Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a vibrant and welcoming newsletter. There’s a cracking edition for you here.
Thank you to everyone who has been deluging us with photos of Issue 20 living it large. In a hammock; on a Norwegian island in the Arctic circle; by a bouncy castle; at a lighthouse in County Wexford; in the Umbrian hills and alongside a well-known work by Tuscan craftsman, Michelangelo Buonarroti Simoni.
There have also been some lovely snaps on Instagram stories, now alas lost to the echoes of the past. We move forward, regardless. A reminder that the best entry will win a bottle of Bollinger Champagne. Here’s Gerry Cox, who won the prize for Issue 19 with his bottle of deliciousness.
We’ve also extended our summer sale for a little while longer, in which we’re offering all readers 20% off any subscription (print, digital or both) using promo code ‘5YOFENCE’. Click the pic beneath to secure it, and if you don’t like clicking pictures, there’s a button just below.
So much better than clicking the picture
Let’s get it going with a dispatch from the frontiers of Little England with our editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie.
A Vision In Honey-Coloured Stone
‘Pies off’: one letter stood between the statement itself and its sentiment. It was what greeted me on arrival at James Martin’s ‘tavern’ at The Lygon Arms in Broadway, Worcestershire. The minted lamb pie and its lazily devised vegan equivalent were not available that evening, for reasons unexplained. This had the effect of reducing the menu in the cheaper, ‘pub-style’ part of Martin’s Cotswold complex – a sort of twee Jonestown – to a burger, an ambitiously priced fish and chips and a sirloin which went for over £40 (not including sides). The service was executed almost as dismissively as the menu.
Martin can get away with this because Broadway is a magnet for tourists. This is mostly thanks to its buildings: palimpsests of each era from Medieval to Victorian, all the same gingerbread colour, broken by the occasional piece of half-timbering. They, and the wide, green avenue on which they lie, attract the Insta-ghouls of San Francisco and Shanghai for photo shoots aplenty.
The Lygon Arms in the centre of the village is a particularly imposing example of the local architectural milieu. The Lygons were apparently an inspiration for Brideshead’s Marchmains, with multiple inns named for them in the Gloucestershire-Worcestershire-Oxfordshire triangle now beloved and besieged by tourists. This particular Lygon Arms looks like Gormenghast in golden Cotswold stone: a strangely apposite destination for Martin’s lair.
Except, of course, it isn’t really his lair at all: you never see him. Or so the locals say. One owner of a small coffee shop within Martin’s blast zone told me that, whilst his name is on every inch of the building – including the aprons the staff wear – the Yorkshire whirlwind is almost never to be seen. The absence of their culinary liege lord is nothing new: the Abbot of Evesham ran the whole joint up until the Reformation, and he rarely popped in. However there are more reasons why the locals are less enthusiastic about Martin’s arrival in Worcestershire’s southernmost tip.
Pricing has proved to be a particular and consistent bone of contention. So too was Martin’s reputation. He received numerous warnings from ITV over his treatment of those working on his shows. He once screamed at a film crew in his house about a blocked drain and an oil spill exclaiming, ‘A driveway that cost me £26,000 is fucked because somebody put a load of oil in the fucking bin.’ Indeed, Martin’s treatment of staff was enough to earn him a rebuke from well known workers’ rights advocate, Jeremy Clarkson.
Then there is the charge that Martin’s swooping in was, it is said, deliberately cannibalistic. One pub manager witheringly summarised the parlous state of other, purportedly weaker gastropubs, saying that prior to Martin’s harrying of the shires, ‘they just weren’t making any money’. And yet, money was there for the making, as the selfie-stick hordes testify. Enter stage right, Sweet Baby James.
The Lygon and its latest owner may not be popular with locals, but Martin was clearly onto something – it is absolutely rammed. Tourists from all over clutter up the vast floor plan: Americans convinced they are in Angleterre profonde, Chinese poking at microscopic portions of fish and chips which have cost them £23, Germans rejoicing in flagrant public nudity in the spa, even a group of Australians who took up the spot next to me, gorged on smoked almonds and talked about, of all people, Rudolf Hess.
What draws them? Well, exactly what repels the locals. The flagrant inauthenticity of the place.
‘I feel like I’m in Hansel and Gretel land,’ intoned one woman to a relative over FaceTime, before knocking into one of the scenic barrels which Martin’s minions have placed in the courtyard to add an element of Olde Worlde charm.
Of course, Martin isn’t the only man to sell a confected version of the British countryside to tourists but, as with Hansel and Gretel, gingerbread houses aren’t always what they seem.
You can follow Fergus on Twitter here.
Hear Our Whale Song
Orlando Whitfield recounts a memorable art deal gone awry with an infamous customer. We were thrilled to harpoon this unbelievable piece for our print mag. For a peek behind the curtain of the less illustrious and more delirious art world, be sure to have a good ol’ read here.
