surprises, and the ordinariness of places that rarely feature in Best Places to Live contests. First up: Bedford.
Alfred Waterhouse’s Shire Hall and the spire of St Paul’s church
Donald Trump lives in Bedford.
Bedford NY that is, until he moved into the White House in January (his neighbours there include actors Chevy Chase, Glenn Close, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Richard Gere, Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, Bruce Willis, Kate and Rooney Mara and the designer Ralph Lauren).
In the US there are more than a dozen Bedfords, two of them in New York state. As well as Trump’s swanky outlying suburb, 40 miles north of Manhattan, NYC itself has Bedford Stuyvesant, a traditionally African-American district of Brooklyn, now being rapidly gentrified. The Bedford is one of Chicago’s most exclusive cocktail bars. It’s a Wonderful Life was set in the fictional town of Bedford Falls.
Just about every large western city has a suburb called Bedford, and Bedford Hotels – in Brighton, London, Sidmouth, Tavistock, Blackpool, Brussels, South Africa – are almost as ubiquitous as the Hotel Bristol. Bedford is a brand name that crops up on just about everything – a millennial blog template, a guitar made in Sheffield, an American wine importer, a Californian clothing retailer, a 1960s television set and a new e-cigarette brand, Bedford Slims. From the 1930s to the 90s Bedford was a British truckmaker, later renamed Vauxhall by its owner General Motors (even Vauxhall’s Griffin logo has its origins in Bedfordshire: it is derived from the heraldic crest of Falkes de Breauté, who was granted the Manor of Luton by King John, and whose London home Fulk’s Hall lent its name to the district of Vauxhall). Continue reading
Cuba is one of the few policy areas where Trump could go either way. Donald Trump’s ghoulish tweet announcing “Fidel Castro is dead!” just a few hours after the Cuba leader had died last November might indicate that his attitude to Cuba will be like his attitude to just about everything else: insensitive, narcissistic and goading. But in fact, the ongoing thaw in US-Cuba relations is one Obama initiative that Trump may support.
The river Nene – the slowest-flowing river in England, and its tenth-longest – meanders through Northamptonshire past water meadows and dozens of former gravel pits, long ago flooded and now a nationally important habitat for wetland birds. Northamptonshire’s an underrated county, the Nene is its under-rated river, and one of its most verdant stretches is between Irthlingborough and Wellingborough. 
Constituency boundary changes don’t just matter to map anoraks or political obsessives (I’m a bit of both). And the proposals won’t just mean a cull of MPs: they will reshape our politics by disenfranchising millions of voters. With no suggestion of proportional representation for the House of Commons, or a democratically-elected Lords, the new boundaries will make our electoral system even less fair. And just when Theresa May’s government needs a strong opposition, the changes will further distract and divide Labour, pitting many of its embattled MPs against each other.
News that the Palace of Westminster will be out of bounds for six years for the £4bn mother of all restorations
One Saturday morning a few weeks before the referendum there were two Vote Leave stalls on the streets of Thrapston, the Northamptonshire market town a few miles from my home. I was in a hurry, buying eggs and vegetables at the market, and in no mood for a political discussion when I was approached by a friendly-looking 60-something man in a red Vote Leave T-shirt. I had to think on my feet to politely decline the leaflet he offered. “No thanks, I’m a Labour voter,” I told him foolishly. “So am I,” he replied.
