MODERN ECENTRICS
STEAMPUNKS
IN A WORLD THAT CAN FEEL INCREASINGLY UNIFORM, WE’RE CELEBRATING THOSE HAPPILY DOING THINGS a bit differently. Meet the PEOPLE WHO ARE seriously PASSIONATE about their pastimes. PERHAPS THEY’LL PERSUADE YOU TO TRY something NEW?
For most history-loving groups, period detail is everything. Arrive for your first meeting of an English Civil War re-enactment society armed with a machine gun and there’s every chance your head will roll into an impeccably exact replica of the bucket that once held Charles I’s.
Steampunk aficionados, on the other immaculately gloved hand, take the more meritable side of the Victorian era and, with a hearty slap on the back, push it through a gaping hole in the space-time continuum. Thus, a 21st-century world in which the markers of modern life – computers, for example, or mobile phones – are present and correct, only powered by steam and altogether brassier and cog-gier.
There’s more to it than that, of course. We asked the founder of the biannual Whitby Steampunk Weekend: Andy Dolan, how to define steampunk. “I think if you asked ten people, you’d get ten different answers,” he says. Even so, he adds, inspiration from Victorian science fiction – the likes of Jules Verne and HG Wells – are a common denominator, along with the kind of gothic romance pioneered by Mary Shelley.
“Steampunk is exciting,” he expounds, “It’s got a bit of mystery about it. The uniforms, the glamorous clothes people wear – explorers, inventors, dastardly villains, that kind of thing. It gives people a chance to escape the daily grind and develop their own persona. Our ladies of the community adore it, as it gives them the chance to get the dressing-up box out. My wife has some stunning outfits from the Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne, which really lend themselves to steampunk.”
What turns a dress designed for theatre auditoria into something more befitting fantastical Victoriana? “Accessories. It might be a leatherwork belt with a holder for a cup and saucer, because we like our cups of tea, or it might hold a hip flask, because we like our gin as well.”
Which brings us to another tenet of steampunk: affected gentility. Andy’s flagship Whitby weekend “grew from tea and sandwiches on a lawn just outside Doncaster in 2016.” It was at this mass steampunk picnic that he first sounded out fellow enthusiasts about plans for a meeting of 30 to 40 friends. Then people began asking whether he’d be laying on entertainment, or trade stands, and the mooted modest gathering turned into something altogether more ostentatious with some 6,000 people attending the first event.
Based around Whitby’s pavilion (Victorian, naturally) and adjacent beach, the steampunk weekends are free – “My belief is it should be accessible to everybody” – and
bring a catholic range of people to the Yorkshire seaside: fire-eaters, magicians, leather and metal workers, jewellery-makers, practitioners of Bartitsu – the late 19th century martial art immortalised by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – and even a steampunk Morris dancing troupe. “It’s not your hankies and your bells,” stresses Andy. “It’s big sticks and stuff.”
Invention and self-expression go hand in hand, he says. “Steampunk brings out the creativity in people, picking up old clothes and jewellery at auction sites and charity shops, reimagining them to suit what they want.”
Since the Whitby weekends debuted, Andy has added another large-scale venture to the calendar: Race the Waves, on Bridlington sands, incorporating a steampunk weekend alongside hot rod racing, a bike show, and a broad assortment of vintage fashion.
As yet, men wearing bejewelled pith helmets adorned with pocket watch mechanisms and brass whistles are not a common sight on the high street. And if you do see a woman draped in a luxuriant stole, she’s unlikely to be setting it off with top hat and driving goggles. So, when else are you able to get out in your steampunk garb?
Present situation excepted, he says, “The social side is extremely buoyant. There are loads of Facebook groups where meet-ups are arranged. It’s not all about massive events, it could be half a dozen people meeting for a cup of tea and sandwiches on the lawn. It’s all old-fashioned in a very nice way, with a good sense of decorum.”
While Andy insists that there is a “thriving steampunk community throughout the country,” the Victorian era’s heaviest footprint – the industrial revolution – is largely planted in the north. Thus, a concentration of favoured destinations for a little steampunk portraiture, each offering a readymade backdrop of outsize engineering and invention. These include the National Railway Museum in York, Dudley’s Black Country Living Museum, and Saltaire, the village created to serve a mill near Bradford. Andy is particularly fond of Preston Park in County Durham, where a grand house built for a 19th century industrialist is today augmented by a Victorian-themed street. These places, like steampunk, amplify Victorian Britain at its best. But it was also a period big on colonialism and conquest; equality of gender, or race, or sexuality… not so much. Has anyone ever got the wrong end of the shooting stick about what’s being venerated?
“It hasn’t reached me if that’s the case,” says Andy. “We’re very much celebrating the positive side. The workhouses, the orphans – that side of it is not touched upon. It’s more about escapism, at the end of the day.”
‘ IT’S ALL OLD- FASHIONED NICE WAY, IN A VERY WITH A GOOD SENSE OF DECORUM’