II Beaumaris sits on the eastern edge of the island of Anglesey, and looks across the tidal waterways of the Menai Strait at the Welsh mainland. Like many British towns, it lives off its past. History in Beaumaris is a guided tour. You can tour the castle, the stately old homes and the streets. I got so used to going on tours that at dinner I half-expected the waiter to offer me a tour of the food: ‘here is a dish that was eaten by King Edward I in 1300.’ Tours offer little sustenance. The town was in service to an image of its past. Walking its streets, there were so many small panels, announcing that this house was lived in by x, on y date, that the town began to feel like a ghost – the unwelcome inhabitant of a dwelling whose true owners would return one day. The panels were IOUs: the past’s contract with the future. Looming over the town stands the castle, which is, or so one of the panels told me, Britain’s ‘most perfect example of symmetrical concentric planning.’ Edward I built it here to control the Menai Strait, and counter Welsh uprisings against English colonial rule. In 1807, Thomas Bulkeley bought the castle from the English crown. And if it is the castle’s towers that dominate the city spatially, then it is the Bulkeley family that does so economically. They have run the town since the fifteenth century. Up until the nineteenth, the town turned around this lineage of English aristocrats; it was a feudal economy of hunters, farmers and domestic servants, all serving at the behest of Lord Bulkeley.
III In the nineteenth century, industrialisation and increasing artisanal production in Beaumaris was accompanied by the decline of Bulkeley power. The process reached its high point during the First World War, when shipbuilding became Beaumaris’s major industry and the Bulkeleys lost many of their male heirs in combat. Baron Hill Estate, the grand mansion above Beaumaris in which they lived, fell into disrepair. Today, the boatbuilding business is finished – vessels constructed of metal and plastic have replaced the wooden boats that were Beaumaris’s pride. The town’s economy is now almost entirely reliant on tourists, who come to see the crumbling castle and celebrate Britain’s feudal past. The tourists are wistful. Something of the holiday camp pervades Beaumaris’s presentation of itself: a time outside of time, where one can come to forget the present, and marvel in the splendour of so much unreality. I thought this over in a solidly built pub on the main street, nursing a beer. Soon, I began listening to the conversation in the booth opposite me. What language were they speaking? It wasn’t Arabic. Slowly, I realised it was Welsh.
above and left: The patient labour of boat-making. Ship design found in the old Gallows Point sheds Bulkely Arms Hotel receipt Return to sender: ship-builder’s address, found amid the debris of the last shed.
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