Winter in Britain

Zoom up the spiral staircase into the cupola; pitch through a tiny door and out on to the roof. Hold on. Be careful not to tread on the pleats in the lead. Be equally careful not to slide into oblivion – wet lead sheeting is as slippery as glass. Steady yourself with a firm grip on the parapet and narrow your eyes against the drizzle. Look due east into the murk. There it is: way beyond the church, rising from the trees, punching straight up out of the black horizon like a Caspar David Friedrich spire in the forest. Our finest Gothic cathedral. Lincoln.

I am standing on the roof of Doddington Hall, panting. I have just been given what was surely the most rapid tour ever of a stately home by the building's keeper, Claire Birch. I've even been off-piste, behind the baize door, as it were, to strange-shaped rooms stacked with old crinolines and rocking horses and helmets. (The roof is off limits to the public too, sorry.) And Claire has talked almost as swiftly as she has walked, which was virtually at a run. She has a meeting in the farm shop to attend and she's already late. So I have watched the interior of a delightfully un-heritaged stately home pass before my eyes much as strange interiors slip through the mind in fugal dreams. But then she did used to work in advertising.

Claire's family has occupied the hall since the 16th century, when it was built by the prominent Elizabethan architect Robert Smythson. It is a modest jewel of the period, glassy, E-shaped and as solidly red brick as you could wish: feudalism expressed not as brute power but as expert courtliness. Down the centuries, the lords of Doddington have been variously known as the Tailors, the Husseys, the Delavals, the Jarvises and, now, the Birches – several names but one family: lineage expressed in obverse form as the house has passed down the family tree through the female line. Which may or may not explain why Doddington continues to feel like – and continues to be – a family home and not a conservation project. It smells as if people live in it and looks as if it were dreamed, not built. One room is a tent.

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Why am I here? I'm at Doddington because the people looking after the marketing of the City of Lincoln think I'd like it. They are interested that I should like it because they want to persuade me – and by extension you – that Lincoln exists not as a mere geographical concept, nor as a historical myth, nor even as an example of improbable provincial chic, but as a living, breathing, thriving place where people might come to invest and spend their money. A destination. And they are only too aware of the difficulties Lincoln faces in getting people to do that. I have experienced a kind of grinding proof of that difficulty myself.

You see, to get to Lincoln you have to go out of your way. I boarded a train at King's Cross slightly after the crack of dawn. An hour and 10 minutes later I was getting off that train and on to another one at Peterborough, which then travelled at the speed of a lame horse across the bleak, unremitting northern Fens to arrive in the city more than two and a half hours after the journey began. During the ordeal, my spirits sank to antediluvian depths and I decided that if there is a more benighted place in England than Lincoln, it is probably Spalding – and I like the Fens. Rail travel to Lincoln from London is a living, breathing hell on wheels.

But no more. The railway is coming to Lincoln, properly and soon. From 15 December, you will be able to hop on a train at St Pancras, by-pass Peterborough altogether, flash through the Fens so fast you have no time to reflect on the profound achievements of Cornelius Vermuyden, and step straight on to the platform at Lincoln station, and all in slightly less than half the time it took me to do the same journey via the back gardens of Spalding.

And what will you see when you get there? The cathedral, of course. It's the one Ruskin regarded as Top British Cathedral and which brings to a heady peak the architectural style we know as Gothic. Fabulous it is too, perched on its glaciated escarpment above the River Witham. They've got a Magna Carta there. And the Wren Library has got Bede's jottings. But what else?

Lincoln, anyone? Any ideas?

That's the problem Lincoln Council is faced with in its drive towards 21st-century marketability: the fact that no one knows what's there and, worse, no one even knows where it is. They did a survey recently and nine out of 10 cats were unable even to place Lincoln on the map, most of their paws descending on Norwich which, as any East Anglian will tell you, is NOWHERE NEAR Lincoln.

Lincoln is north-east of Nottingham. It's right up there in a loose bunch with Hull, Grimsby, Sheffield, Doncaster and Mansfield. Lincolnshire has Wolds. Due east across the cabbage fields lies Louth, the market town to which the musician Robert Wyatt moved a few years ago "because it's as far away from anywhere as you can get". And up the road lies Gainsborough, which last year saw the fastest rising prices in the property market. Lincoln also has a rather pretty centre.

