Time to wear Purple: Please Joanna, what is a Baisingstoke?

Was the question asked after a particularly bileful blog after a day's shopping in the mall of hell. It made me think and then, talking to my darling Dubs on the phone this morning I was making him laugh about the horrors of it and he said,"Write it." So here it is.

Some basic history first - Basiingstoke was a sleepy Hampshire town whose main claim to fame lay in the Kennet and Avon Canal that ran right through the middle. It made for a bustling market as cattle barges bound for London would also bring prime cows for the weekly cattle market. To commemorate this there some rather neo - Stalinist statues of bargess and farmers straddling the roadside by the station and the entrance to the mall of hell.

In the 1960s London's bomb damage in the East End was still not cleared and it was decided to move whole communities to New Towns as overspill. Basingstoke was one of these - the canal long gone it had slowly become a sleepy Hampshire town again with few pretensions and even fewer aspirations

Enter the Eastenders - I know for a fact that for one of the Kray's funerals the school I taught at was half empty - asked where they had been, "To show our respect Miss, they looked after their own."

The town grew madly, new estates with the worst of the seventies ugly buildings sprang up over green fields and leafy lanes became dual carriageways linking roundabout after roundabout to Reading, Newbury and Oxford and of course, London. It became known as the Dallas of the South with its high rise super office blocks and its shiny newness.

The trouble was that Basingstoke was in the midst of an identity crisis - old Hampshire country folk who wanted their market and a few comfortable shops and an ever growing population of young Londoners who wanted more. And somewhere in between the doughty middle classes holding out for the town to become better known for better reasons. Twinning with Alencon allowed some cultural exchange. There was already a, not very good repertory theatre and a slightly flea bitten cinema so the race was on to re culture the town.

It is a truth universally acknowledged (sorry Jane) that a town in need of culture must build a concert hall - so they did; the Anvil - a nod to the agricultural past. Now I love the Anvil - great acoustics, superb artistic director and team. All very well for the aspirant middle class but what about the thousands still in their Hampshire East End enclaves. What did the Anvil do for them?

The thing is, Basingstoke was like a lost child seeking to find her identity - nest stop leisure parks with bowling , skating, ice hockey, flume rides and swimming pools and McDonald's. Big success - huge. They went one step further and built a transport museum - biggish success.

So now the town had Culture, Fun and Education. The next and most obvious of all was to worship at the alter of the 90s gods of shopping. Hence Festival Place the mall from hell. All under one roof, over heated by the press of unwashed bodies, shop after shop selling the same thing in different colours - a food court, another cinema, another pool and a slightly dingy area for the pounsdshops and the food shops and the smokers!.

But you can build things to your hearts content but you cannot design or build a soul for a town. One of the great Cromwellian sieges took place here and that puritan mentality is hard to shake. I took my drama students to a dress rehearsal of the The Good Woman of Szechuan - it was the RSC and it was amazing,unsettling and totally altered their understanding of theatre and how it integrated with its audience to question and to doubt. On the first night of the play half the audience walked out. That is Basinstoke.

And now a great joke - someone somewhere decided a little controversy was needed and commissioned a piece of art ( hate that expression - art is not something you buy like a sack of potatoes, paint and mud and stone are not art even they cost millions to some poor sucker). And it is joyous and misunderstood, for the people of Basingstoke stop and look, giggle and walk on slightly shocked. I don't know what the artist meant but I know what I see - a giant phallus, a Shiva lingum, an erect fertile giver at last of some soul of this lost town.