Mike Pike Essipode 1

It's 1984. This was drawn for a fortnightly listings magazine in West Kent that lasted about three issues. Despite the magazine collapsing before I ever got anything published, I returned to it a year later and ended up with two finished stories divided between 25 'essipodes'.

Frame one actually does show Tonbridge. You can see the Castle pub in the foreground and, over the bridge with the ornamental lamps you can see what used to be the Nat West bank (now a Pizza Express).

Being set in the mid eighties, this portrays Tonbridge as a boarded up town centre - Britain is slowly dragging itself out of the recession of the early eighties, which Margaret Thatcher imposed on us 'for our own good'. I was unemployed and oh so grateful at the time. The city was booming but the recovery hadn't quite arrived in the provinces yet.

Tonbridge is like Catford, one of those not quite places. It has a town centre consisting of a single street, a rail junction, an old ruined Norman castle and no entertainment to speak of. The cinema had closed, there were no night clubs and the theatre was a converted Oast House capable of holding an audience of about eighty. At the time it was a town that ran on football and alcohol. For anything else you had to travel to the surrounding towns of Tunbridge Wells, Sevenoaks or Maidstone.

It's my home town, I lived there for the first five years of my life and still have lots of family there. Personally, I love it, despite all its deficiencies.

The Angel Centre was a council-run multi-purpose building built to address the lack of facilities in the town. It boasted a not-quite-good-enough theatre (very seldom used), some just-about-adequate conference facilities and meetings rooms, an indoor sparts hall, and a bar. To pay for it they gave two thirds of the space to a department store and a supermarket.

Note Trish's none-more 1984 T-shirt.