Near West by Charlie Teasdale

First money, then poetry. Then money again, ideally. In the spring of 2011, I was fresh out of university, a newly anointed bachelor of humanities and a newly appointed barman of The Beckford Arms in Fonthill Gifford, south Wiltshire. Some pals had moved straight to London. Others, swimming nobly against the tide of middle-class graduates flooding into Hackney, had opted for Bristol. Swimming harder still, I planned to travel America on a journey of inspiration that would result in me writing like the Americans I had come to love in tutorials — the likes of Auster, Easton Ellis, Poe and Whitman. Clearly, the only way to do that was to go and be in North America for a while; just mooch about and pick idly at the fabric of the country until my own bildungsroman morphed into a novel of astonishing poignancy and I was launched into the literary stratosphere. (And providing some crucial seed money for a flat in Hackney.) A summer at the Beckford would set me up for at least a few months of manifest destiny, I was sure.

The vibe seems standard now, maybe even a touch passé. But nine years ago on the rolling banks of the A303, the Beckford was wholly alien. Daily (daily!) menus printed on weighty Elephant’s Breath-coloured paper; freshly baked

sausage rolls piled beneath a big cloche on a bar dressed with dried hops and fitted with a ceramic-handled tap pouring Phoenix, the craft beer brewed exclusively for the pub.

The Beckford had almost burned down the year before (hence the name of the beer) and the refurbishment was carried out by a former honcho of Babington House, the Soho House hotel and spa 23 miles away in Somerset. Cue broadsheets in the sitting room, pétanque pitch in the garden, sisal carpets and roll-top baths in the bedrooms.

I had worked in country pubs since I was 14. First there was The George Inn in Mere, Wiltshire, where I picked up car park litter in return for a modest cash-in-hand salary that came heavily offset by as much draft cola as I could guzzle. Eventually, I graduated to the bar, and even moonlighted at The Walnut Tree (where the cool dudes and pretty girls worked) on the other side of the village. But it was a week until my guilt got too much and I jacked it in. Then there was The White Lion Inn in Zeals, where I had a real rapport with the clientele (apart from two hellish, ruddy brothers who threw coins at me), but the management eventually grew tired of my refusal to charge friends for drinks.

Each had its own agricultural charm but The Beckford was something else. It had been lifted straight out of a Richard Curtis film, and everyone loves those. Local (and latterly, national) up-at-heels came in their droves. The sausage rolls were gone before the cloche had a chance to condensate and we couldn’t change kegs of Phoenix quick enough; the sisal forever damp by way of carefree bathers. It wasn’t long until a second outpost, The Talbot Inn, in Mells, Somerset, was outshining all the other pubs in the area, too. And towards the end of 2018, the group’s third pub, The Lord Poulett Arms, opened in Hinton St George in the south of the county. You know, west of Haselbury Plucknett, east of Dowlish Wake.

As has been documented, the “Near West” (my phrase) has been the food and culture

capital of the UK for a few years now. People suddenly realised there was nice stuff in the bit between Soho Farmhouse and Padstow, and now everyone who’s anyone is racing to Paddington after work on a Friday to make sure they’re in-country in time for the acid jazz and scrumpy barn dance* at Hauser & Wirth.

The Somerset outpost of the gallery has been a totem of the irresistible rise of the Near West since it opened five years ago in Bruton. Among other emporia and eateries, it is home to At The Chapel: “a restaurant, bedrooms, bakery, terrace and clubroom” and former church in the centre of the market town that clearly ushered religion and grammar out the door when the open kitchen was installed. When it’s full (“Sorry, we are At Capacity”), visitors can decamp to a new hotel, The Newt in Somerset, which is what nearby stately home Hadspen House (whose foundations date back to the late 17th century) is now called thanks to owners Karen Roos and Koos Bekker. The South African couple have been renovating the old pile for the past six years, so at long last it has a hammam, a “cyder” press and a farm shop — things none of those feckless Georgians ever had the good sense to install.

Then there’s Frome, which rhymes with “tomb”. The hilly, semi-cobbled town is home to the gargantuan street market “The Frome Independent”, with its slogan “Shop (independently) Eat (seasonally) Sleep (easily) Repeat (monthly)”, and entices thousands of visitors every four weeks.

(As luck would have it, I’m writing this on a train that has just passed through Frome. The carriage is now full to the brim with exhausted get-awayers and tat-shoppers who have just this instant come to a stark and depressing realisation: the density of the crowd and the direction of travel has shown them they weren’t the first Londoners to come here. They probably weren’t even the first Batterseans to have exciting get-away sex in that yurt.)

I grew up in the Near West, so I feel about it a little differently. I was born in Yeovil, which is an objectively shit place. A large Somerset town with a hospital at the top, a Frankie & Benny’s at the bottom and not much in between. My school was in Gillingham (hard “G”) in Dorset, which, like most towns in the area, has had its character gutted by the arrival of major supermarkets and discount stores. Legends, our nightclub, was on the trading estate. We would go to either Salisbury (“Sledge”) or Sherborne (“Shledge”) beforehand and get the last boozy train back. To finish, it was chips and cheese from Marmaris for the walk home.

There was no Josper grill at Legends, sadly.

Independent markets were scarce, but we had the Gillingham & Shaftesbury Show once a year, where you could buy tractors and meat and cartons of thick brown cider. My older sisters went to school in Bruton, so I would often go with mum or dad in the Montego to pick them up. By my recollection, it was always raining in Bruton, but that can’t be true, unless there was some pathetic fallacy for my anguish at having to move to the back seat when the girls got in. We’d also go there to play football against Sexey’s (seriously), the fellow comprehensive whose Dickensian pitch was atop a high plateau behind a housing estate. Their goalkeeper, who I’m sure was a nice chap, was the lardiest 17-year-old I had ever seen. Fine from long distance but a nightmare one-on-one.

On the way out of town, the one-way system took you under a railway bridge, past Texaco and the turning for outdoor-activity-centre-and-tetanus-jab-waiting-to-happen, Mill on the Brue, before swinging right up to the dark, narrow, vaguely threatening high street. There was something of the night about Bruton; something on which Tim Burton could base an animated film.

Ironically, I am both beholden to and tempted by the Near West. I have to go there a few times a year to see my family, but I also want to go there because I’m a thirty-something Londoner with disposable income and an Instagram account thirsty for authentic experiences. I, like my fellow lifestyle curators, search high and low for the holy trinity of artisanal pies, locally-fired pottery and Aesop-approved bathrooms. The Near West has loads of all three.

I never went to America on that voyage of literary discovery. I spent all my Beckford money on petrol, Golden Virginia and lock-ins at the The Benett Arms (which is a very Beat triumvirate, as it happens). But if I had, I might have come back to a home I didn’t recognise. A home that belied my own memory, a home that was at once the same and completely different. Instead, the path of my life has lead to me living above a chicken shop in Finsbury Park, so the Near West is my Shangri-La.

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*Not a real thing, sorry.