Change

I've always thought that I cope with change reasonably well. Sometimes, for example when your children are born, you don't really have an option but to cope. Elsewhere, I've been through countless restructures at work, changes of role, had routines and habits frequently turned upside down and have simply got on with it.

However, in the last few years I have found it hard to accept change in my birth town of Stratford-upon-Avon. I struggle to be positive about anything that alters Stratford from how it was when I was a child. I clearly have an idyllic, frozen image in my mind and anything that threatens that isn’t comfortable to me.

It is perhaps because Stratford still retains the character and personality – even in these modern times – of an English market town. Certainly the abundance of half-timbered Tudor houses connected to England's greatest playwright have done much to keep Stratford unspoilt. There’s the vast green park which wraps itself around Stratford's two principle theatres – the RSC and The Swan – and Holy Trinity church, a park which quickly flows into beautiful unspoilt countryside and which is bisected by the Avon; apart from some improvements to the playground, a new café and a shiny but unnecessary bandstand, the park remains almost exactly the same as from when I was a child.

Elsewhere, Stratford is no longer the same place I remember. The shops of my childhood – RH Bailey's toyshop with its distinctive smell that I can still remember to this day; Midland Ed with its well in the centre; the old Tesco where my sister threw up by the tills; the card shop on Henley Street where I went with my nan to buy a 50th birthday card for an uncle; the Derek Lamb-owned toyshop in Bell Court where I met and was terrified by Star Wars' Darth Vader; another branch of the same toyshop on Wood Street where dad took me to choose a toy, a grey mouse, for my newborn sister; Music Junction where I bought most of the records that I love the most – all of these places are now gone, mere memories and nothing more. In most cases, the shop may have gone but the actual building is retained much as it was owing to a wealth of listed building orders. Not so with the old Post Office, an admittedly ugly block of a building that had a new frontage applied in the 1990s to allow it to blend in with neighbouring shops. Okay, it may look better now aesthetically, but give me that ugly redundant Post Office building any day over the derivative branch of New Look that resides there now.

Putting aside tenancy changes and the expansion of Stratford's housing out into the green belts and fields that once bordered the town, the far bigger change to hit me personally is with regard to my old high school. Stratford-upon-Avon High School was the location of my academic studies for seven years, and while I don't necessarily agree with the old phrase that your days at school are the best years of your life, a lot of formative things happened to me at that school. Admittedly, not all of those things were necessarily good, and indeed there were a number of absolutely terrible events while I was there, but my overriding memory of my time at this school is a positive one.

Therefore, antiquated and ill-equipped for modern times though it may well have been, to demolish the place and build a shiny new school next door to it, and to turn much of the land formerly occupied by my old school to housing, is tragic. It feels like someone indiscriminately snuffed out a major part of my personal history, leaving just memories which will fade out over time. I’ll never be able to show my daughters the school their daddy spent such a long time at and they’ll never be fully able to visualise the layout, outbuildings and playgrounds so vividly etched in my own mind when I describe them to them.

The old Stratford-upon-Avon High School was quirky and in places so old as to have a looming, overbearing presence, just like some of the teachers did. The main buildings, formed around a quadrangle in which the wiry-haired science teacher Mr Turner would keep bees and on one occasion sheep, dated back to a time when the school was formally divided into a girls’ school and a boys’ school. Each had their own assembly halls that during our time at the school were given over to the ‘Lower’ school and the ‘Upper’ school for the obligatory weekly talks by the heads of the respective schools. The boys’ half included the science labs and the girls’ half the home economics rooms, reflecting a time when sexual equality was an abhorrent concept. This segregation went further still, with the playground originally divided so as to prevent intermingling and the distractions afforded, during those pubescent years, by the opposite sex. Bleak though it often appeared during the autumn and winter months, the quadrangle was a green lung at the heart of the school and it instilled a sense of order that the derivative pile that is the new school lacks; at first glance the new school could be a generic office building, utterly devoid of character and soul.

Like many schools, the High School retained a suite of temporary classrooms that had become permanent. These black, wooden huts were hot and uncomfortable in the summer and crushing during the wet weather when you’d have to stand outside waiting to go into class in the rain, your blazer, books and bag becoming ever soggier. There was also a more modern, but still old, building known as the Maths block which was rather ill-named given that only one room of the six or seven in there was used for that topic. When the sixth form common rooms moved from their home in no doubt asbestos- and occasionally rat-riddled cream-coloured concrete sheds on the leftmost edge of the playground, they moved us into the Maths block, and it was here that I spent most of my time in the final year at the school. I have no fond memories whatsoever of the gym building and the sports hall. When I recently looked around schools for Seren I visibly shuddered when they took us into the sports hall. Too many memories of being last picked for sports leave a mark on a man. Similarly, I have no pleasant memories of the dinner hall, beyond the fact that I must have consumed a lifetime’s worth of sausage rolls and nasty cup-a-soups in a very short space of time given that I only went in there for a term at best.

