England flags were everywhere in the area of Wales where I grew up.
Rhyl is very English. I grew up with majority Scouse and Brummie accents and nobody spoke Welsh. Welsh classes were openly ridiculed, despite it being a part of the curriculum and actually learning Welsh was never a consideration. We would ask our parents if we were English or Welsh and be consumed with alienation at Eisteddfod events. It was impossible to tell what nominal nationality I had running through my veins just from looking, and The English are so loud. Englishness permeates everything it comes near, whatever class or background people belong to. There is something about the boldness of the English flag that suits. No nonsense, big red lines. What more do you want. The English flag communicates a “got here first” aesthetic that it is impossible to talk over.
The English, a phrase I will keep using to describe more an attitude than a people, are a force. The English can knock the legs out from under a town. Its theirs now. Try and take it back from them. They dare you. Rhyl is based near Rhuddlan castle, part of the Ring of Iron, a strategic line of castles built by Edward I to keep the Welsh in check. I have always felt the presence of this castle despite it being a crumbled ruin, and I wonder how its construction has echoed through history. Every wall of it sealing us off from our origins.
We relied on The English and we made no plan B. We weren’t prepared for them to stop coming. We are part of a modern tradition of seaside towns that gave their all; for nothing. But Rhyl is different from towns like Blackpool in that we have had our identity and national culture permanently changed by our holidaymaking past. I am sure there are people in Rhyl who feel Welsh. As teenagers, some of my peers rebelled by becoming nationalistic, as though they had dug in the back garden and suddenly uncovered something in the soil that was truly theirs.
I grew up in the 90s. There was something idyllic about being a child in Rhyl at this time. I remember as a very small child going to the fair, a fair where my mum used to work and once ladled hot gravy onto a mans head, a story I loved hearing growing up. I have the kind of memories where you are not sure if you dreamed it. A big fun house on the prom. Was that really there? LazerQuest by the marina. Did that ever exist? Some memories still glow inside me. Evenings rollerblading down the prom as the sun set being one of them.
But we didn’t see something coming over that hazy horizon. Cheap flights. The growing availability and popularity of the all-inclusive resort killed the seaside town. Certainly not immigration, as I saw a grifting little worm of a politician state recently while walking around an area of Blackpool that has likely had no income or investment since the early 2000s. The only immigration Rhyl has really experienced is from The English and it suffers from exactly the same decline. An argument people tend to use for working class areas “going downhill due to immigration” are disproved by simply looking and hard to stomach when I spent so many years watching The English treat our town like a playground. Because who cares? They didn’t live there. We would walk down Rhyl High Street on our way to the pub as carrier bags and crisp packets swirled around us. Chippy wrappers and polystyrene burger boxes piled up in doorways and seagulls as big as toddlers swooped down to collect what they felt they were owed. The town was trashed like this every day of summer. But what we wouldn’t give to have those halcyon days again, when the burgers were bought and the seagulls were fed.
“They put up posters of Rhyl on the walls of the prison” a man told me a few months ago.
“Ah I see” I replied, imagining what such a poster would look like and only seeing the old hand drawn “Sunny Rhyl” advertisements from back in the 50s.
We were sat outside a café. My mother had been eager to show me her usual Saturday routine of getting a coffee and sitting on the tables outside the cafe on Market Street. Once she had updated me on the personal news of lots of people I had never heard of, we got talking to the couple next to us. I sipped at my hot chocolate from a chipped mug.
“Rhyl isn’t what it used to be” said the woman who was smoking a cigarette rolled in black papers.
I started to imagine what Rhyl “used to be”, before I was even born. There is the Rhyl of my parents era, of which I know only a small amount. There are the old black and white films showing people in uncomfortable clothes moving up and down the prom at double speed, looking like ants flowing in formation. There is the video of the time Buffalo Bill visited. But before? Rhyl was part of the great Victorian expansion. It was built to be a resort for Victorians and before that it was mostly marshland. There was no Rhyl before. The English didn’t claim Rhyl, it was built for them. I am not disenfranchised. Like an extra in a film, I only exist in their reality. I am part of a purely capitalistic dream that was dreamt hundreds of years ago. There is no identity that has been robbed from me. I came from this soil but The English dug me out.