anyone found a penny?

It had to be done. A trip in search of the house in the foundations of which I placed the penny which has given the title to these ruminations. So here it is:

The visit of course was a bit of an anti-climax, I was hardly going to ask the current occupants if I could pull up their kitchen floor! But, it was a necessary act of pilgrimage. The house we eventually lived in (several years later!) can just be seen in the background - there is more about that in a previous post.

The house with the penny was built in 1973 and as a family we finally moved to Cramlington in 1977 calling it home for four years. Though I have visited the town frequently over the years it was interesting to take this moment to think about the way it has developed and continues to grow. Built round a number of existing communities, even in early 70s it felt like a well established place, with a sense of coherence. Perhaps those who had lived in the old villages felt less sure about the new estates which were filling all the land between them, but as a newcomer life revolved around shops, school, church and other community facilities, which all felt shared and accessible. Yet as a an article in the Evening Chronicle in January 2013 described, the town was only 10 years old when I first started to get to know it:

FIFTY years ago tomorrow, January 9, 1963, the North East welcomed the go-ahead for the birth of a revolutionary new town - it was going to cost £60m (a considerable sum in those days) and was to be built at Cramlington.

It was also the going to be the first new town in the country to be built by private firms in co-operation with local authority –and work was to start within the month.

While Governments today talk and talk about the need for new building programmes to help unemployment – in the 1960s they actually had to courage to go ahead and do it.

A master plan for housing and businesses had been drawn up from a draft proposal for the county council and William Leech (Holdings) Ltd, by a firm of town planning consultants.

The new town was to be situated only eight miles north of Newcastle and in the heart of the unemployment distressed area of Seaton Valley – it was expected to eventually have a population of 48,000.

Northumberland’s planning officer, Mr J B Ross, described the passing of the unmodified master plan by the Government as “a remarkable achievement”. He went on to say that the first building on the new town site would be a Government advance factory costing £25,000.

It was expected that Cramlington New Town would take up to 20 years to complete and would have 16,000 houses, 15 primary and 12 senior schools, 16 public houses and 500 acres of industrial sites and cover an area of four square miles.

The houses, shops and amenities were to be built by private firms, but roads and school were to come under the county council.

The original plan also included a covered market, hotel, cinemas, railway station, office blocks, stores and sports grounds

So the town is technically just a few months younger than me and despite the prediction that it would be 'completed' within 20 years, it is still growing and evolving. The County Planning Officer is reported to have predicted that it would look like a town in five years Cramlington - Wikipedia. That bit might just have been right.

SPCK 2012

I am re-reading Richard Rohr's book in which he explores a spirituality for the second half of life. For a long time I have been both intrigued and disconcerted by this book. The blurb offers this insight: 'In the first half of life, we are naturally and rightly preoccupied with establishing our identities - climbing, achieving, and performing. But these concerns will not serve us as we grow older and begin to embark on a further journey, one that involves challenges, mistakes, loss of control, broader horizons, and necessary suffering that shocks us out of our comfort zones. Eventually, we need to see ourselves in a different and more life-giving way. This message of 'falling down' - that is in fact moving upward - is the most resisted and counterintuitive of messages in the world's religions, including and most especially Christianity'

Starting from a very different place, The Guardian newspaper has a weekly column entitled 'A new start after 60' which often makes a similar point. We spend years trying to establish ourselves, build a good reputation, find success and happiness, but often it is only when those things are questioned or lost, that we can find a truly fulfilled life. It might be redundancy, breakdown of a relationship, ill health, bereavement, crisis of faith, loss of control, or simply the realisation that what thought was important is in reality, pretty meaningless. Freed from the need to impress or to conform, a whole new way of being beckons.

When I first read this book I found myself wondering if I had experienced the crisis point and the second, more content half of life was beckoning. Every time I thought I had, another came along - and the truth is that in trying to read into events is just about trying to remain in control. The wisdom of the second half of life is about letting go of the impulse to control.

I am discovering that this is really about learning to let go of some things that once seemed important and find meaning in how things are becoming. That penny will remain in the foundations of a house I never lived in. I'm glad its there and that it will probably never be found. The memory is important and every story has to start somewhere, but along with all the other pennies that have seemed important on the way, they don't hold the key to being right with self or with God. 

And so, returning to Cramlington, I wonder whether a place or a community can be described using some of the same ideas?  The town is growing and maturing physically, but what about its heart and soul.  As I have done before I turned to the Co-op Community Wellbeing Index for help. Using the postcode of the house with a penny Home | Wellbeing Index (coop.co.uk) I was pleased to learn it stands above the UK average overall, and indeed on most of the individual components. So on education, economic participation, relationships and environment the area is doing well. But, two scores are well below the UK average and they are concerning, 'Health' and 'Voice and Participation'. The health criteria measures: Access to good quality public, voluntary, and social care services that promote physical and mental health in the community. Voice and Participation measures: Democratic governance and decision-making mechanisms in place to allow people to express themselves and take either individual or collective action to improve the local community and beyond.

Can a place be so concerned with reputation, looking good, providing great shopping and leisure facilities, can it look like a town and yet be missing something in its soul? Do places need to find the second half of life?

Having just returned from a trip to a place I used to work, I offer a comparison. Chipping Norton, an attractive, ancient, prosperous Cotswold town, different in pretty much every respect from Cramlington, has the same overall wellbeing score. The individual factors are slightly different and a high score for Culture and Heritage perhaps masks some important weaknesses. But it seems, neither place is entirely comfortable with itself.

I come to no real conclusion from this, except perhaps that if more people allowed themselves to drift comfortably into fulfilled and content lives, worrying less about status and reputation, then maybe more of our communities would? People are shaped by the environments they experience and we can also shape the communities of which we are a part.