In all honesty, I'd struggle to make a convincing case for the architectural beauty of the High School. It was, in all senses, a poor relation to the boys’ grammar school with its supporting annual funding from the Clopton Foundation and the girls’ grammar school in nearby Shottery. The school, just as the September 1988 intake I was part of joined, had a terrible reputation, a terrible uniform and terrible grades. I had the good-fortune to be there during a time when all of those things improved, but being a basic comprehensive in a town with not one, but two, grammar schools always rendered it somehow second-rate. But it worked for me and many of the people who I was at school with, and you just have to look at the career paths that many of us have taken to see that the High School did a lot of things right.

But that High School simply doesn’t exist any more. Call me sentimental, but I miss it. Perhaps it’s not just about the building itself, but about the array of experiences that went with it, be they first girlfriends or getting head butted for the first time and all the myriad points in between.

There are many further examples of change. On the Birmingham Road there was once an Amoco petrol station that was pulled down to make room for apartments; ugly though it was, it was part of the fabric of my childhood since I’d walk past it every day I went into town with my mother. Further up the same road a Texaco filling station met with the same fate, making me wonder if Stratford has somehow overcome the need for cars given the paucity of petrol pumps in and around the town centre. And then there’s the Island Café, a formerly dilapidated eatery on the roundabout at the top of Henley Street which lay empty for my entire childhood, prompting my sister and I to yearn for the funds to buy it and turn it into a funky hangout for twenty-somethings, and which now looks set to be redeveloped. I agree that it must be a sorry sight for the tourists who flock into the town centre, but it’s sat there, unchanged, for so many years that surely it couldn’t hurt to leave it be?

Then there’s the theatre redevelopment and associated overhauling of the Bancroft Gardens out front. The main RSC theatre was an impressive example of 1930s art deco architecture, designed by Elisabeth Scott. However, austere though its brick-clad exterior might well appear, its proximity to the refurbished Swan and its traditional design meant that, functionally at least, it simply didn’t operate effectively, and was a source of frustration for producers and actors alike. The RSC are right to push for a modern, well-equipped venue as their flagship theatre given the increasingly advanced stage productions of today, but I'm pleased that the planners capitulated to public pressure and allowed much of the original façade to be retained in the new design; although, one simply needs to take a look at the state of the building now – a mere shell bereft or all its former visual power – to wonder whether the builders might now ‘accidentally’ cause the whole structure to collapse anyway, giving the original, more radical plan a new lease of life. As for the Bancroft – the scene of much underage drinking of a Friday night by many a generation of Stratford teenager, spontaneous football matches by topless visiting Brummie lads and sunbathing bikers – a ploughed field would have more visual appeal than the wasteland that currently leads up to the theatre.

To a certain extent, I'm somewhat hypocritical in all of this on two counts. Firstly, I detest the redevelopment and modernising of Stratford, but when it comes to London, whose environs I inhabit during the working week, I'm all for tearing down old and inefficient buildings to make way for shiny new edifices, even though with the current state of the commercial property market they’ll doubtless sit there empty for many years to come. As for Milton Keynes, my home since 2003, I have even less emotional attachment to the buildings and history here, and if they pulled everything in the city centre down tomorrow and started again I wouldn’t mind.

The second point is that I don’t even live in Stratford anymore, and haven’t done so since I went to university in 1995. Furthermore, my parents are about to up sticks and leave the town, leaving me with no immediate familial connection to the town. You could therefore argue that I have no right to criticise given that I clearly didn’t care enough to stay around. Irrespective, Stratford has always been, and will always be, my home and I think that gives me the right to care.

In trying to rectify the latter hypocrisy somewhat, last year I joined the Stratford Society, an organisation with the stated aim of helping ‘preserve and maintain the character and appearance of Stratford-upon-Avon’. I fully accept that I might well be the youngest member of this group, but nevertheless I'm all for a group that only wants to do the best it can to preserve the essential fabric of this unique and important Midlands market town. The Society is respected enough locally to have its collective and informed voice listened to, and is often directly consulted by the town planners over developmental issues, such as the controversial river crossing that I first saw as an architect’s model at the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition last year. Moreover, the Society has been entrusted with the stewardship of certain buildings to ensure they are maintained. A good example would be the project to find a use for the Toll House building which can be found on the town end of Clopton Bridge, a tiny building which has fascinated and enthralled me since I was a child and which one day we might have access to.

Change, I accept, is inevitable and as I said at the start this piece, ordinarily I embrace progress. I think we have to. Stasis, after all, is death. But Stratford is a town preserved in aspic whose essential charm has little need for excessive modernity. I would therefore encourage any similarly minded residents or former residents to shell out a mere £15 and join the Stratford Society. It’s a small price to pay for preservation.