Spirit of place: Stratford

The new theatre is one sexy building

I thought the old one was a sexy building as well... I know, it's such a bloke thing

To Stratford for an outing yesterday, on a train full of families obviously desperate to get the kids out of the house. So I sat there making notes on Crowley's Liber Resh vel Helios, with a view to developing some kind of daily practice.
I have a somewhat love-hate relationship with Stratford. I loved it as a child, I loved the touristy nature of it, I loved visiting the houses associated with Shakespeare, I loved that you could get souvenirs and almost take home a little bit of the world of Shakespeare. In retrospect I loved that so much of the Stratford tourist industry is actually aimed at foreign visitors. To revisit this world now is actually to revisit the world of my childhood, where it wasn't naff to buy a tin of tea with a union jack plastered across it, and it felt good to walk through Ann Hathaway's cottage.
But I now feel differently about Stratford, and in and of itself frankly don't like it as a town. It comes across as a welcoming cosmopolitan place, but I do feel Stratford has a lukewarm relationship with its own fame. If it were not for the Shakespeare industry Stratford would just be another sleepy Warwickshire town. The house prices are simply astronomical, and this is reflected in the nature of the people who obviously live there now: snobby, rude, and downright unwelcoming of other people. Stratford has been gentrified by its tourist industry and in the process attracted a crowd of braying rich residents, far removed from the town's relatively humble origins. It feels as if the energies of Stratford are disjointed between these several different identities, and while there is obviously a presence of magical people there I have no idea how they feel about this. Does anyone else experience Stratford this way, or is it just me? The RSC shop is selling prints of the top print at over £200 each. I stretched to a tea towel print of it. I did, though, find in a charity shop the DVD of Prick Up Your Ears, the film about the life of the playwright Joe Orton. There will be more of this anon in this blog, since I didn't realise it was available on DVD, and I had forgotten how formative it was for me!
On the way back I was interested to notice a plaque at Stratford station announcing that it won a Best Presented Station award in 1988 (pic to follow), obviously still a source of price a mere 22 years later. It was a relief to get back to friendly Brum, where there is currently an installation (again, pic to follow) called Best of Birmingham, by Birmingham Parks and Gardens, which consists of a pretend Greek temple and a Mini filled with flowers. It's not snobby, but it's home.