A murder in Adam Curtis Land

At some point in its recent past, Boscombe ceased to be just another faded Victorian seaside resort and became a place where the lost and desperate began to collect like debris at the mouth of a river. “You come here to either die or recover,” say locals who have so far managed to do neither. This is a place where you might check into one of the town’s many rehab centres — Boscombe is said to have the largest concentration in England — and end up staying for a few weeks, or for the rest of your life.

I have come for the inaugural Adam Curtis Party Conference, the latest addition to Boscombe’s infrastructure of salvation, alongside its methadone clinics and mental-health hubs. Timed to coincide with party-conference season, it presents Britain’s most famous cult documentary-maker as a “talisman” for a new political awakening.

The whole thing was nearly scuppered by a minor media moral panic over a Friday night 9/11 watch party. But for the organisers, this was just another example of the “dark forces of rational control” the conference promised to free us from in Boscombe: a place said to contain “all of the problems of modern Britain” — but also, somehow, “some potential solutions”. 

Boscombe, just west of Bournemouth, has long specialised in redemption, churning out Pride of Britain winners and supplying the tabloids with stories of ruined lives put back together. Even Paul Gascoigne ended up here, passing through the Providence Projects before attempting his transformation from national casualty into quiet suburban resident of nearby Poole. These days he can be spotted entertaining royalty in one of Bournemouth’s fish and chip shops.

At the Adam Curtis Party Conference, however, there is a sense that stories like these will no longer do. Britain is suffering from a deeper sickness. And the Boscombe of 2026 has become Curtis Land: a place that might have wandered straight into Shifty, his latest six-part chronicle of Britain since the 1980s, in which the country appears trapped in a period of transitional trauma comparable, at times, to the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

What would Curtis’s eye settle on in Boscombe? 

Perhaps Dave Wells, one of the country’s biggest private landlords and an accidental star of Landlords from Hell, whose properties provide homes to some of the town’s drifters and outcasts. Or, for contrast, Tobias Ellwood, the town’s former Tory MP, who has been spotted on clear days schmoozing wealthy Emiratis on a boat offshore, mingling with ceremonial admiralty dressed like something out of HMS Pinafore, and dreaming of a miniature Shard rising from the ruins of the Old Arcade.