by Bill Bryson
It seemed remarkable to think that a century ago Titus Salt Junior could have stood on this spot, in a splendid house, looking down the Aire Valley to the distant but formidable Salt’s Mill, clanging away and filling the air with steamy smoke, and beyond it the sprawl of the richest centre of woollen trade in the world, and that now it could all be gone. What would old Titus Senior think, I wondered, if you brought him back and showed him that the family fortune was spent and his busy factory was now full of stylish chrome housewares and wooftah paintings of naked male swimmers with glistening buttocks?
We stood for a long time on this lonely summit. You can see for miles across Airedale from up there, with its crowded towns and houses climbing up the steep hillsides to the bleak upland fells, and I found myself wondering, as I often do when I stand on a northern hillside, what all those people in all those houses do. There used to be scores of mills all up and down Airedale - ten or more in Bingley alone - and now they are virtually all gone, torn down to make room for supermarkets or converted into heritage centres, blocks of flats or shopping complexes. French’s Mill, Bingley’s last surviving textile factory, had closed a year or two before and now sat forlorn with broken windows.One of the great surprises to me upon moving North was discovering the extent to which it felt like another country. Partly it was from the look and feel of the North - the high, open moors and big skies, the wandering drystone walls, the grimy mill towns, the snug stone villages of the Dales and Lakes - and partly, of course, it was to do with the accents, the different words, the refreshing if sometimes startling frankness of speech. Partly it was also to do with the way Southerners and Northerners were so extraordinarily, sometimes defiantly, ignorant of the geography of the other end of the country. It used to astonish me, working on newspapers in London, how often you could call out a question like ‘Which of the Yorkshires is Halifax in?’ and be met with a tableful of blank frowns. And when I moved North and told people that I’d previously lived in Surrey near Windsor, I often got the same look - a kind of nervous uncertainty, as if they were afraid I was going to say, ‘Now you show me on the map just where that is.’
Mostly what differentiated the North from the South, however, was the exceptional sense of economic loss, of greatness passed, when you drove through places like Preston or Blackburn or stood on a hillside like this. If you draw an angled line between Bristol and the Wash, you divide the country into two halves with roughly 27 million people on each side. Between 1980 and 1985, in the southern half they lost 103,600 jobs. In the northern half in the same period they lost 1,032,000 jobs, almost exactly ten times as many. And still the factories are shutting. Turn on the local television news any evening and at least half of it will be devoted to factory closures (and the other half will be about a cat stuck up a tree somewhere; there is truly nothing direr than local television aews). So I ask again: what do all those people in all those houses do - and what, more to the point, will their children do?
We walked out of the grounds along another track towards Eldwick, past a large and flamboyant gatehouse, and David made a crestfallen noise. ‘I used to have a friend who lived there,’ he said. Now it was crumbling, its windows and doorways bricked up, a sad waste of a fine structure. Beside it, an old walled garden was neglected and overgrown.
Across the road, David pointed out the house where Fred Hoyle had grown up. In his autobiography (It’ll Start Getting Cold Any Minute Now, Just You See), Hoyle recalls how he used to see servants in white gloves going in and out the gate of Milner Field, but is mysteriously silent on all the scandal and tragedy that was happening beyond the high wall. I had spent £3 on his autobiography in a second-hand bookshop in the certain expectation that the early chapters would be full of accounts of gunfire and midnight screams, so you can imagine my disappointment.
A bit further on, we passed three large blocks of council flats, which were not only ugly and remote but positioned in such an odd and careless way that, although they stood on an open hillside, the tenants didn’t actually get a view. They had, David told me, won many architectural awards.
As we ambled into Bingley down a curving slope, David told me about his childhood there in the Forties and Fifties. He painted an attractive picture of happy times spent going to the pictures (‘Wednesdays to the Hippodrome, Fridays to the Myrtle’), eating fish and chips out of newspapers, listening to Dick Barton and Top of the Form on the radio - a magic lost world of half-day closings, second posts, people on bicycles, endless summers. The Bingley he described was a confident, prosperous cog at the heart of a proud and mighty empire, with busy factories and a lively centre full of cinemas, tea-rooms and interesting shops, which was strikingly at odds with the dowdy, traffic-frazzled, knocked-about place we were passing into now. The Myrtle and Hippodrome had shut years before. The Hippodrome had been taken over by a Woolworth’s, but that, too, was now long gone. Today there isn’t a cinema in Bingley or much of anything else to make you want to go there. The centre of the town is towered over by the forbidding presence of the Bradford and Bingley Building Society - not a particularly awful building as these things go, but hopelessly out of scale with the town around it. Between it and a truly squalid 1960s brick shopping precinct, the centre of Bingley has had its character destroyed beyond repair. So it came as a pleasant surprise to find that beyond its central core Bingley remains a delightful spot.