Nepo Baby Olympics
The son of Tom Hanks is Chet Hanks, and he is the gold medal celebrity spawn. We have really been relishing his posts from a recent holiday to Egypt, where he dresses in traditional garb to visit the Great Pyramids. ‘Side quests going crazy’, one commenter says.
Truly, this is the platonic ideal of the nepo baby experience. No hand-wringing acknowledgements of the privilege that afforded you a ‘platform’ to sell organic soaps or write memoirs of mid-19th Century politicians. Just side quests and white boy summers. Inshallah more people realise this.
The Witchy Living Room
It’s always good to have some coverage from the north of England, and here’s a great little piece from George Lee, who’s been meeting the Wolves of Brigantia, a neo-pagan sect operating in the shadow of Pendle Hill. Fascinating stuff.
The Next Episode
Nobody has had more career pivots than Snoop Dogg. He began his early professional life releasing some of the biggest hip-hop hits of the 90s, along with three years on trial for a murder of which he was acquitted. He appeared at Wrestlemania and wrote a cookbook. Three years ago he claimed on Twitter that he was actually a prolific NFT collector known under the pseudonym Cozomo De' Medici. He briefly changed his name to Snoop Lion and directed a porno (Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle) for Hustlers. He’s a judge on The Voice. The list goes on. Perhaps it makes sense that he is now the unofficial mascot for the 2024 Olympics also. Or perhaps it is, when you think about it, slightly weird that Snoop Dogg is carrying the Olympic Torch through the streets of Paris? Finally he is, as one person on Twitter recently pointed out, starting to look a bit like Clement Attlee as well. There is no grand theory here. We have simply been thinking about Snoop Dogg quite a lot recently.
Odi(n)ous
This week, Richard Symth goes to Nottinghamshire, to find out what really goes on at the Odinist Fellowship of Newark-on-Trent. Self described as ‘ethno-specific’, whilst also being a registered charity, the inner workings of this pagan ‘religion’ that idolises the Norse gods and despises ‘Communist-inspired wokery’ are delved into in his latest.
Get Involved
We continue to offer a product that is significantly cheaper and more beautiful than our peers. Humility is a virtue but allow us to direct you to this paean from Max Daly. There are some very exciting things happening and we want you to come aboard. Subscriptions start at just £15.99 for the year with the promo code ‘5YOFENCE’.
Minetta Tavern Madness
Cockney restaurateur Keith McNally was the king of restaurants in New York. Now in his seventies, he's one of the most reliably engaging posters on Instagram, where he will go from sharing rather sweet birthday tributes to his friend, Alan Bennett, to going places very few others would dare tread. The post below is one such example. Keep doing you, Keith.
Never Meet Your Heroes
For Issue 20 we asked readers about the most monotonous, mid-tier and mundane moments they’ve had upon randomly encountering celebrities. And from Rylan buying hammers in Islington to Ronan Keating being a bastard in Debenhams, you did provide. Enjoy some of the other answers here, and if you feel you have a more memorably boring encounter with the rich and famous, please do let us know.
In Case You Missed It
Inside the brutalist buyout: Holly Munks takes on concrete profiteering.
In the FT, contributing editor Róisín Lanigan mourns the death of the house party.
A fascinating profile of investigative journalist Paul Foot by Francisco Garcia.
Meet the meatfluencers: A bunch of carnivores spoke to Daisy Schofield.
Oliver Whang paints a portrait of the Appalachia that Vance missed.
And Finally
You may be thinking: surely the 1990s was not a good era to create a religious comedy sitcom based in Belfast. And you would be correct. So You Think You've Got Troubles (1991) only ran for six episodes, presumably for the same reason.
The premise of the show was a simple one, an equal-opportunities offender in many ways. Starring bushy-browed controversialist Warren Mitchell as Ivan Fox, the show followed Fox's journey from London to Belfast, where, as a non-practicing Jew, he sets about the task of running a tobacco company in the Troubles-torn city.
Ivan is set upon by a character known as 'The Jew Finder General', who is taking it upon himself to 'single handedly repopulate Belfast's Jewish population', and gets into scrapes and japes involving roadblocks, cemeteries, synagogues and armoured cars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEvwfgJK9QA
You may now be thinking, why did the BBC make this? We don't know! The show has one review on IMDb which reads ‘there is a reason this was never repeated’. If you have it on DVD, please send a copy to 2 Archer Street, W1D 7AP (or editorial@the-fence.com).
That’s it for this week. If you’d like to message a member of staff, then the good news is that a few of us are back in the office and will attend to your email promptly. We look forward to joining you with another bumper edition next Tuesday. Until then.
All the best,
TF