There were Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse once, War, Pestilence, Famine and Death. Now there are Six. In the 1960s, out of nowhere there came the Councillor and the Developer, nondescript men in suits, but their impact on the little towns of Britain has been more devastating, and will last longer, than that unleashed by any of the others. Not the cities, mark you, the towns.

What became of my town, and yours? Where are the alleys now, the old walls, the squares, the little shops? More to the point, where is their past? Until our time a town was an organic thing, shaped by a its inhabitants, growing as their fortunes grew, declining with theirs; you had only to stand and look around you to read its history as in the rings of a tree. And a each town was different. Not now. They could be anywhere now. It is not your town or mine any more, but mere details on balance sheets far away. 

You have all seen the result, the canyons of supermarkets and multi-storey car parks, the multiple shops, Etam and Next and Boots, the brutal geometry of glass and concrete, the silence of death in the pedestrianised precincts after six o'clock in the evening. You have only to go away for 10 years and you return like Rip Van Winkle, unable to recognise anything. But why, and how? You have asked these questions and been puzzled, for nobody answers them, certainly no local newspaper. 

"Old Kettering and its Defenders" is the first book to explain in detail what happened to one town, but it is also the story of your town and mine, as the desolation came. 

Tony Ireson was born, and has lived all his life, in Kettering, working on its evening paper before he became editor of Garden News. In 1947 he and his wife Rene moved into a beautiful l8th-century cottage bang in the middle of the town. Fifty years on, and a widower, Tony Ireson is still here.  Everything he knew around him has gone, his garden, his trees, his gates, even the lane on which the house was built. That is a modern thoroughfare now. On one side of him, just feet away, is a bleak line of modern stores. On the other, blotting out the light, is a shopping mall.

For the cottage was also bang in the middle of Phase II of what was called Kettering's "commercial redevelopment". And Tony Ireson, on whom the world called with compulsory purchase orders, stayed on. The Daily Mail hired a helicopter last year to photograph his cottage from the air. LWT, thinking to include it in the series Houses from: Hell, sent a television crew, only to decide at the last minute against its inclusion on the grounds that it was too beautiful. And it is beautiful, it is a gem, except that in its location it is as extraordinary as a motte and bailey castle, still inhabited, in the High Street.

Tony Ireson, suffering from arthritis, is housebound now, which, as he said wryly, is not without its compensations. "People ask, how can I bear it? If I can't go out, I don't see what's happened. If I don't have my glasses on, I can pretend the shopping mall is Hampton Court. Why not? Brick's the same colour." 

You will have gathered from that brief quotation that he is not an ordinary man. Only there is more. From his cottage, with the earth-movers prowling like dinosaurs, with dust being thrown up to the point where he once said that, not only did he now know all the topsoils of Northamptonshire, he had tasted them, Tony Ireson, starting in his late seventies, has written and published a history of the town he knew. He is now on his seventh volume. "There comes a time in a man's life when the fruit's ready for plucking, you know," he said airily. Tony Ireson is 87 now. 

There are other things you need to know. This is a man who had never taken part in any public protest, who had ignored, even on his own admission looked down on, local government, who in the later stages of his professional life ambled around Britain interviewing gardeners and inspecting their work. A bit like Johnny Appleseed really. But then the 1960s came. 

"What I hadn't realised was that there was a new kind of councillor. In the old days, if you were good at business you got on to the council and things were well run. But then local government got political, people got on to the council as a reward for their political services, and there was a new, ambitious breed, again like fruit, ripe for plucking. But I blame it on the developers really. They were the pluckers. 

"You had these narks travelling the country, trying to talk councils into redevelopment, holding out the promise that this would cost the taxpayers nothing, and the threat that if they didn't agree to it their town would be left behind. It was like selling rifles to a savage tribe." 

Kettering had no civic society then. No town did, no town had needed one. They knew nothing about the details of opposition, that in a dispute with Town Hall policy they would need to meet their own legal expenses, and, a supreme irony, as ratepayers, those of the council as well. This, as Tony Ireson says, was like expecting Londoners during the Blitz to pay for the petrol of the Luftwaffe. They did not know because they had never had a need to know. 

They had left it to the Town Hall, secure in the knowledge that the Town Hall had never done very much. Kettering was a small market town, its population 30,000, based on the shoe trade. Like most small towns it was not beautiful, but it was interesting. It had its old buildings and its myths, like the patriotic landlord of the Royal Hotel who, when a visiting Queen Victoria needed to spend a penny, not only kept the chamber pot, but its contents, and the whereabouts of the bottle of "Queen Victoria's Water" was known as late as the 1930s. 

