AMERICANA INN MANHATTAN

Ely, Cambridgeshire

I'm always afraid of going back to Ely. So many of the memories from the first twenty years of my life are bound up with this place. I want to step off the bus or train and find that it is still the early 1970s, to wander around the market with my granny, or go to my other grandparents' house in Chiefs Street for dinner before wandering off into the shops to spend my pocket money. But they are all dead now, and although many of my aunts, uncles and cousins still live in and around the city, I have no direct connection with Ely any more.

It is fully ten years since I last visited Ely. But I was born here, and I still feel a sense of ownership. It is still the touchstone for our family - my children still think of Ely, in a strange way, as where their story started.

And in fact, Ely hasn't changed that much. There are still plenty of independent shops in High Street, Fore Hill and Market Street, there are still lots of the old pubs, the Thursday market is still busy with people who have come in from the Fens on buses, and talk exactly like my grandparents. I was shocked to see that they have pulled down Cutlacks the ironmongers, and I mourn the passing of the cattle market, although that, of course, could be said for many small country towns.

Is there another Cathedral city in England where the cathedral is so utterly entwined with the streets which huddle around it? There are no other tall buildings, apart from the spire of St Mary's church. The Cathedral west tower is always there, peeping above the rooftops, wherever you look towards it.

Ely is a city, and the Isle of Ely was a proud, independent county, but neither of these mean anything now, and neither of them have any political purpose any more. Today, Ely is merely the largest place served by East Cambridgeshire District Council, a completely meaningless division of the overgrown county of Cambridgeshire. I was born in the Grange Maternity Home, some 200 yards from the Cathedral's west tower; today, it is the headquarters of East Cambridgeshire District Council.

The biggest difference from twenty years ago is how quiet the streets are - they used to be so traffic-choked, but today Ely is bypassed.

And another thing which has changed is the Lamb Hotel. This is one of those grand coaching inns you often find in small country towns. When I was little, it was dead posh - we would never have gone in there. I always associate it with wedding receptions and commercial travellers. But today, we found it was a very pleasant place to stop for lunch.

Anyone coming back to Ely after half a century away might find the gentrification of the waterside area remarkable. This was where my father was born in the 1930s, in a cheerful slum of barefoot children. Today, the houses are sought after by young professionals - the walk to the station is a couple of minutes, and we are only twenty mimutes by train from the city of Cambridge.

Ely Cathedral is architecturally one of the most magnificent buildings in England. The view from the south-east is world famous, as is the lantern tower. But the interior is rather dull, despite the wonderful unbroken vista down what is England's longest cathedral. Apart from the architecture, very little of medieval origin survives - there is a small cluster of stained glass in one chapel, and the stone carvings of the beautiful lady chapel, but that is about all. The narrow Norman aisles, with their grey, oppressive vaulting, are not really a pleasure to walk, and there are no cloisters. And while the lady chapel is breathtaking, is it any more magnificent than a dozen or more East Anglian churches - Salle, Walpole St Peter or Blythburgh, for example? Ironically, Ely is one of the few English cathedrals which charges an entrance fee, a whacking ?5.50 (Lincoln, a much more important and beautiful interior, charges ?4, while Norwich and Peterborough, the other two great medieval Cathedrals in this corner of England, are completely free).

I remember how the great west doorway and the north transept doorway would stand open during the day. As a child, I would leave my grandparents house in Chiefs Street, and walk the length of the nave and out through the transept to get to the market place. Everybody used the Cathedral to get from one part of this tiny, beautiful city to another, just as there ancestors and predecessors had for hundreds and hundreds of years. But no longer.

But I liked Ely - it was good to be back. And I shall go back again soon.

The former City Hotel on the town square in Woodville, Mississippi still houses a number of businesses on its first floor. At one point there were plans to restore the second floor as apartments or even a bed and breakfast inn. As far as I know, nothing more has come of these plans, but the building is an anchor to the integrity of the square, one of the more intact town squares in the state.