The road out of Whitehaven lurches and corkscrews through the west Cumbrian hills. These are steep and largely treeless, smoothed by prehistoric ice, pilled with sheep and webbed with dry stone walls. It is the land of Withnail and Wordsworth: the daffodil-fancier was born in Cockermouth, lived with his mother’s family (he loathed them) in Penrith and bounded roe-like over the mountains of Keswick.
Behind a grey council estate on Whitehaven’s southeasternmost edge, in the borough of Copeland, sits a clutch of new houses. One of the biggest is a six-bed with precipitous stairs, its garden ringed by the green landscape. In Surrey you would need to be rich to buy somewhere like this, but Haylee and Gareth McCarron are not millionaires.
The house cost £275,000 and they moved in three weeks ago. It smells, like all new builds, of expectation and the promise of memories. The McCarrons earn about £90,000 together and proudly say it took them only six months to sell their previous home. In London their money might buy a one-bed former council flat in the East End; new builds there often sell within 48 hours.
Last week Copeland emerged as the last scrap of England in which houses are still affordable — the average home there costs less than three times the median wage. In Kensington property costs 30 times what people typically earn, and even elsewhere in the Lake District you will need eight times the median wage to buy a home.
Like almost everyone in Whitehaven and its environs, the McCarrons owe everything to Sellafield. It will take 120 more years to dismantle the world’s first commercial nuclear power station, which was closed in March 2003 but still stockpiles almost all the country’s plutonium. About 12,000 people continue to troop to the site every day, and 10,000 more work for it indirectly. Shops, restaurants, pubs, car dealerships and almost every other business depends on the plant. The council and the NHS employ only a few hundred people locally; there are few other jobs.
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The McCarrons have worked there for generations. “My dad is 35 years at Sellafield now,” says Gareth. “Me grandpa worked 40 years there.”
“If you don’t work for Sellafield,” says Haylee, “the only option is to move away. A lot of friends finish university and can’t get a job — they come home and Sellafield is on the doorstep.”
Would you want to live here? During the Second World War, TNT was made near Sellafield precisely because it was so far from anywhere. Carlisle, the nearest city, is a good hour away by car. A decent shopping trip means a two-hour schlep to Newcastle. And a huge and ageing nuclear facility runs the risk of accident and terrorism.
Whitehaven’s buildings are cracked and dirty; weeds sprout from empty shopfronts. A once-handsome 1930s building is now Chattanooga Kebab and Pizza. Every other shop seems to be flogging donated second-hand clobber; the rest are hairdressers and cheap clothing shops such as Shooz’n’Sox.
The streets trundle and squeak with harried, spotty kids pushing hand-me-down prams. Half a dozen minicab drivers mooch on Duke Street. For all that the McCarrons are athletic fell walkers and say their kids are “crag rats”, Copeland was recently confirmed as the fattest borough in England.
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I meet a man from Sellafield’s press office in a pub by the harbour. “This is England’s best-kept secret,” he burrs, and then adds: “If it was in St Tropez you’d be paying a lot of money.” A few boats bob morosely in the grey autumn light, but it’s going to be a long wait for the superyachts.
This is a hard-hewn part of England — graft and chemicals, the worked-out seams of old communities. Whitehaven has stapled its expectations and desires to a single crumbling piece of 1950s expediency, born of distrust and fear.
Despite the deprivation and the dangers, I envied the McCarrons not just for their beautiful home and the sublime landscape it looks over, but for the strength of the bonds they feel with this place.
Theirs may be some of the most affordable housing in the country, but there is nothing cheap about that.