Kettering, in short, was ripe for the plucking. A great deal of plucking attends this account. The first anyone knew was that in July, 1960, the Borough Council submitted a map to the Ministry of Housing which showed its proposed redevelopment. Nobody even knew it had been contemplating such a thing. There had been no debate in public, and no newspaper reports: this was policy as a Soviet Politburo would have understood it. 

The first reaction came from local architects, their pride stung at not being involved, who sent a letter to every councillor, pointing out the implications of a scheme which involved the demolition of 50 shops, of 30 streets, and the creation of a new dual carriageway inner ring road with seven roundabouts. There were to be five areas tackled in turn, of which, 40 years on, just part of the first has been completed. The scale still takes the breath away. 

The next revelation came in a fit of pique from a firm of London developers, whose plan had actually been turned down on the grounds that it was too ambitious, so God alone knows what they had proposed. What the company did reveal was that the Council had been in secret talks with it and with another firm for two years, without even telling either they were in competition. 

So the characteristics of modern redevelopment were there from the start. First, the plans had been drawn up far from the town by strangers. Second, there was secrecy. 

The alderman in charge, a man called Crayford, actually said, "It is not fair for the councillors to be swayed by the views of the public or the press. This is something they must make up their own minds about." You might like to read that again. A council about to make the biggest decision a council would ever take felt no need to consult the community which had elected it, whose lives this would affect. 

The details emerged: there were to be four new stores, 64 new shops, a 10-storey block of offices or flats, an 80-bedroom hotel, and a multistorey car park. But things began to go wrong. Exit, in 1965, the second developer on the grounds that the plan was uneconomic. 

Enter a new firm, with a new plan. Eighty shops in place of the existing 45, "possibly" a multistorey hotel, "probably" two 17-storey blocks of flats. Because this would involve compulsory purchase, there was a public inquiry by a Ministry inspector, and at this point Tony Ireson got involved, to the extent of submitting a letter to the inquiry, for his own house would disappear. But he did not attend its proceedings, for, like just about everyone else then, he thought "progress" inevitable. The inspector approved the first stage of the plan. 

But then, in 1967, Tony Ireson read a remarkable letter from Ted Rowlands MP referring to a country-wide frenzy of local authorities and developers. The result, wrote Mr Rowlands, was going to be "a concrete wasteland of unwanted shops and offices" in town centres, where there had once been communities, and life after 6pm.

For the first time someone in public life had questioned "progress", but not only that, the people of Kettering now realised they were not alone, for the agony and the lunacy of such schemes had until then been beneath the notice of national newspapers. 

In the town, news continued to creep out under the doors. In 1971 it emerged that the developers, for the second rime, had withdrawn, again because the scheme was uneconomic. Only later did it emerge that they had withdrawn 14 months earlier. Then something amazing happened, Kettering Council announced that it would go it alone. It was to be redevelopment on the rates, for whatever else these men lacked, it was not self confidence. 

In March, 1972, they announced that Ireson's cottage was to go, and, with it, Beech House, a stately home across the lane, part of which was built in Queen Anne's time. The wife of the chairman of the development committee, Bob Denney, and herself a councillor, voted saying, "We don't want to give our family jewels away." By then this remarkable Council had formed its own opposition, subsidising a Civic Society, I which immediately started to campaign against them under the banner "SAVE BEECH HOUSE". This was black comedy with a vengeance. 

The famous got involved, with the poet John Betjeman promising his support, but the Council went its bizarre way, debating whether a reporter from the local paper should be allowed into its proceedings. Unable to decide, it adjourned itself and hired a PR firm. A man from a London estate agent acting for the Council called on Tony Ireson, and bleakly informed him that he could expect two more crops from the glory of his garden, a fig tree. He then picked a fig, ate it, and left. In 1972 a compulsory purchase order was served on Mr Ireson. 

There was a second public inquiry, on the eve of which the DOE deepened the black comedy by suddenly promoting Beech House from Grade Three to Grade Two in its listings. 

There were objections from the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, the Council for the Protection of Rural England and the Georgian Group. Even the Royal Fine Arts Commission later asked for the development to be reconsidered. But the inspector still approved the plan. "He said yes, but he never said why," said Tony Ireson. 

It was at this point, familiar to those of you who watch Westerns, that one man got cross. "When I went abroad and saw what they had kept I felt like a citizen of the Roman Empire among the barbarians when I came home." 

On February 20, 1974, Tony Ireson watched the demolition of Beech House begin. It took three weeks, and his cottage was to be next, except chat during those three weeks someone from the estate agent called to say diffidently that, if he so chose, he might stay on, though his garden would have to go. A startled Ireson, who had been glumly looking at other houses, was encouraged by a friend, the novelist J. L. Carr, who said, "Human beings can get used to almost anything." He decided to stay on, and his garden was at its finest, the flowers out, the fruit already on the trees, when in July he watched the bulldozers tear everything up. 

