Forgotten twins - Britain's neglected twin towns

After the muted reception for the Goat’s slow-build satire on Trump’s cupidity and corruption published on Sunday, here’s a change of gear.

It was a great idea to start with. Coventry, bombed to smithereens in the war, entered into a “bond of friendship” in 1944 with Stalingrad, a city of 500,000 people reduced to less than ten thousand inhabitants by the Nazis’ brutal siege. Stalingrad (renamed Volgograd after Stalin’s dehabilitation) became one of Coventry’s 26 twin towns and cities, vigintisextuplets to be precise (that’s more than any other British town)¹. There’s even Volgograd Place, a public square underneath a north eastern section of Coventry’s ring road, specially designed to evoke the bleak devastation of Stalingrad after the siege ended.

Coventry twinned with similarly ravaged cities soon after the war - Kiel in 1947 and Dresden in 1956, for example. In 1947 Coventry presented Kiel with a cross made from medieval nails found in the ruins of its cathedral.

This was when twinning was bold and beautiful, a symbol of hope, trust and forgiveness. Now there are more than 40,000 twins in Europe alone. Some of the arrangements make sense - Oxford is twinned with Bonn, Leiden and Grenoble and other university cities, and Canterbury with religiously significant cities Rheims in France and Vladimir in Russia². Some are for fun - Dull in Scotland is twinned with Boring in Oregon, and now Bland Shire in Australia. Others seem like acts of mutual penance - Wuhan is twinned with Manchester. One gave the world COVID, the other the Gallagher brothers. Fair exchange.

Some are puzzling - how did Medway manage to twin with Cadiz? Did the Gaditanos actually bother to visit the less than picturesque Kent docklands, or did they sign off based on a picture of Rochester castle and the usual guff about Dickens? Medway is seriously punching here. How did Brentwood manage to pair off with beautiful Montbazon in the Loire valley and Roth in Bavaria? It may be famous for its density of cosmetically enhanced inhabitants, the home of The Only Way is Essex and the Sugar Hut, but no amount of surgery could glow Brentwood up to be a match for its much hotter European siblings. Strasbourg selling itself short with Leicester is another head-scratcher.

The Goat realises that it is Trumpily conflating imagery of family members and dating here. Twin towns are ostensibly family members, but yet towns enter into an exclusive relationship with another town (at least for that country). They are really town-friends. You ought not to be shallow enough to pick a town-friend based on looks but because you have things in common. Though of course physical appearance is a factor - beautiful cathedral towns tend to pair up (Chichester and Chartres), likewise ugly industrial towns (Rochdale and Bielefeld).

There’s not much news about failed attempts to pair up, where a town swipes left. Poor Rochdale was apparently rejected by Chernobyl in 2017. It was setting its sights pretty low because the Ukrainian town and a 1,000 square kilometer around it are uninhabited due to radioactive contamination. As the Rochdale Herald reported: A spokesman for Chernobyl said “Rochdale and Chernobyl are a little too similar for students from here to really benefit from a cultural exchange visit. The towns look exactly the same.” Ouch.

Wincanton was taking no chance of being rejected when it decided to twin with Ankh-Morpork, a city state near the Circle Sea in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. It remains the only city in the world to be twinned with a fictional place.

Why twin with a fictional place? But then why twin with a real place, or a semi-fictional cosmetically enhanced semi-scripted place like Brentwood? Western Europe has been peaceful for 80 years so there is not the urgent need to build bridges of friendship as in the past. Councils don’t have any money to fund anything like this any more. British students don’t need to learn other languages any more - exchanges are dying out. If children travel abroad they want to go to big cities, not to some obscure town hand-picked to be similar to their own dull abode. I felt sorry for the bedraggled gaggle of Italian teenagers who approached us in the rain in Winchester yesterday asking if we knew “somewhere to drink”, and even more sorry for them when Alison sent them off the wrong way. When you’re young you don’t want some picturesque well-heeled market town steeped in history and full of old people with no sense of direction - you want cheap bars.

