I'm currently sat in my room in the vibrant heart of Plymouth, curtains shut, sat at a crudely lit desk with a half cup of orange juice beside me. I've switched to the orange juice since realising that my excessively late coffee drinking is why I find it hard to get to sleep before 5am - not because my house is haunted as some were suggesting - anyway tonight I'm aiming for 3. However, my coffee abuse aside for a minute, there is one other thing that is worrying me about the impending deadline that is 'my new bedtime'. For that I need to explain a little something about the Plymouth nightlife.
Plymouth essentially has three nightlife centres dotted around the city. There's Union Street; a parade of clubs that stretches from the town centre in search of the river Tamar, The Barbican; a slice of old town Plymouth with winding cobbled streets, old houses and an assortment of ever so slightly differing quaint pubs and trendy bars dotted along the Quayside, and North Hill; the student capital that runs alongside the university down towards the city centre and has a series of small to medium sized clubs all churning out more-or-less the same thing - student friendly drinks at student friendly prices. The former two are rarely visited by students, and as a student therefore rarely visited by me. Union St. has large clubs and can be good fun if you're in the mood for that kind of thing and there's a student night on in one of the clubs down there, but principally it is visited by Plymouth residents and Navy Crew. To understand why this becomes a problem you need to understand the not-so-complex relationship between the main 3 groups in the Plymouth area, (Janners, Navy Boys & Students) something I will come to shortly. The Barbican is too far for Navy types to venture to and typically too expensive for the students - "£3.00 for a vodka coke, you're having a fucking laugh, come on let's go to the SU" - or something along those lines. This leaves space for your more discerning local, in the fertile soils left untouched by the likes of "pound-a-pint" and "mobile burger vendors", comedy clubs, jazz cafes and restaurant-come-bars have sprung up. It is occasionally less reserved - Bank Holiday Sunday's have the reputation for leaving no stone, flower box or litter bin unturned - but on the whole this is a safe haven from the likes of the other two night scenes. Then finally just down the road there is North Hill, a stretch running from the student saturated neighbourhood of Mutley down past the University Campus and into the City Centre. As far as I'm aware this area is dominated entirely by by students, perhaps some young locals and a few navy boys in disguise occasionally sneak in early unnoticed to the student population, but this is certainly the students' stomping ground.
This is where I live, more precisely I live a few houses down from a club called Cuba, a club with two main selling points; 1. It has thin platforms with poles attached around the ground floor walls on which drunk girls (and perhaps just as commonly, drunk boys dressed up as girls) can be seen gyrating on. 2. It stays open till 5am. It's this second reason coupled with my single glazed window with a small hole in the frame (allowing 24 hour ventilation) which is worrying me about my task of falling asleep by 3am. Students may not be the rowdiest of drunks, but they sure are persistent and even a Sunday night/Monday morning is orchestrated with the faint sound of distant shouting, laughing and arguing (not to mention the wheely bins which as a result, spend most of their life lying on their back thinking of England while the perpetrators carry on unfazed up the road.) This brings me neatly back to a point I promised I would cover earlier, the 3 main groups of people living in Plymouth, so here's how it works.
Janner is the colloquial term for a Plymothian, they are typically born in Plymouth or the surrounding area and have subsequently spent most of their lives there - Plymouth, not unlike my own hometown is not typically somewhere you leave. Wikipedia tells me there are a good 250,000 Janners currently living within the city limits and, like people from most places, they are a mixed bunch. On the whole they are not as well off as their nearest neighbours, Exeter, and more-or-less untouched by immigration into the UK, but there's still plenty of variation within the City. Plymouth has been a Naval base and a port for a very long time indeed and while Janners don't always see eye-to-eye with Navy types they certainly have learnt to share their city with them and tolerate them. In turn, the navy respect the residents' right to call the city home and use this neutral standpoint to trade for the goods that seafarers have for thousands of years, alcohol and women. Students however are different, Plymouth University has only existed in it's current state (as a University) for 17 years and is now one of the largest in the country (currently ranked 5th with a student population of 30,000). This means that your average Janner can remember a time before the University and certainly can remember a time when it was not such a large part of the city. In typical human fashion, nostalgia paints a beautiful portrait of "the old days" leaving today's problems however petty and unavoidable as a perceived product of 'change'. Students who now colonise the City centre are certainly part of this change and this probably explains a large part of the animosity towards them from the more long-standing factions. This is by no means the only reason, a walk down North Hill on a Saturday/Sunday morning, or worse still, in the wake of a Fresher's week can show another key reason for this clash between the old and the new, students are generally messy and disrespectful of the city. While the old Plymouth streets were never paved with gold, I doubt that they were adorned with last night's half digested kebab, or the shoe that didn't quite make it home either - respect is earned, not given, something which your average student knows all too well but is still a way from learning.
