Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence: a weekly Mon-or-Tuesletter that twice a year takes a week-long break, and to make things even kookier, is joining you on a Thursday this time around. But do not fear, there’s a lot going on – the much-mentioned new website is launching imminently, and Issue 15, set to land on Monday, is our finest, broadest and most expensive iteration yet.
On that note, if you’re one of the hundred-or-so people with a lapsed subscription — or, god forbid, no subscription at all — click on this link here and make sure that you’ll be getting your latest copy. If you want to change or update your address, or check the status of your order, please email subscriptions@the-fence.com and we will attend to you promptly.
To business. There are some bits about Borges, the Groucho Club and some very sweet cribs, but we lead with a dispatch from Skegness, from our editor, Charlie Baker.
Fantasy Island
Skegness is a punchline for comedians and journalists, and the recent march by a group called Patriotic Alternative – and led by a man dressed eerily like Hitler – will have done little favours for the tourism board. In between the Grimsby of Sacha Baron Cohen’s imagination and Margaret Thatcher’s Grantham, Skegness is a seaside resort for working-class tourists from the Midlands corridor stretching from Coventry to Leeds. It’s also ten miles from the village I grew up in, and where my parents still live. So back home from Easter, I made a day’s visit to Skeggy.
Walking into the town, I spotted the internet’s most famous glutton, ‘BeardMeetsFood’, posing for selfies on the Lumley Road. He’s possibly the only famous person I’ve ever seen in Skegness, a town that gave Nikolaus Pevsner a characteristic squirm – ‘the paraphernalia can only be described in the Las Vegas style.’ Typically, Pevsner didn’t appreciate the 101-year-old art deco Tower Cinema, where I snuck into watch American Pie with my pals, or the arcades where I would play Time Crisis for hours on end, and I don’t think he would like the seafront club, L.A Cafe, where as a teenager, I enjoyed many a swirling night out for a tenner (drinks included). I like Skegness, I always have done, and the town has, at least compared to other places in Lincolnshire, enjoyed something of a renaissance. The foreshore has been Grade 2-listed and developed, and at the end of the pier you can see the Lincs Wind Farm five miles out into the North Sea, a £1 billion investment in renewable energy.
Rather than land some vox pops from some disgruntled pensioners, I wanted to take the temperature of the local mood, so I spoke to people working in the tourism industry. Over the course of an afternoon, I criss-crossed Skegness, interviewing hotel and guesthouse owners, and while many were shut for the winter season, there were about 25 open, and nearly everyone I spoke to was furious, raging that ‘fighting age’ men – and all the migrants are men – were lodged there. Some were so angry that they just shook their heads when I asked them about the situation. Two of them had been on the march. One receptionist told me that the migrants head down to Skegness Academy at three o’clock to take photos of children. Another told me that the migrants like to head to the nightclubs to chat up women, and told me, approvingly, of a YouTuber who operates the moniker, the Yorkshire Rose – you can observe her work here
I saw a few migrants, too, walking in twos and threes. One of them told me he was from Afghanistan and had been here for a year, and when I asked him whether he was enjoying life here, he said that he didn’t speak English well. I was reticent to press him further.
There were a few sanguine dissenters among the hotel staff, who told me that they had enjoyed their best year ever, and that there were bigger issues: coach trips are less popular post-COVID, and guests are now keener to have single rooms rather than share doubles. One hotel owner told me that he had a number of regular guests ringing up to cancel their booking after reading about the migrants. ‘They were here when you came last year’ the owner told them. But they still cancelled anyway. ‘The media publicity is not ideal’ another told me, pointing to the visit of Katie Hopkins, whose dispatch from Skegness has over 100,000 views.
At the end of my visit, I went to the Ali Nawab pizza house, which is just 20 metres away from one of the hotels housing migrants. There, the owner, who was born in Pakistan, tells me that some of the migrants have begged him for work, saying that they will clean his garden for ten pounds. ‘But I cannot give them work. I tell them it is illegal for me to do so.’
Whichever way you look at it, a town of 25,000 people taking 250 migrants from Somalia, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan is a story, and that’s before you consider that Skegness, and the wider East Lindsey area, is one of the whitest places in Britain, and the constituency, as everyone knows, is the least ‘Bregretful’ in the country, with 70.7% of the votes cast in East Lindsey going for ‘Leave’ back in 2016.
I rang the local MP, Matt Warman, who I must say, was generous with his time. ‘It’s the number one issue in the inbox’ he told me, and he also relays that the police have had to intervene because of a number of attacks on migrants, but there have been no instances of migrants loitering outside schools, or harassing women in nightclubs. But why are they being sent to Skegness? 250 men with little to no English, stuck in a seaside town where they will never feel fully welcomed – to put things mildly. The Home Office has been under provocative leadership lately, and the contract to house the migrants has been renewed for another year, despite a legal challenge from the local council.
‘It’s frustrating from a democratic perspective,’ Warman tells me, ‘But I assume there is some degree of due diligence between Serco and the Home Office.’
For now, the town is limbering up for the summer season. The day after I visited, a pub landlord was murdered in a Skegness car park. A 53-year-old man called Richard Lee Norris has been charged – but if he was called, say, Rashid Al-Ramzi, you would have known that already.
