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JR's notes:

I left Luton - after about four years - in the late summer of 1997 and although I don't regret my move to the glorious south coast I do look back on Luton with great affection. Almost nobody has anything good to say about this gritty, hard-working town but I found warmth and welcome, an astonishing ethnic mix, and made a lot of friends. Indeed, Luton needed all of its 'no-nonsense grit' at the end of 2000 when Vauxhall - the town's largest employer - announced the cessation of car-production there, with the loss of thousands of jobs. My weekend programme on the local radio station (BBC 3-Counties Radio) finished in the spring of 1998. This article appeared in the LUTON NEWS in July, 1997, shortly after the London Evening Standard and one of those poncy style-conscious men's lifestyle magazines had both published features slagging the town off. The LUTON NEWS website is at www.bedforshireonline.co.uk

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Luton - Dontchalovit?

John Radford, of BBC 3-Counties Radio, bids a fond farewell

It's a dump, it's "the first town in the Midlands", it's got no culture and it's a million miles from town... Readers of a certain London local newspaper with pretensions and a haircuts- and-wristwatches magazine for blokes who can't reach the top shelf have had their say about what Luton is and what it isn't, and I'm sure that the journalists who wrote those articles invested... Oooh, anything up to thirty minutes in research before delivering themselves of their profound conclusions. And it was nothing to do with getting loads of free publicity for their flagging circulations in Bedfordshire, no, honest, guv, leave it out!

I came to live in Luton four years ago and I was equipped with all the prejudices: gritty, industrial town, cheap-and-cheerful airport bustling with cheapskate tourists bringing home wickerwork donkeys from Benidorm... And Lorraine Chase, of course. And none of these are wholly untrue: Luton's a gritty, no-nonsense, hard-working place. The airport's modern success was built on giving a large number of ordinary people exactly what they wanted at prices they could afford to pay. As for industry, even the longest recession in living memory and the worst negative-equity situation in the UK proved, between them, unable break the town's resilient spirit.

But that's for outsiders to worry about. They never see the real Luton - the diversity of the people, places and businesses which make the town what it is, and the 'villages' which go to make it up, each with its own identity - Stopsley, Limbury, Biscot, Leagrave and Sundon Park. I discovered High Town, with a real 'High Street' of real, independent shops; Wardown Park with its leafy walks and leafier suburbia - the Old Bedford Road and Pope's Meadow; and, most fascinating of all, the Bury Park area with its magnificent domed mosque and eclectic range of shops - my wife now wears Punjabi fashions on formal occasions, and I discovered a hitherto unsuspected taste for Bhangra music (with a little help from my colleague DJ Ritu).

Business is what made Luton and it's business which still provides the powerhouse - not just the big old industries (some of which, sadly, are still suffering the echoes of the recession) but the hustling, bustling, wheeling-and-dealing independents which figure on every street in the town. You name it, it's there: hairdressing, retailing, restaurants, taxi-firms, small manufacturers, design studios, second-hand dealers, cafés, antique-shops, street-vendors and, of course, now as ever, hatters. The recession was cruel to every town in the land, and, perhaps, to Luton more than most, but the sheer entrepreneurial spirit of the town refused to lie down and die, and as one area of industry suffered, so three more opened up, under the untiring efforts of people in the community.

Which is where it all starts, of course - with the people. Luton may not have a Royal Opera House or flashy bars dispensing the kind of expensive exotic beer favoured by fashion- conscious young dudes but it's got solid, honest-to-goodness people who know what work is and aren't afraid of it, and that's what's made the difference. The warmth and welcome, the cheery good-humour and the pragmatic acceptance that life is seldom perfect characterise the impressions I received when I came to live here, and nothing has happened since then to change those impressions.

By the time you read this, I shall be on my way to dabble my toes in the sea on the south coast, but I'm not gone for good. I still have family in Luton and I shall be back each week to present my Sunday afternoon programme on BBC Three-Counties Radio - and probably more often than that, indeed. But I'm taking with me some of the fondest memories of four of the happiest years of my life.

When they talk to me about Luton, I shall know what to say to them.

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