There were weeks of Hell and dust, in the course of which he pleaded unsuccessfully for his fig tree. His wife Irene had died in 1961; had she lived, he says now, he would not have stayed on. "It was complete madness, it would not have been fair to ask that of a woman." 

After the garden went the building of the road began, on the edge of which he abruptly found himself, and, after the road, the start of work on the shopping mall opposite. This had its strange moments, as, with everything else demolished, he had for two months his first, and last, glimpse of the roofs of old Kettering from his cottage, which he had never been able to see before. But as the mall rose the shadows fell. And each night, after the bedlam of the day, there was the absolute silence in which he now found himself alone. 

September, 1975, was the cruellest month of all, for, after all he had been through, the Council now informed him it still wanted his cottage. But then, in another bewildering twist, it announced in March, 19'I6, that he could stay. Ireson, like Ben Gunn, was marooned in the centre of Kettering. But, unlike Ben Gunn, he had a typewriter. 

"I came to think of him in terms of Tobruk," said Arthur Heath, chairman of Kettering Civic Society for 30 years now. "Just as Rommel went round that, so the Council went round him." Only this Tobruk didn't fall. 

"He rang me up one day," said Mr Heath, "said he'd seen an advert in the local paper that the Council was opening its books to the public for a day. Apparently councils are obliged to do this, and of course nobody goes. But we did, and it was as though we'd thrown a bomb at them. 

"They even brought the Chief Executive back from holiday and he, nice as anything, invited us to his new offices in what had been the old Boys' Grammar School, and never asked us what we thought of them. Tony didn't bat an eye, I shall never forget this, he said, `When I was here, this was an urinal.' 

"They gave us the books, bound in leather, but of course we didn't have the foggiest what to look for. I suggested a cup of tea might help, and, unbelievably, a secretary was sent home for two cups, two saucers, spoons and four biscuits. We drank the tea, ate the biscuits, and all we found out was that the Mayor's old car used more petrol than the new one." 

But one of their number knew exactly where to look, which is how such remarkable little details emerged as the fact that the Council, desperate for tenants in its shopping mall, had let a supermarket to Sainsbury's for a ground rent of £60 a week, and a store to Boots for less than £40. As one businessman said, "I have seen better deals pulled off by Boy Scouts in a bob-a-job week." 

In retirement the councillors are unrepentant. "You had to have progress," said Alderman Bob Denney. "If we hadn't done what we did Kettering would have been a stagnant old place. Instead of which, we have a nice new shopping centre." 

But some footnotes cast a long shadow. A retired borough surveyor protests that, like a Nazi general, he had only been acting under orders. An anonymous gift of £500 to the Civic Society at the peak of its opposition turns out to have come from Geoffrey de Freitas, then MP for Kettering, who in public made no comment. But between them, the silent and the enthusiastic, they did for Kettering. 

Except that a typewriter taps on, as one man tries to put down everything, everything, about the town he once knew. And no-one will again. Tony has now written six volumes of  "Old Kettering - A View from the 1930s"

Arthur Heath, bemused by his experiences, wrote a novel about them, which was published last year (St Gyp-in-Mowsden). The councillors and developers of Kettering alone remain mute.

Details for obtaining Tony Ireson's and Arthur Heath's books are on the publications page

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The Following article is from the August 10th 2000 edition of Country Life  by kind permission of the editor. 
Country Life can be found on the web at www.countrylife.co.uk  

CLIVE ASLET meets the sort of man that every English town should have. TONY IRESON, writer and historian, has fought to defend the centre of Kettering, including his own cottage, from brutal redevelopment. 

The centre of Kettering, in Northamptonshire, is a car park, a shopping centre and a scramble of featureless roads. In the very middle of this urban disaster, like an 18th-century aria just making itself heard above a cacophony of car horns, is a perfect ironstone cottage with its green door and windows, bed of lilies and beech hedge - it is called Beech Cottage - it could have been transplanted from a poster for the English Tourist Board. But it has not been transplanted from anywhere. It has always been here. Then the ghastliness of late 1960s and 1970s development came rolling in on all sides. The fact that this one little cottage survives to remind people of what Kettering used to be is the result of an epic conservation battle, waged by its occupant: Tony Ireson, the town's historian. 

