Doncaster

It’s been a while since I last blogged on here, and I’m aware that there is something counterintuitive about choosing to make another post on my travel blog at a time when a lot of people would tell you to stay inside and lock the doors.  The irony is that I have indeed spent most of this weekend at home, which means thinking of things to do to avoid boredom, which means (in this case) blogging.  You may feel free to take this post about Doncaster, and any posts that may—if I feel like it—appear in the coming weeks, as recommendations for places to visit once the pandemic has passed.

Date of trip: Wednesday 11th March 2020
Journey time: approx. 3h outbound, approx. 2h40 inbound, because trains are weird
Fare: £64.15 (Off-Peak return, with 16–25 Railcard)

Not that this post is necessarily a recommendation.  Whatever there was to do there, Doncaster wouldn’t be a good place to visit from Oxford, on account of being very far away.  I went because I was travelling back from Leeds this week, and for stupid train reasons had to wait for ninety minutes at Doncaster.  (There was a train thirty minutes after I arrived that would have taken me to Oxford, which didn’t exist on the app I used—I was so confused.)

I’d been to Donny before, both with family and with school: the trip was to the Doncaster Dome, a combined ice-skating and swimming pool centre where the ice rink has two different levels with ice ramps between them.  Surprisingly, I didn’t injure myself skating—that was a decade later, here in Oxford.  But, anyway, I wanted to see what it was like now.  In forty minutes there, I found enough material for a blog post, which I therefore knew I had to write.

I should say, it is easy to mock Doncaster for things that are essentially a proxy for wealth, like closed shops, or whatever.  I don’t want to do that, because I don’t think jokes are particularly funny when they’re punching down, especially when they’re made by some entitled Oxford kid.¹  No, I just intend to mock Doncaster for being… a bit weird.

Upon arrival, I lugged my case into the lift up to the Frenchgate Shopping Centre.  When the doors opened, I found this:

Yes, that is indeed a poem about Ed Balls.  And, I guess there’s nothing particularly wrong with writing a poem about your local MP, especially if he’s been on Strictly Come Dancing.  Kinda sweet, really, if normally the sort of thing one would put in the letters page of the local newspaper, and not on a wall in a food court.  Except… Balls was never the local MP.  He was the MP for two seats in Leeds and Wakefield; he was born in Norwich, attended school in Nottingham, and went to Keble College, Oxford.  As far as I can tell from his Wikipedia article, he has no connection to Doncaster whatsoever.

The weirdness went on further into the mall, when I saw this:

That is indeed a place to attach love locks, because there is clearly no more romantic gesture than sealing your love with a padlock next to a branch of Deichmann Shoes.²  “Just like they do in the city of love, Paris”, it says—except that’s really more of a thing tourists do, not locals, and in any case they removed all the locks from the railings on the Pont des Arts back in 2015, because they were making the bridge start to collapse.³  “Our bridges can no longer withstand your gestures of love”, said the city, in a sentence that sounds like a metaphor without actually being one.

The extremely tiny lift with two floors but eight buttons was confusing, but manageable.  Confusing too was the centre’s marketing slogan—“It’s not a revolution, it’s a revelation”—about which Angelica Schuyler and/or Lin-Manuel Miranda would like a word.  Then there was the shop on the outside with a big poster advertising that they sold hand sanitiser.  Excellent, if slightly opportunistic, marketing, you might say.  A bit more confusing was the fact that it was a shoe shop.

I’ve realised that, in fact, almost all of this post has been about the Frenchgate Shopping Centre.  And in truth, I come not to mock the Frenchgate, but to baffle at it.  Aside from its eccentricities, it really was busy and well-cared for, and a pleasant place to shop—and it was also one of the only places in the country where you could still find antibacterial hand soap, for which it deserves a lot more credit than I might have thought a couple of weeks ago.

But there is one thing I found to write about in Doncaster outside the shopping centre, which was the station.  I’ve passed through the station far more times than I’ve got off, and each time I’ve wondered at why they couldn’t find a better way to build this: Platform 0.

Doncaster is one of a number of stations where Network Rail have built a new platform at the “wrong” end, numbered it with a zero so they didn’t have to renumber everything else, and crossed their fingers that they won’t have to build any more.  (Platform –1 sounds like the boarding point for Kennilworthy Whisp’s train to the World Cup in J.K. Rowling’s new interpretive dance piece based on Quidditch Through the Ages.)

Anyway, there’s nothing really wrong with a platform with a weird number—Leeds has extended at the “wrong” end twice now, and last time ended up with Platforms W, X and Y, but life went on.⁴  The problem is that it’s slightly up the line from everything else—so, to get there from the main (indeed, only) entrance, you have to go down to the subway, across to Platform 1, up, along the platform, up onto a long footbridge that crosses the line at a diagonal, and then back down again.  (You can see that on a map of the station, though it compresses the bridge substantially.  Also it has the railway line on the wrong side.)

Anyway, if that sounds bad, imagine doing it with luggage, or with mobility problems.  Imagine if one of the four lifts that that involves breaks down.  I can understand it was probably the only way to increase capacity and they probably couldn’t afford to extend the subway.  But it very much feels tacked-on.  Forgotten.  Unloved.

Anyway, yeah, after an hour’s wait on the station I got on a train to Oxford, and that was it.  But there you have it.  Doncaster.  Baffling.

This post does not mean that the hiatus is deinitely over and a return to regularly-scheduled posts will come soon.  I do have places I’ve been to maybe write about, but I didn’t find inspiration to start blogging again at the time, so it seems unlikely I will now.  Meanwhile, I don’t anticipate being able to go on any day trips in the near future, for obvious reasons.  But we’ll see.  I still haven’t escaped Oxford entirely, so maybe there’s life in this blog yet.

¹ Am I entitled to call myself a “kid” still at nearly 26?  Answers on a postcard.

² We gloss over the fact that the heart was placed there for the centre’s fiftieth anniverary, two years ago.

³ Not that that’s stopped the tourists, of course.  When I was in Paris in 2017, I noticed that tourists had taken to attaching them to the lampposts instead.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—just like they say in the city of love, Paris.

⁴ People on various forum threads, remember Platform W, but, in admittedly a cursory Google search, I cannot find any existing evidence for Platforms X and Y online—probably because they only had those numbers very briefly, as soon after they were built they renumbered the whole station.  Being the sad person that I am, I’m pretty sure I have a map showing those platforms as part of a Leeds on Track newsletter about the rebuilding, which I now consider a vital historical artefact.