You can follow Charlie on Twitter here.
Ranking Dread
The most eminent listicle of them all dropped last week. Every ten years, Granta publishes a list of the 20 best British novelists under the age of 40, and now, after much consternation and deliberation, the 2023 volume has landed, and you can read the whole thing here.
Congratulations to Sophie Mackintosh for making the cut (Sophie wrote this excellent story for us in Issue 5). Sophie’s latest novel has been winning rave reviews and is very much worth your time.
Pyramid Scheme
We’re pleased as punch to see that we have 7,000 subscribers to this newsletter – that’s almost a thousand new readers in a month on Substack, which is great. To new readers, old readers and ‘casually scrolling through months in the future’ readers, we can say that we’ve got plenty more of the good stuff that’s brought you here in our print magazine, which you can have four of, on your doorstep, for the ridiculously low sum of £30 for the year. If you’ve been enjoying our work here, please subscribe today.
The Velvet Coffin
Last year, the Groucho Club on Dean Street was bought out by Hauser and Wirth, and yesterday, they sacked the membership committee via email (in a worldwide exclusive SCOOP brought to you by The Fence magazine).
One of the problems with landing this worldwide SCOOP was that people thought members of our editorial team were part of the motley crew of personal stylists, reality TV stars and Times journalists that made up the erstwhile committee of the Groucho Club. Not true! None of us would ever join a club that would have us as members (for £950 a year).
Master P’s Gold Ceiling
Alongside Jackass and The Osbournes, Cribs was one of MTV’s early 00s programmes that skewed popular culture across the English-speaking world. And if you’re going to be pretentious about it, Cribs presaged the all-access intimacy of social media, but we’ll leave that essay to one side – its legacy is best seen in the rather more wholesome celebrity home videos engineered by the Condé Nast empire – here’s Detmar Blow showing off his Cotswolds manor house for Vogue, or you can check out Gwyneth Paltrow’s tour of her Montecito Goop nest for your YouTube delectation.
But there’s a more niche, and rather more tasteful series engineered by the luxury bods at Nowness called ‘In Residence’, in which some of the world’s leading architects, artists and interior designers show off their beautiful homes. Here’s Richard Rogers’ Chelsea palazzo – one of the most singular residences in the capital; while in this three-minute vid the LA architect Roy Kappe gives a brief glance over the Pacific Palisades home he lived in for more than 50 years.
Rogers and Kappe both died in the last few years, and so there’s something uncanny in these clips – legendary modernist architects memorialised through a medium synonymous with 21st century bling and voyeurism. Or are we being pretentious about it?
Out of the Eerie, Into the Weird
Now, we’re usually in the business of teeing up luxuriant pieces of writing to you every week or so: clippings from that gorgeous magazine we’re always telling you to subscribe to, links to the latest and greatest longform masterpieces – cozy, lovely words. Tim Abrahams’ latest project, The Machine Book of Weird, is not cozy or lovely. In this collection you’ll find Chekhov, Saki, de Maupassant and Lovecraft turning their gaze inward, to prisons and temples and ships; unsettling stories to beguile and intrigue you. If you’re in the market for words that make you feel all weird, find out more about the collection here.
Our Kingdom For A Pork Scratching
There might be a few of you reading this in your inbox for the first time, after signing up through our first newsletter collab of the year with the good meat people at Serious Pig. First off, welcome, and secondly, one of you lot will soon be receiving your hundred quid behind the bar of your choice – keep your eyes peeled on the 24th April when the winner will get a nice little email with their winnings.
In Case You Missed It
The second 11/10 article of the year has landed: scoring some unbelievable access, Gabriel Sherman takes you inside Rupert Murdoch’s Succession drama.
Hugh Morris drives through the beautiful Scottish Borders with experimental musician Richard Skelton.
TikTok might be done. David Turner explains why.
Beth Jones tracks how a group of squatters held on in Notting Hill
A helpful reading list of women adventurers, if you needed one
Will Lloyd asks why the Granta list features only four male novelists.
Tamlin Magee details Italy’s love affair with super-strength Scottish beer
And Finally
Has the internet made us all stupider? It’s a very 2013-Will-Self-Ted-Talk talking point, and one that we try to stay clear of, given that we rely on the world wide web for many things, such as this tediously popular newsletter. But every so often, you do come across something that makes you wonder what you would have made of your life in the pre-digital world (if you’re prone to such self-indulgence). And so it is with this interview between William F. Buckley and Jorge Luis Borges, which was filmed in 1978, when the Argentine polymath was completely blind, and we join the action as he talks about his bilingual childhood in Buenos Aires, and his love for the English language. Is there anyone on the planet who still speaks – or even thinks – like this? Answers on a postcard, please.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNxzQSheCkc
That’s it for this week, and we’ll join you on a Tuesday next week, when the issue will be launched and hopefully the new website will finally be ready. If you’ve read this newsletter and thought hmmm this is pretty good I would like more then do support by purchasing a subscription.
In the meantime, enjoy the weekend, and if you’d like to speak to us, you can email editorial@the-fence.com
All the best,
TF