Petersfield, the Goat’s home town, is twinned with Barentin in Normandy and Warendorf, a town in northern Germany. You wouldn’t know except for the sign when you enter the town and a French market in the square each year, when Barentinians used to schlep over to sell cheese and stuff with little success. They seem to have given up now, maybe it’s a Brexit thing. We’ve taken back control of our market. A road is called Barentin Way. There are no school exchanges I am aware of and no other initiatives, except for a low key twinning association that organises annual exchange visits for what seems a pretty elderly crowd.

When I was a schoolboy in Brentwood I stayed with a French family in a town on the banks of Lake Geneva. There were actually two of us English boys staying with a French boy and I made fun of him to try and show off to the other English boy. Later we played in a football match with his mates and I was shocked at the brutality of their tackling against me. In the end one of them pushed me over and I sprained my wrist. That injury was partly to blame for me later crashing the moped that I hired and which his father had stood guarantor for (and partly because I only discovered what a throttle was when riding it). Meanwhile my wife’s rather miserable brother had a French exchange student in Gravesend who called her brother a “grumble boy”, thereby creating an anecdote for my mother-in-law to repeat almost every time we meet. If I could travel back in time I think I would try and intervene to stop that French boy saying “grumble-boy” rather than change the course of my own exchange. Just so I don’t have to hear that story any more.

So the youngsters miss out on all those character-building experiences. Maybe twinning is an anachronism now. There are very few new twins - Trowbridge with Kostopil was a recent one last year - a “hugely symbolic gesture of support”. Some ammo or a couple of drones would have been more welcome, but better than nothing.

Even though twins may be living separate lives, just keeping in touch via Christmas cards between their mayors, it’s still unusual, and a bit of a shock, when towns un-twin. There were a spate of these in the early 2010s as Euroscepticism was on the rise and austerity was biting. Bishops Stortford dumped Friedberg and Villiers-sur-Marne in 2011 due to “lack of interest”. Harsh, it could at least have said “it’s not you it’s me”, Bishops Stortford is not ready for that level of commitment. Dumped by Bishops Stortford. Though Goat research suggests that Friedberg had something with Chippenham at the same time so that may have been a factor.

So most twins are probably living separate lives, just keeping up the relationship for the sake of appearances. Is there something that can spice it up - maybe forming a throuple with an exciting young Asian city? There are more than 50 twinning relationships between Britain and China for example. Not so easy for them to nip over for the May Day holiday food market but exchange trips would certainly be an experience.

Or should twins get much closer? Map every Petersfield resident to their nearest Barentin or Warendorf equivalent - is there a late middle-aged Barentinian seemingly doing nothing useful with his life except writing wry and quirky under-appreciated Substacks? Maybe re-design each town to be an exact replica of the other so that Barentinians visiting Petersfield will instantly feel at home (and not just in Barentin Way). This would mean that every Petersfield planning permission would also need to be approved in Barentin and Warendorf - catnip for the East Hampshire District Council, one last act of bureaucratic defiance before it disappears next year.

Maybe we need to face reality - there is a lack of council money for any initiatives and the activities that do occur are not attracting young people. Twinned towns, at least western European twins, will soon be little more than historic. Maybe also the internet has made the world more connected now so that it’s not as important for young people to get the experience of making friends with people from other cultures and realising how much we all have in common. Young people realise that already.

I expect our twins will continue to gently co-exist, becoming less and less relevant. But it would still be useful to find ways to connect us with people from non-European cultures, especially countries that are potentially hostile to us. So yes to Coventry-Volgograd and yes to Manchester-Wuhan, not so much to Barentin and Warendorf. Though they are on my bucket list, for around 15 days years time, when the limit of my adventurousness will be driving a large green car slowly and erratically between European towns and villages, shuffling round old churches, spending half the day in cafes drinking tea and eating cakes, then eating in a modest restaurant absurdly early and getting my head down by 9pm. Perfect.

1. Volgograd is currently a suspended twin after the Ukraine invasion

2. Not suspended after the Ukraine invasion