So student's have learnt to live in the city but not with it, certain areas are free for everyone to enjoy, while other's become available on certain days. This is quickly learnt by new students and they soon become aware that living within these boundaries is not only possible, but easily achieved and likely to result in an enjoyable university experience. And so (apologies to my year 2 teacher for using 'and' to start a sentence. But notice how I haven't started any with 'but'.) the whole thing perpetuates itself, each year in turn passing on the guidelines to the years below slowly etching away at the divide that exists between the students and the rest of the city.
This, is the first reason I love and yet could never stay in this city. I've only ever lived in a bit of it. The city I've met and enjoyed time in is not the city I would live in after leaving the University. I have no experience of what it's like to live in an outer suburb, shoulder to shoulder with local residents, I haven't even caught a bus here yet. I know very little of the geography of the city despite my efforts to learn all the place names on google maps and seeing the city from the safe distance of a friend's car seat whenever possible. It doesn't make sense to me yet and I'm not sure that it ever will, not because I think it would be a particularly complicated place to understand (it seems far from it) but because I don't think I will ever make the effort to understand it, and the reason for this lies not within it's local geography, but within it's geography over a broader area, in relation to the rest of the country.
My first visit to Plymouth was not in the winter of 2006/2007 when I came to look at the University for the first time but in fact many years earlier, as a day trip, as part of a family holiday to Cornwall. For those of you who are unable to place Plymouth accurately on a map (don't worry I couldn't before I came here) it lies on the border of Devon and Cornwall on the peninsula that juts out below Wales into the far south-west of the UK. It is as I like to call it, the gateway city to the end of the earth, slow down now or your liable to simply fall off the edge of the jagged cornish rocks that mark the end of the road. Of course this is a complete lie, the cornish rocks don't mark the end of the road, the roads stop as soon as you pass Plymouth and are replaced with small tracks which are strangely large enough for farm vehicles but too small for cars. Some would argue the roads stop even earlier than that, the last motorway was gone a hundred miles back as you passed Exeter and this should have given you a sign of what was to come. The point that Highway Maintenance were trying to make to you as you left the last blue line on the map was that you were escaping mainland UK. You're leaving all of that behind and entering a new place, and what's more you didn't even have to bring a passport.
It's for this reason that the far South-West has become such a popular holiday destination for British residents hell-bent on escaping for a week or two but unable, unwilling or uninterested in travelling abroad. Some would argue that it's the beautiful moors, long sandy beaches with excellent surf and numerous campsites and holiday parks that swathe across the region that make it such a tourist hot spot, and they'd have a point, I mean, it's certainly why my parents took me as a child. But there are other parts of the UK with equally picturesque landscapes. As a young child I would often go to beaches in Bournemouth and Poole and to the New Forest to see wild horses and attack invisible soldiers with sticks. I'm sure the same is true for a lot of children across the UK and so, for me the defining feature of the south-west and what makes it so different from any other area is it's separateness. It's the conservatory that the UK built when it tired of everyday life and wanted somewhere nice to sit in the summer months, and when winter comes around it goes quiet again. I can't live in the quiet, a fact I've been reminded of frequently in recent months as I remind my brother of every travelling musician that stops for the night in his city, who I've convinced myself I would have gone to see if they came to mine. And (sorry again miss) I wouldn't go see them all, far from it, I know this deep down but I don't think it's really this that bothers me, it's being so far away from it all. In the last two years I've entertained thoughts of travelling to Bristol to see some live music, an expensive 300 mile round trip, which truth be told is never going to be worth the time and money I spend on it. And so in these winter months I feel like the cold feet at the end of the bed, so far from the heartbeat that drives the country, alone, peeping out of the end of the duvet waiting for the summer.
I know that all sounded very gloomy for a minute and I don't see it like that all the time, I still live in the centre of a city with lots of people around me and plenty of things to be getting on with - an undergraduate degree should keep you busy at least part of the time otherwise it's not really doing it's job. Some people would thrive on this lifestyle, living in a city with all the benefits of a 24h superstore and a reasonable public transport system but with the quiet that comes from a place which for most of the year isn't a half-way-house or another stop on a tour around the UK. Hooray for them, if nothing else I've found your Mecca, a city nestled away in amongst a beautiful landscape with a rich history and a bright future, and all this in a place that you'd be hard-pressed to come across by accident. But (that's it I've blown it now, 6/10) it's not for me thanks, like crocs, I've tried them, they were comfortable and I'm all for saving the environment, but I'll never buy a pair.
In short, this city has a place in my heart, but not in my future. I've no doubt I'll come back to visit it again, perhaps even with a family of my own, and I'll remember it fondly, talk about it with a smile on my face and remember all the good memories I have of it. That's all it can be for me though, a fond memory.
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