Whitwell is a village in the county of Rutland in the East Midlands of England.
It is located about four miles (6 km) east of Oakham, on the north shore of Rutland Water.
A pleasure boat known as the Rutland Belle operates from Whitwell Harbour.
Whitwell claims to be twinned with Paris, France. In the 1970s, regulars from the pub, the Noel Arms wrote to the then Mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac proposing the link and with a tight deadline for a response.
As no answer arrived from the Mayor's office by the set date, the village unilaterally declared itself to be twinned and erected road signs to that effect.
The original wooden signs were later replaced in metal by Rutland County Council.
It only has 19 houses, plus a pub and hotel nestled amongst those.
As you drive along the A606 in the East Midlands of England, you may notice a rather unusual road sign. It's one of two, one either side of the road, as you approach the village of Whitwell in the tiny county of Rutland. The one on the right announces 'Whitwell - Please drive carefully through the village', but the one on the left somewhat enigmatically reads 'Whitwell - Twinned with
Paris'.
It's a proper, official-looking county-council-installed sign, all right. It's been there since 1980 and the Paris it refers to is indeed the capital of the glorious
Ré publique Franç aise. So how could a fairly nondescript English village have pulled off such a coup?
There's nothing unusual about twinning, of course. There are hundreds of cities, towns and villages in the UK, and thousands worldwide, which have fostered links with others abroad. Councillors will tell you it's an opportunity to promote goodwill and understanding between the townsfolk, form an association of
friendship, and share both ideas and hospitality through fact-finding visits. Council tax-payers will tell you it's a shocking waste of public money, as the representatives they elected to formulate local government policy take all-expenses-paid foreign holidays on club-class tickets to indulge in lavish junkets. The truth is probably somewhere in between the two, but you don't necessarily need a twin town for an excuse to live the high life – remember
Doncaster in 1997?
With few exceptions, twin towns are of a similar size and exhibit some sort of demographic, cultural or historical similarities.
London is twinned with
New York City,
Torquay with the once rat-infested Hamelin, and
Aberdeen with, naturally, Bulawayo. Paris and Whitwell, however, are not so closely matched, let it be said. Paris, 'the City of Light', is one of the top tourist destinations in the world. It boasts many beautiful and historic
landmarks, romantic vistas,
world-class museums, some of the finest hotels, best cuisine and most fashionable boutiques in the world, and unrivalled nightlife. It is also a vast metropolis, home to around 11 million people. Whitwell has a pub, a hotel and
42 residents
.
It all happened in the
pub, you see. You know how it is: people sit around and have a few drinks and someone cracks this 'wouldn't it be funny if...' joke. In thousands of other pubs across the land that would be the end of it, but the chairman of the parish council and landlord of the Noel Arms, Sam Healey, thought it was worth a try. Declaring himself head of the newly formed Twinning Committee, he wrote to his equivalent number in Paris, one Jacques Chirac, suggesting the tie-up. Chirac, to his credit, replied diplomatically, but wasn't too keen. He thought he might only be able to legally pair up with foreign capitals, as Paris had done with Rome, and he'd never heard of Whitwell.
Well, that sounded fairly positive to the Noel Arms regulars. They drafted another letter, asking whether they could know for sure by a certain date, about five weeks hence, as they were planning a celebration. If they didn't hear anything, they would assume he approved. The local schoolmaster translated it, and it was sent back to Chirac. Then came the important bit: the deadline passed without a reply. They were twinned!
They don't remember a lot about the day of the ceremony.
English beer and French
wine flowed. English Morris men performed alongside a troupe of can-can dancers specially shipped in from Melton Mowbray. A fine time was had by all; Healey woke up the next day in the coal shed.
There isn't a law set in stone that capital cities can only link with other ones, and a handful of non-capital cities in the UK have pulled off the feat of having a capital twin.
Birmingham proudly displays
Prague on its road signs, and
Liverpool is closely associated with
Dublin.
Bristol ties up with Tblisi and
Hull with Freetown, Sierra Leone.
Edinburgh has links to Kiev, and
Glasgow to Havana. Some even have two:
Nottingham boasts both Harare and
Ljubljana;
Coventry has both
Belgrade and Kingston, Jamaica.
It's not only cities. The
Yorkshire spa town of
Harrogate, home of Bettys
Tea Rooms, is twinned with
Wellington, New Zealand. Dartford in Kent, best known for
a bridge, a tunnel and a large shopping centre, is linked to
Tallinn; while
Slough, still awaiting
Betjeman's friendly bombs, can boast a friendship with Riga.
Whitwell trumps the lot of them, though. Yes, it was unilaterally declared and entirely unofficial, but it's raised the profile of a small community and ensured there's one pub in Britain where bemused travellers will drop in every other week and ask: 'Are you
really twinned with Paris?'
