If I’d learnt about Wolverhampton’s heritage, I might have stayed

When I recently went back to Wolverhampton for my 49th birthday, I have to admit, the main piece of history I was interested in visiting was “the history of me”.
The place outside the civic centre, where all the cool boys I was interested in went skating.
The pub I got banned from after having my 18th birthday party there — thus tipping them off that I’d been going there wholly illegally for the previous two years.
The libraries. All the libraries. Or, at least, the ones that still exist.
However, after I’d done all that, I went to see some actual history: Wightwick Manor. For all my life, I have known Wightwick Manor merely as a series of road signs on the A449 which we never followed. Mainly because they were those brown road signs, which denote directions to a historic building — and, therefore, one that will cost money to enter.
Unless English Heritage or the National Trust had something my family could bunk into free, we would not consume our English Heritage, or see what the Nation so Trusted.
This time around, though, I was middle class. There isn’t a castle in the whole of England I can’t afford to enter. So I paid my £15 and went to Wightwick Manor.
Well, I have to say, I was surprised. I think I’d always thought it was a Tudor mansion, or maybe one of the places where Charles II hid. Turns out, Wightwick Manor is a Victorian Arts and Crafts house, built by the wealthy Wolverhampton industrialist Theodore Mander, and absolutely somewhere I would hire on Airbnb for a luxurious holiday.
It was commissioned after Mander attended a lecture by Oscar Wilde, in which Europe’s greatest fop described how a house should look — “You will want a joyous paper on the wall, full of flowers and pleasing designs, but the dado should be either of wood or some beautiful Japanese mattings” — and Wilde gave this lecture in interior decor in Wolverhampton. Each room is hung with paintings by Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Siddal. The furnishings are by William Morris — and his pioneering, lesbian daughter May, who founded the Women’s Guild of Arts, once visited the Manders at Wightwick Manor. Turns out Wolverhampton was quite the hangout for those who believed in radical, revolutionary beauty.
If you’re in the area and would like to see what is basically a Victorian episode of Changing Rooms, with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen’s role taken by the author of The Importance of Being Earnest, I can’t recommend it enough. But it also left me quite sad. Angry-sad. Why, when I was growing up in Wolverhampton, did I not know about this place? Why didn’t I get to walk around somewhere that showed my post-industrial dystopia as somewhere that, once, the bright, beautiful radicals hung out, and constructed fabulous art palaces?
All I knew of Wolverhampton was the empty buildings, and the dole queue, and the punchline to a Jasper Carrott joke — “as bad as winning a weekend’s donkey trekking in Wolverhampton!” I didn’t know it as somewhere that, once, Oscar Wilde had stood, and had some opiated fantasy about joyous wallpaper and very specific Japanese dados. That there was more to Wolverhampton than Banks’s Brewery, Wolverhampton Wanderers and a mainline station that could take you to London, if you needed a city with more than football or beer. Which I did.
I was put in mind of all this last week, when Historic England published a report which found that the best way to boost a town’s ailing economy is not to “pour money into new business”, but to start investing in its cultural past, instead.
“There is a tangible link between historic places and increased creativity and economic activity,” said Neil Mendoza, chair of Historic England. “Our heritage is one of our country’s core strengths.”
And, oh! That fact feels like a fact! Just as the children of glorious families are more likely to be glorious themselves — because it is expected — so the children of glorious towns are likely to be more glorious, because: your city is your family, too.
Had I known my town had amazing people doing amazing things, I genuinely wonder how different I would have been. Would I have used the morning after my 18th birthday to move, hungover, to Camden? What would happen if every kid in Wolverhampton — every kid in every town — was allowed to walk through the doors of their history, free of charge? And find out their old city-family was ambitious, and made beautiful things, and was a place you got on a train to visit — rather than, always, always, got on a train to leave?