When you step into the wardrobe of eternal memory the last thing you expect is to step out again and find the world around you all back as it was in the halcyon days of, let’s say, the 1970s. When your mate Dave calls you up and says ‘Ey Bri quick get round here I bought this cupboard from a crystals, drugs and glam rock memorabilia shop in Glastonbury and the bloke told me it takes you back in time’ probably stepping inside it is the last thing you should do. It won’t end well. Remember what happened with that ‘Derek the Exploding Frog’ glove puppet….
But I did it. The world went black. Well, I closed my eyes. I started spinning and grabbing the handles. Coat hangers clattered across my head. ”Dave! Stop hitting me with coat hangers!”. “Sorry Bri.” He got out of the cupboard. I got out of the cupboard.
Everything was the same. But different. Like an Oasis concert.
See, my memory of Bridgwater in the 1970s was cheesecloth shirts, centre partings and stack heeled shoes so people constantly walked like they were going downhill. As indeed they were.
Workers Paradise
If you stood on the Cornhill in the 1970s, leaning against the railings, and with a statue of Admiral Blake next to you rather than across the road, you’d be surrounded by cars queueing up and down the High street and Fore street. A crown post office to your left, a Marks and Spencer’s in front of you and 2 more supermarkets to your right. Walking the narrow pavements, you took your life in your hand.
You could walk into town and find the newly built workers paradise of West Street, with the only tower block of flats in Somerset above you, clean and tidy lines of shops, and built on a site that only a few years previously were home to courts and slums, a long ambition of the Borough council to build proper homes on.
On the Town Hall, the home of the Borough Council, and on the Priory, home of the Rural District Council, was now one sign ‘Sedgemoor District Council’. A new type of council that would combine the powers of the former two councils into one big district. Although now this new council also included Cheddar and Burnham with Bridgwater reduced to only 30% of the authority and no longer master of its own destiny. The lights had gone out in the offices of the towns own council and wouldn’t be turned on again until the early years of the next century.
Radical
Bridgwater, historically a town run by radical whigs, progressive liberals and working-class socialists over the centuries was now run by Tories. And out of town Tories at that.
Bridgwater lost its legendary outdoor pool ‘The Lido’ where we all learnt to swim. They replaced it with the Splash…but then they got rid of that too. Were ‘edge of town’ supermarkets the answer?
You could walk from North Street to the Railway station with shops all along the way. Two cinemas faced each other showing rival yet current films. And I’ve just counted about 25 pubs along that same route. From the Blue Boar to the Bristol & Exeter.
Cars queued round the block to get on top of the giant Sainsburys that dominated Eastover and the seven major car parks feeding the town centre were always full. And at the same time most people still chose to cycle to work. There was a clock on Broadway that told Cellophane workers they were late.
Halcyon days. Not really.
It was the time that the rot set in. The 1980’s turned that into decline, and it was only by the turn of the century that working class communities like Bridgwater started to rebuild through Government projects like Sure Start.
Bridgwater regained its town council in 2003. Sedgemoor was abolished in 2023. Somerset became a Unitary Council that same year but was immediately burdened by the years of Tory debt. Bridgwater Town Council grabbed and saved the services, jobs and assets we’d lost over those 50 dark years. And that was painful. But it was the right thing to do.
There weren’t elections in Bridgwater or Somerset last week. But there will be next year. Sometimes you have to play the long game. But always you have to remember where you’ve come from and where you’re going.