Places in Oakhaven
Radworth is one ward of a Midlands city that does not exist. These are the buildings you can walk into, and what tends to happen in them.
Nightclub
The Sweatbox
A brick factory that stopped making anything a long time ago, and found a second use for its floor. The…
Licensed betting office
Last Tenner Bets
Single-zero roulette on a UK table - all English on the baize, no French - and every one of the hundred and…
Fish bar
Chish & Fips
Ten things on the chalk board and a fryer that has been going long enough to have opinions. You queue, you…
Convenience
Bossman’s Corner Shop
The shop on the corner, and the one the street actually uses. A three-storey corner building with a red…
Butcher
Bagshaws Butchers
White painted brick over two storeys and a slate roof, and across the front an oxblood fascia eleven and a…
Parish church
St Cuthbert’s
Eighteen sixty-eight, Gothic Revival, and older than every house around it: the estate grew up round the…
Police
Radworth Road Police Station
Where the game starts, though not in a way you chose. A car leaves this building with a young man in the back…
Public house
The Slag & Slurry
A corner shop unit that became a pub and never looked back. Three floors of it, with an iron-bracket hanging…
Civic
Bestholme Job Centre
Brick, a flat roof and a parapet, twenty-four metres by fourteen over two storeys, and a light green…
Golf club
Radworth Golf Club
Eighteen holes on the rising ground north of the estate, par 72, six thousand four hundred and nineteen…
Hydroponics
Green Boss
A Victorian corner unit on the ringway with GREEN BOSS across the front and a sign board three and a half…
Snooker club
The Baulk Line
A 1904 north-light billiard hall, built when a room full of tables was a respectable way to spend an evening…
Members’ club
Radworth Working Men’s Club
Nineteen thirty-two, red brick, Crittall windows and a hipped tiled roof, with a white faience surround round…
Council
The Council Depot
The Oakhaven City Council Depot: a shed eighty metres by sixty with five roller-door bays along the front, a…
The river
The Oakhaven
The river runs west under four bridges and takes its time about it: seven and a half kilometres of slow olive…
The old workings
Below Radworth
A mile out of town, eighty-odd metres back from the north ring road and six hundred metres from the nearest…
Waste & recycling
The Incinerator Plant
The end of the line for everything the town throws away. Both of the council’s rounds finish here: the…
Private society
The Temple of the Unsleeping Eye
Egyptian Revival, nineteen twenty-three, and comprehensively the wrong size for the street it stands on. Two…
Used cars
Cutshaw & Shutt
Cutshaw & Shutt has stood on the grass east of the Thornyholt Roundabout since 1987, or so the fascia…
Drive-thru burgers
Burger Boss
Kimberton Road has one drive-thru, and Burger Boss will tell you so on the tray liner. It takes the east half…
Caribbean kitchen
Jerk Hut
The other half of the drive-thru on Kimberton Road, and by some distance the better-smelling half. Jerk Hut…