'What is this place anyway?' I asked.

 'Training centre, sir,' was all he would say and in any case we had reached the end of the drive. He watched to make sure I went. I walked back across the big field, then paused at the far end to look at the Welbeck Abbey roof rising from the treetops. I was pleased to know that the Ministry of Defence had maintained the tunnels and underground rooms, but it seemed an awful shame that the place was so formidably shut to the public. It isn't every day after all that the British aristocracy produces someone of W.J.C. ScottBentinck's rare and extraordinary mental loopiness, though in fairness it must be said they give it their best shot. And with this thought to chew on, I turned and began the long trudge back to Worksop.

 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

 I SPENT A PLEASANT NIGHT IN LINCOLN, WANDERING ITS STEEP AND ancient streets before and after dinner, admiring the squat, dark immensity of the cathedral and its two Gothic towers, and looking forward very much to seeing it in the morning. I like Lincoln, partly because it is pretty and well preserved but mostly because it seems so agreeably remote. H.V. Morton, in In Search of England, likened it to an inland St Michael's Mount standing above the great sea of the Lincolnshire plain, and that's exactly right. If you look on a map, it's only just down the road a bit from Nottingham and Sheffield, but it feels far away and quite forgotten. I like that very much.

 Just about the time of my visit there was an interesting report in the Independent about a longrunning dispute between the dean of Lincoln Cathedral and his treasurer. Six years earlier, it appears, the treasurer, along with his wife, daughter and a family friend, had taken the cathedral's treasured copy of the Magna Carta off to Australia for a sixmonth fundraising tour. According to the Independent, the Australian visitors to the exhibition had contributed a grand total of just .938 over six months, which would suggest either that Australians are extraordinarily tightfisted or that the dear old Independent was a trifle careless with its facts. In any case, what is beyond dispute is that the tour was a financial disaster. It lost over .500,000 a pretty hefty bill, when you think about it, for four people and a piece of parchment. Most of this the Australian government had graciously covered, but the cathedral was still left nursing a .56,000 loss. The upshot is that the dean gave the story to the press, causing outrage among the cathedral chapter; the Bishop of Lincoln held an inquiry at which he commanded the chapter to resign; the chapter refused to resign; and now everybody was mad at pretty much everybody else. This had been going on for six years.

 So when I stepped into the lovely, echoing immensity of Lincoln Cathedral the following morning I was rather hoping that there would be hymnals flying about and the unseemly but exciting sight of clerics wrestling in the transept, but in fact all was disappointingly calm. On the other hand, it was wonderful to be in a great ecclesiastical structure so little disturbed by shuffling troops of tourists. When you consider the hordes that flock to Salisbury, York, Canterbury, Bath and so many of the other great churches of England, Lincoln's relative obscurity is something of a small miracle. It would be hard to think of a place of equal architectural majesty less known to outsiders Durham, perhaps.

 The whole of the nave was filled with ranks of padded metal chairs. I've never understood this. Why can't they have wooden pews in these cathedrals? Every English cathedral I've ever seen has been like this, with semistraggly rows of chairs that can be stacked or folded away. Why? Do they clear the chairs away for barndancing or something? Whatever the reason, they always look cheap and out of keeping with the surrounding splendour of soaring vaults, stained glass and Gothic tracery. What a heartbreak it is sometimes to live in an age of such consummate costconsciousness. Still, it must be said that the modern intrusions do help you to notice how extravagantly deployed were the skills of medieval stonemasons, glaziers and woodcarvers, and how unstinting was the use of materials.

 I would like to have lingered, but I had a vital date to keep. I needed to be in Bradford by midafternoon in order to see one of the most exciting visual offerings in the entire world, as far as I am concerned. On the first Saturday of every month, you see, Pictureville Cinema, part of the large and popular Museum of Photography, Film and Something Else, shows an original, uncut version of This Is Cinerama. It is the only place in the world now where you can see this wonderful piece of cinematic history, and this was the first Saturday of the month.

 I can't tell you how much I was looking forward to this. I fretted all the way that I would miss my rail connection at Doncaster and then I fretted again that I would miss the one at Leeds, but I reachedBradford in plenty of time nearly three hours early, in fact, which made me tremble slightly, for what is one to do in Bradford with three hours to kill?

 Bradford's role in life is to make every place else in the world look better in comparison, and it does this very well. Nowhere on this trip would I see a city more palpably forlorn. Nowhere would I pass more vacant shops, their windows soaped or covered with tattered posters for pop concerts in other, more vibrant communities like Huddersfield and Pudsey, or more office buildings festooned with TO LET signs. At least one shop in three in the town centre was empty and most of the rest seemed to be barely hanging on. Soon after this visit, Rackham's, the main department store, would announce it was closing. Such life as there was had mostly moved indoors to a characterless compound called the Arndale Centre. (And why is it, by the way, that Sixties shopping centres are always called the Arndale Centre?) But mostly Bradford seemed steeped in a perilous and irreversible decline.

 Once this was one of the greatest congregations of Victorian architecture anywhere, but you would scarcely guess it now. Scores of wonderful buildings were swept away to make room for wide new roads and angular office buildings with painted plywood insets beneath each window. Nearly everything in the city suffers from wellintentioned but misguided meddling by planners. Many of the busier streets have the kind of pedestrian crossings that you have to negotiate in stages one stage to get to an island in the middle, then another long wait with strangers before you are given four seconds to sprint to the other side which makes even the simplest errands tiresome, particularly if you want to make a eatercorner crossing and have to wait at four sets of lights to travel a net distance of thirty yards. Worse still, along much of Hall Ings and Princes Way the hapless pedestrian is forced into a series of bleak and menacing subways that meet in large circles, open to the sky but always in shadow, and so badly drained, I'm told, that someone once drowned in one during a flash downpour.

 You won't be surprised to hear that I used to wonder about these planning insanities a lot, and then one day I got a book from Skipton Library called Bradford Outline for Tomorrow or something like that. It was from the late Fifties or early Sixties and it was full of blackandwhite architect's drawings of gleaming pedestrian precincts peopled with prosperous, confidently striding, semistick figures, and office buildings of the type that loomed over me now, and I suddenly saw, with a kind of astonishing clarity, what they were trying to do. I mean to say, they genuinely thought they were building a new world a Britain in which the brooding, sootblackened buildings and narrow streets of the past would be swept away and replaced with sunny plazas, shiny offices, libraries, schools and hospitals, all linked with brightly tiled underground passageways where pedestrians would be safely segregated from the passing traffic. Everything about it looked bright and clean and fun. There were even pictures of women with pushchairs stopping to chat in the openair subterranean circles. And what we got instead was a city of empty, peeling office blocks, discouraging roads, pedestrian drains and economic desolation. Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but at least we would have been left with a city of crumbling old buildings instead of crumbling new ones.