A disused pub is no more. So what? Fire failed to finish the job, and so with apparently indecent haste, bulldozers razed the Crooked House in Staffordshire to the ground. People turned up to mourn. Why? Who mourns a disfigured building? What exactly are they mourning? These are reasonable questions, unless you happen to be from the area.
The Crooked House always lived large in the imagination of anyone from the West Midlands. It was the pub where things – marbles, coins, even people – rolled uphill. Optical illusions, of course. I’d wager that for most people who are from where I’m from, the first time you heard the words “optical” and “illusion” used together was in relation to the mysteries of the Crooked House.
It hardly mattered if you’d never been there; you still knew all about it. I’m ashamed to say that while I did go there, I can’t remember a lot about it. Don’t judge me. I was young and daft and at the end of an extremely long pub crawl. Being by then uncertain about which was way up, I was quite unable to get the full effect of marbles rolling this way or that. I always promised myself I’d go back there one day and do the place justice.
And now it is no longer. Then again, so much of what made the Black Country great isn’t there any more. I don’t know where buildings go when they die but the wonky pub will be up there with, for example, Round Oak Steelworks, which once stood close by. In this case there was no fire – we went straight to the bulldozer phase. Down it came, and up went a great big shopping mall, although I’m not sure we called it that. This was the 80s, and we were struggling with the vocab. All we knew was that it was the biggest and the best shopping thing outside the Metro Centre in Gateshead. Thrilling. And now, like the Metro Centre, it’s looking past its best. Units stand empty. It no longer thrills anyone, apart from crowds all a-clamour around the food offerings with their all-you-can-eat-for-next-to-nothing deals.
You won’t travel far in the Black Country, or Birmingham, or any other British city, before you’re confronted with evidence of what the area used to be about. In short, making things. Old factories, disused. Newer factories, often disused. Lots of charity shops and bookies and vape shops. Not much of anything else.
It says something that, with brutal irony, a real bright spot is the Black Country Living Museum, which commemorates what life used to be like – what we used to do. After the referendum, I did a Panorama talking to people in these parts about why they’d voted for Brexit. A former welder from Tipton told me how he loved taking his kids to the museum to show them how it used to be. “All our history’s gone,” he said. “They took it all away, and now I have to go to a museum to see it.” It wasn’t clear who he meant by “they” but he looked so sad that I didn’t press him on the matter.
It’s all so darkly meta, the nadir of which is surely the sad fate of the Crooked House. It’s like it’s fallen under the sheer weight of metaphor. A place called Crooked where, possibly, allegedly, apparently, something off the straight and narrow came to pass. A building disfigured by a mining industry that in itself is long gone, memorialised by the pub that it almost but not quite destroyed, now itself destroyed. Although we knew the things that went on there were optical illusions, the place always looked and felt a bit mystical, a bit knowing – and still more so now it’s gone.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