After I've done my regulation gasping at the flutes and buttresses of the cathedral – and it is completely genuine gasping – I'm led on a whistle-stop tour of the city's hot spots, from its medieval crowning glory at Castle Hill, down Steep Hill through the "Cultural Quarter", which would once have been the centre of Lincoln's hefty medieval Jewish community, to the bit of the city which looks like it is undergoing a very expensive job on its teeth. This is what will make you stick around in town instead of zooming off to York. Here you begin to see where the council's millions have been invested.

The Collection is a handsome swoosh of an edifice halfway down the hill. It opened in 2005, the work of the London firm of architects Panter Hudspith. The burghers of York, Oxford and Cambridge will already be familiar with the Panter Hudspith vibe. The Collection is a museum-cum-exhibition hall-cum-events building which elegantly wraps its contents in honey-coloured stone without appearing to want to dominate them. The backwards view from the foyer through an elevated plate-glass window, framing the pinnacles of the cathedral, is as simple and effective a bit of architectural dramaturgy as you'll ever see.

Then its onwards and down the hill to the Terrace. If the Collection is a box-office development, the Terrace is the production office. The engine room. Two slabs of modernity – glass, brick, metal – designed functionally but not unprettily to sit amid the scrot of Lincoln's ongoing works and point the way into the future. The language gets in the way, of course. "The Terrace is a creative industry managed workspace," it says in the literature, before going on to explain that the building incorporates no fewer than 50 serviced workshops, studios and offices for creative types.

In one such gleaming white space I am introduced to Ted Brewer, who makes electric violins. He set up in Sheffield but made the short journey to Lincoln when he learned of the Terrace's advantageous terms. You can see how this commercial-development/inward-investment malarkey works. It's not about being pretty; it's about being magnetically attractive.

Further evidence of that is to be seen down at Lincoln's waterfront development. All cities have to have waterfront developments nowadays but this is quite a sensible one. It's on the quayside at Brayford Pool, where in centuries past trade came and went, linked by canal and river to the hinterland and the coast. It was a dump for decades. Not now, though.

Yes, you do have to narrow your gaze to exclude a gawky sculpture entitled Empowerment, but the rest is pretty sensible stuff: restaurants, bars, shops, swans and so on; and, on the other side, where tanks were once manufactured and rolled on to barges, the mighty, thrusting block that is Lincoln University.

The fact is, Lincoln's got just about everything you could reasonably expect of a post-industrial cathedral city. It's got a cathedral, a castle, a ludicrously long shopping high street, some industrial residue; it's got cobbles and swanky new architecture; it has Roman remains and a gastropub, half-timbered houses and a rather funky arts centre hewn from brick and iron of the local regimental barracks.

It also has the other stuff. I'm given a tour of the Guildhall, its council chamber, its galleries and its regalia room. There are old paintings on the walls and the wood everywhere is dark with time. It's not difficult to imagine the 18th-century mayor of Lincoln emerging on to the Guildhall to survey his handsome high street.

The 21st-century Mayor of Lincoln emerges on to the same Guildhall steps and is met by the spectacle of a nine-foot dolly bird in rubber suspenders. But that's the free market for you. Nowadays the Guildhall's front door gives straight onto the handsome window display in Ann Summers.

The Yellow-Bellies

Lincolnshire folk are happy to refer to themselves as "yellow-bellies".

No one, however, can offer a definitive explanation for the nickname. Here are some of the less implausible ones.

There are frogs and newts in the Lincolnshire fens with yellow undersides.

The mail coach between Lincoln and London/York also had a yellow undercarriage.

Lincolnshire farmers were so accustomed to bending over in the fields that their backs burned brown while their stomachs remained white – a white which would reflect the yellow of their crops.

The sheep grazing in mustard fields would emerge with their lower halves tinged yellow.

Etymological Chinese whispers have transformed "Ye Elloe Bellie", an Anglo-Saxon expression referring to the rural deanery of Lincoln, into the modern English "yellow belly".


Between the 17th and 19th centuries, the 10th Regiment of Foot (which became the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment) wore yellow waistcoats and red coats. They weren't cowards though.

Compact facts

How to get there

East Midland Trains (08457 125678; eastmidlandstrains.co.uk ) will launch direct services from London to Lincoln on 15 December from £11.25 each way.

Further information

Lincoln is featured by Citybreaks (citybreaks.org.uk ), a partnership of 20 British cities working together to promote short breaks and day trips across the UK, offering ideas for visitors' itineraries, discounts, listings and travel links.

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