Mr Ireson, now 87, is the sort of man that every English town should have. He is the keeper of the flame. To date, he has published eight books on local history, all at his own expense, and another, which includes a chapter on Kettering's Members of Parliament, is on the way. He has been given an honorary MA by University College, Northampton, for his major contribution, as a historian, to the county. He receives a succession of visitors, seeking local knowledge or sharing memories, in the parlour of Beech Cottage, the walls of which are closely hung with watercolours painted by his father, Christopher, in the 1920s. In those days, this provincial town, famous for its shoe factories, possessed a flourishing artistic life. Its most famous artistic son was Sir Alfred East, who became president of the Royal Society of British Artists. Architecturally, Kettering could boast the first provincial president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, John Alfred Gotch, also the author of many books; his brother Thomas Cooper Gotch was an accomplished painter, some of whose rather morbid works can be seen in the art gallery. Sadly, Christopher Ireson's watercolours do not often show local scenes, most having been worked up from sketches made during the First World War, when he was stationed in Greece. He died in 1925, aged 41. The ghastliness of late 1960s and 1970s development came rolling in on all sides. The fact that this one little cottage survives to remind people of what Kettering used to be is the result of an epic conservation battle, waged by its occupant: Tony Ireson, the town's historian

These days, Tony Ireson never leaves Beech Cottage. He accepts the infirmities of age with good humour, and nothing ruffles the old-fashioned courtesy of his manner. `Let me leap up and get it for you,' he will say of some book, as his electrically operated armchair makes its slow ascent from the seated to vertical position. no doubt his wry sense of humour helped him through the dark years of Beech Cottage, when his garden was obliterated by a road and his view of l8th-century Beech House replaced by that of a car park. The sense of humour must veil a fair supply of Midlands stubbornness. 

Parts of the Kettering in which Mr Ireson grew up survive: the church, the market, the railway station, the library-cum-art gallery-cum-war memorial. Predominantly red brick, old Kettering still radiates a sense of Edwardian civic pride. But comprehensive redevelopment destroyed the pattern of old, tree-lined lanes, gardens, shoe-working sheds, leather warehouses, stables, smithies, printers' offices and bakehouses that swarmed up the hill, in what had been Victorian Kettering's most bustling district. Also sacrificed was the theatre, formerly Victoria Hall, known as the Vic. 

In old Kettering, the cottages of the poor stood just next to the houses of the town's prosperous shoe-making and banking citizens. The poverty was real. 'At school, I envied the son of a local newspaper editor because he could put his toe through a hole in his shoe and scratch the pavement with his toenail as he walked along. I envied that, but it shows the state of his footwear.' When the buildings of the steelworks at Corby, nine miles away, began in the 1930s, the labour exchange occupied a little cottage in what was then no more than a village. Mr Ireson remembers the queues of would-be workers stretching for 200yd. But Kettering remained a 'very well-behaved town', in which poor shoe workers did not think of robbing their rich neighbours. 'They were on Christian-name terms, because the rich people had often worked their way up from a bench in the factory.' 

Mr Ireson comes from a family of stonemasons - hence, perhaps, his instinct for buildings. Some of his great-uncle's handiwork can be seen on the wall of Beech Cottage. During the First World War, to realiase his anxiety about his son at the front, he would carve a stone head. Eventually, he produced some 60 of them. On his death, they were divided among the family and those that. Mr Ireson inherited were mounted on the front wall. The features of wartime leaders, such as Lloyd George, can he recognised. Mr Ireson's father worked in the Family business until his untimely death. 

In the late 1920s, when Mr Ireson began work, stonemasonry did not promise much of a future. Instead, he went into journalism, as a reporter on the Northamptonshire Evening Telegraph. I remember starting work on the worst day of the Depression. Not a very good day to negotiate a few, bob to live on.' Later, he found the perfect billet as one of the founding staff of the gardening paper Garden News, where he finally became editor. The aim of the publication was to bring readers reports of the events and personalities that were making news at every level of gardening round Britain. A decade after his wife's death in 1961, his experience as a journalist led naturally to a retirement writing books. 

The first of the books, Old Kettering and It's Defenders describes the campaign to prevent Beech Cottage being demolished. This was the iniquitous age when councils, bamboozled by developers, were able to use their powers of compulsory purchase to provide sites for commercial development. The tragedy for Kettering is that the result was not only an aesthetic disaster but no great commercial success. Many of the sites in the Newlands Centre, as the new shopping precinct is called, are empty or occupied by low-calibre shops. It would be enough to make a man bitter. Not Tony Ireson. He looks upon the councillors of that time as 'poor misguided creatures'. They were conned into thinking that the town would fade away if they did not modernise their facilities. Some ideas have changed since then: the old shoe factories are now being converted for loft living. But the architecture of the new housing estates with which Kettering is now being ringed looks all too much like another urban catastrophe in the making. 

Keep writing the books, Mr Ireson, Kettering needs them.                                               top