It's been a couple of months since we bought our apartment in Newark and I'm beginning to get a handle on the place. From the windows of our apartment there's a good view of the main town-centre car park next to a bridge over the river Trent. It's packed during the day and empties out completely after the bars and restaurants have closed around 11pm. Now sunnier weather has arrived it's become a popular spot for bikers to come for a drink at the pub/barge moored next to the carpark. I guess many of them are from the nearby city of Nottingham and they make me feel at home here.
Also from our windows we can see the massive spire of the church of St Mary Magdalene which was finished in 1350 and is a landmark for miles around. It's strange to think it's been there for nearly eight hundred years and sometimes one can hear, that most English of sounds, the pealing of church bells, crashing out from its bell chamber. Strange as well to think that at the time it was built Newark was governed by a regime which would have had more in common with Islamic State than a modern "developed" nation. Indeed, during the English Civil War in the seventeenth century most of its stained-glass windows were kicked in by what the BBC today would probably describe as "terrorists" or "insurgents".
Walking round the town today it's a very civilised place full of antique warehouses, upmarket food shops, cafes and the usual high street chains. There are lots of wrinkly old folk moving around deliberately, like tortoises dressed by Marks and Spencer, looking for ways to kill the time. I kill time observing them and they make me uneasy.
For me, the most unexpected thing about the place is that it is still affected by the trauma of a war nearly five hundred years ago. Newark was a Royalist stronghold in the English Civil War (now known as the "British Civil Wars" I'm informed in the "National Civil War Centre" based in the town museum) and was besieged several times. The town is dominated by references to the seiges - part of the defensive earthworks (the Queen's sconce) are now a park, the spire has a cannonball hole in it and Newark Castle is a ruin part-demolished by the victors after the capitulation of the town in 1646. Apparently it was saved from being razed to the ground because the plague broke out in the town and the fearful occupiers buggered off. And here it still stands today, "one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit" and a gaunt reminder of just how shit the past really was.
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