Rugby is the easternmost town in Warwickshire, not far from Coventry, and the site of an important railway junction. It's big in cement, was big in electronics and has been a market town since medieval times. But it's best known worldwide for its school and the sport which originated there 200 years ago when a pupil picked up a football and ran with it. Midweek in February alas isn't the best time for a visit, especially when it rains relentlessly from the moment you arrive to the moment you depart, but I did my touristy best. [Visit Rugby]
Rugby has one of Britain's oldest public schools, but it was nothing especially special until the 1820s when new headmaster Thomas Arnold shook it up and created an educational paragon. You can tell it's old because it occupies most of the southeast quarter of the town, and you can tell its heyday was in the 19th century because a bulwark of fine Victorian buildings nudges up towards the high street. You won't be getting in, not without forking out a five figure sum annually or perhaps taking advantage of a Saturday tour. But you can wander the streets of its 'campus' and pass the private gates of its classrooms and dorms, and also get as far as the school shop for a stripy scarf or a house rugby ball.
The site of that first pickup is The Close, a tree-lined greensward behind School House and the Old Quad, where the ground staff still lay out two pristine rugby pitches. It looks auspicious through the railings, overlooked by various pavilions and raised benches, and I bet the historic ambience awes many an away team. But the main outward-facing embodiment of the game is on the other side of the Chapel, facing the gyratory, where the flags and statues are. The focal point is a statue of William Webb Ellis on a plinth holding a ball which wouldn't have been that shape in 1823, and alongside is a somewhat gaudy representation of the Webb Ellis Cup. In front of this are sufficient poles to fly the flags of all the major rugby-playing countries, although only the Six Nations are fluttering at present.
Just across the road is the Webb EllisMuseum, essentially an adjunct to a sports shop, where historic teams and equipment are the headline act. This is where the very first Gilbert rugby ball was manufactured by a local cobbler, so you'll see a lot about that, and yes it's free to go in, they don't make that particularly obvious. The town goes especially rugby-crazy when there's a World Cup on, perhaps adding another giant decorated ball in a key location, and put on a slew of events for the game's bicentenary last year. Look down around the town and you'll also see multiple ball-shaped plaques in the pavement, each bearing the name of a rugby great, although look closer and you'll see they're all sponsored by Rugby Cement.
n.b. On the outskirts of town, down a puddled lane muddied by studs, I found a school playing field with ordinary football goals, not classic H-shaped posts, so they do play the 'other' game.
The town's other favourite son is the poet Rupert Brooke who was born in the town a few doors down Hillmorton Road. His father was a housemaster at Rugby School so it was inevitable he'd study there, but not inevitable that he'd go on to King's College Cambridge, write some of the finest war poetry and die on a hospital ship on his way to Gallipoli. He's remembered with a statue on the green at Regent Place, close to what's currently a small carpet of snowdrops. This is also the former site of a short-lived Norman castle, replaced in the 13th century by a moated manor house owned by the de Rokeby family. It's from their surname that the name of Rugby derives, indeed they're ultimately responsible for the name of the oddly-shaped ballgame too.
The town centre has the crowded irregular feel of somewhere fairly ancient, though without a slew of properly historic buildings. The oldest is St Andrew's Church, which is unique in England in having two towers with a peal of bells in each. I didn't hear them ring but I did pop in to admire the rebuilt Gothic interior while they were setting up for a lunchtime concert. I could have stayed for refreshments in the cafe, although I was unnerved by how far this spread out into the aisles and the smell was somewhat all-pervasive. Rugby's second oldest building is a small half-timbered medieval shop on Chapel Street, once the site of Tews the Butchers (as featured in the book Tom Brown's Schooldays) but now a nail art salon.
The shops aren't as plentiful as I was expecting for a town the size of Watford, nor especially prestigious. There are some lovely independents in the central warren, presently targeting Valentine's Day trade with a splurge of hearts. There are also numerous shops which sound sports-specialist - Rugby Barber, Rugby Electrical, Rugby Grill House - until you remember it's the name of the town. As for Rugby Central, the extensive covered mall, it may have been the future once but is now more B&M than M&S, more New Look than Next, has recently lost its anchor Wilko and is about to lose its Iceland. That said the town can still deliver a proper pancake-flipping racecard, attracting half term punters to a mini-pop-up fairground by the Clock Tower, so don't write Rugby off.
For day-trip culture you want the Rugby Art Gallery and Museum in the millennial building opposite Asda. The council did the clever thing and combined it all with the town library, so the opening hours are long and wandering in is again free. The gallery's great, currently showcasing an excellent little exhibition of Quentin Blake book covers, a local artist's clever cartoony pastiches and a fine selection from the council's longstanding collection of key British artists (from LS Lowry to Lubaina Himid). You can skip the archaeology gallery but do make a beeline for the Local History Gallery and its display of A history of Rugby in 50 Objects.
Amongst the eyeopeners are Dr Arnold's birch rod (used for whacking pupils' backsides), a Viking ring, the inevitable Gilbert ball and a scale model of the famous 'Rugby bedstead' (a massive signal gantry which spanned three tracks outside the station until 1939). A large number of the objects are either scientific or industrial, or both, as befits Rugby's historic technical pre-eminence. In particular two plaques commemorate achievements at British Thomson-Houston, the massive electrical works just to the north of the station (later part of GEC, since demolished). One is for Sir Frank Whittle who undertook the first test run of a jet engine in 1937 and the other for Hungarian scientist Dennis Gabor who invented holography ten years later in the very same building. Whittle has his own memorial in the town centre close to the entrance to Caldecott Park.
I somehow don't have a photo of Whittle's sculpture, indeed I completely failed to notice it despite walking straight past, which I put down to being half-drowned by endless rain at the time. Such are the perils of pre-booked rail tickets, although at the frankly ridiculous sale price of £4 each way I'm not complaining. I'll also say that I extended my sodden gadabout beyond the town centre, because Rugby's not an especially convincing day trip destination in itself, so more of that tomorrow.
