No Place to Go

No Place has no church, no chapel, no cinema, no football field. About all it does have are three streets of red brick houses, 259 inhabitants who mostly work in the local Beamish Mary coalpit, and a hearty dislike for Durham County authorities. For No Place learned last week that Durham's planners had condemned it to slow extinction.

Trouble was that nobody much had moved in recent years to No Place--a name it got back in the days when it was only two cottages jammed between two big estates and considered too small to have a proper name. (In Durham, the authorities had changed its name on their map to "Cooperative Villas," but No Place paid no attention to that.) The county planners decided that "a loss of population is expected" and pronounced No Place "a bad financial risk." That meant that the county would neither replace houses that fell into decay nor build new ones for young couples. No Place had suffered the worst fate that any community can in an age of planners--it had been left out of plans. In 50 years, No Place would be nowhere.

In the only pub in No Place, the pitmen agreed that they would not abandon No Place without a fight. The pits still had 30 or 40 years' working in them, they argued. The Rev. Ronald Halstead came over from his vicarage in West Felling, a mile away, to organize a protest meeting.

Said the vicar: "Some think No Place is doomed because of its name. But to the villagers it is home, and there is no place like it." If their village was to be condemned for its name, what about some other Durham villages? Such as Cold Knuckles? Or Pity Me? After all, it had taken a heap of living to make No Place like home.

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