Andrew Napier: Winchester’s never had it so good (From Hampshire Chronicle)

Andrew Napier: Winchester’s never had it so good

11:56am Thursday 13th September 2007 in

• Skip social links
• Print
• Email
•  

IT'S nearly 20 years since I came to Winchester. It's a landmark, for me anyway, although I'm not expecting a civic reception.

I sit back in the office, look out of the window (if I had one), reflect on passing time, the stories, the characters, and the way the city has changed.

Many would be tempted to bemoan how things are not what they used to be. You see it regularly in the letters page opposite. But not me.

I think Winchester is a better place than it was in 1988 when I arrived as a cub reporter.

No-one could say the city is perfect, or that it was terrible then.

But many of its ills are because of powerful national trends - heroin, anti-social behaviour, the first-time buyers' crisis, the cramming of houses into back gardens.

Setting aside the massive investment in education and health, many of the improvements are specific to Winchester.

In 1988 the cinema on North Walls closed. It was a decade before the super-comfortable Screen opened.

In 1988 the Theatre Royal was a fleapit, where if you got the wrong seat you could rick your neck. I know. It hurt.

In 1988, the Trinity Centre borrowed space in a church hall - now it plans to move to a new £2 million base at Durngate.

In 2007 Winchester has the biggest farmers' market in the UK; work has started on an Olympic-size running track at Bar End, and there is even a butchers' shop back on the High Street.

My argument is epitomised by the Southgate Hotel. A lovely building, but with a bar noted for the blobs of chewing gum on the carpet (or was it lino?). Now it's the Hotel du Vin.

One downside has been the loss of local quirkiness: the beautiful bowling green nestling below North Walls; the paddock grazed by ponies off Quarry Road; the ramshackle but excellent garage behind Parchment Street.

The property boom ironed out these glitches' but denuded Winchester of its variety. In general though, Winchester has never had it so good.

I'm not arguing that no-one should grumble - it can be a kind of first step on the ladder to involvement in public life, enriching democracy. Winchester is full of public-minded people campaigning for what they believe, testing the powers that be, over the M3, park and ride, Barton Farm, Silver Hill or speeding cars on Battery Hill.

No-one can argue that the Shabby Winchester Group was not raising important points about a perceived council uninterest in dealing with dangerously uneven pavements.

But many critics hark back to a mythical 1960s age when the buses ran on time and teenagers sat well-behaved in steamy-windowed coffee shops sipping milkshake.

It was also a time when the average life expectancy was about 65, backstreet abortions and racism were common, and hundreds of Winchester homes had no internal sanitation.