One recent misty morning in Taunton, the county town of Somerset, I was taken on a tour of our decaying public realm. The flowerbeds, which have won Britain in Bloom contests, will no longer be planted along the neat Victorian promenades of Vivary Park. Funding for the Brewhouse, a modernist theatre of Bourbon-biscuit-coloured brick decorated with a Shakespeare mural, is ending. At a popular café, a server with Down’s syndrome will lose the employment service that supports the job he loves. The local swimming pool was shut to make way for riverside flats and shops – where some units have sat empty for two years. A Georgian market house, home to the local radio station and tourist information centre, is “vulnerable”. A bus subsidised by the council, bearing its rusting white livery, will no longer run. Even the public toilets will close.
These were just a handful of entries on a “heartbreaking” 200-line spreadsheet the Somerset Council leader, Bill Revans, was toiling over when I visited (councils finalised their budgets in February). A burly retired history teacher and proud Somerset boy born in Taunton, Revans, who is 55, looked bereft. With his russet beard, crinkly-eyed smile and sorrowful baritone chuckle, he seemed like a reverse Father Christmas: he was taking things away, door by door.
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