We walked past a school and a golf course to a place called Beckfoot Farm, a pretty stone cottage in a dell beside a burbling beck. The main Bradford road was only a few hundred yards away, but it was another, pre-motorized century back here. We followed a shady riverside path, which was exceedingly fetching in the mild sunshine. There used to be a factory here where they rendered fat, David told me. It had the most awful smell, and the water always had a horrible rusty-creamy colour with a skin of frothy gunge on it. Now the river was sparkling green and healthy-looking and thespot seemed totally untouched by either time or industry. The old factory had been scrubbed up and gutted and turned into a block of stylish flats. We walked up to a place called Five-Rise Locks, where the Leeds-to-Liverpool Canal climbs a hundred feet or so in five quick stages, and had a look at the broken windows beyond the razor-wire perimeter of French’s Mill. Then, feeling as if we had exhausted pretty much all that Bingley had to offer, we went to a convivial pub called the Old White Horse and drank a very large amount of beer, which is what we had both had in mind all along.
The next day I went shopping with my wife in Harrogate - or rather I had a look around Harrogate while she went shopping. Shopping is not, in my view, something that men and women should do together since all men want to do is buy something noisy like a drill and get it home so they can play with it, whereas women aren’t happy until they’ve seen more or less everything in town and felt at least 1,500 different textures. Am I alone in being mystified by this strange compulsion on the part of women to finger things in shops? I have many times seen my wife go twenty or thirty yards out of her way to feel something - a mohair jumper or a velveteen bed jacket or something.
‘Do you like that?’ I’ll say in surprise since it doesn’t seem her type of thing, and she’ll look at me as if I’m mad.
‘That? she’ll say. ‘No, it’s hideous.’
Then why on earth,’ I always want to say, ‘did you walk all the way over there to touch it?’ But of course like all long-term husbands I have learned to say nothing when shopping because no matter what you say - ‘I’m hungry’, ‘I’m bored’, ‘My feet are tired’, ‘Yes, that one looks nice on you, too’, ‘Well, have them both then’, ‘Oh, for fuck sake’, ‘Can’t we just go home?’, ‘Monsoon? Again? Oh, for fuck sake’, ‘Where have I been? Where have you been?’, ‘Then why on earth did you walk all the way over there to touch it?’ - it doesn’t pay, so I say nothing.
On this day, Mrs B. was in shoe-shopping mode, which means hours and hours of making some poor guy in a cheap suit fetch endless boxes of more or less identical footwear and then dec
iding not to have anything, so I wisely decided to clear off and have a look at the town. To show her I love her, I took her for coffee and cake at Betty’s (and at Betty’s prices you need to be pretty damn smitten), where she issued me with her usual precise instructions for a rendezvous. Three o’clock outside Woolworth’s. But listen – stop fiddling with that and listen - if Russell & Bromley don’t have the shoes I want I’ll have to go to Ravel, in which case meet me at 3.15 by the frozen foods in Marks. Otherwise I’ll be in Hammick’s in the cookery books section or possibly the children’s books - unless I’m in Boots feeling toasters. But probably, in fact, I’ll be at Russell & Bromley trying on all the same shoes all over again, in which case meet me outside Next no later than 3.27. Have you got that?’
‘Yes.’ No.
‘Don’t let me down.’
‘Of course not.’ In your dreams.
And then with a kiss she was gone. I finished my coffee and savoured the elegant, old-fashioned ambience of this fine institution where the waitresses still wear frilly caps and white aprons over black dresses. There really ought to be more places like this, if you ask me. It may cost an arm and a leg for a cafetiere and a sticky bun, but it is worth every penny and they will let you sit there all day, which I seriously considered doing now as it was so agreeable. But then I thought I really ought to have a look around the town, so I paid the bill and hauled myself off through the shopping precinct to have a look at Harrogate’s newest feature, the Victoria Gardens Shopping Centre. The name is a bit rich because they built it on top of Victoria Gardens, so it really ought to be called the Nice Little Gardens Destroyed By This Shopping Centre.
I wouldn’t mind this so much, but they also demolished the last great public toilets in Britain - a little subterranean treasure house of polished tiles and gleaming brass in the aforementioned gardens. The Gents was simply wonderful and I’ve had good reports about the Ladies as well. I might not even mind this so much either but the new shopping centre is just heartbreakingly awful, the worst kind of pastiche architecture - a sort of Bath Crescent meets Crystal Palace with a roof by B&Q. For reasons I couldn’t begin to guess at, a balustrade along the roofline had been adorned with life-sized statues of ordinary men, women and children. Goodness knows what this is meant to suggest - I suppose that this is some sort of Hall of the People - but the effect is that it looks as if two dozen citizens of various ages are about to commit mass suicide.
On the Station Parade side of the building, where the pleasant little Victoria Gardens and their pleasant little public toilets formerly existed, there is now a kind of open-air amphitheatre of steps, where I suppose it is intended for people to sit on those two or three days a year when Yorkshire is sunny, and high above theroad there has been built a truly preposterous covered footbridge in the same Georgian/Italianate/Fuck-Knows style connecting the shopping centre to a multi-storey car park across the way.
Now, on the basis of my earlier remarks about Britain’s treatment of its architectural heritage, you may foolishly have supposed that I would be something of an enthusiast for this sort of thing. Alas, no. If by pastiche you mean a building that takes some note of its neighbours and perhaps takes some care to match adjoining rooflines and echo the size and position of its neighbours’ windows and door openings and that sort of thing, then yes, I am in favour of it. But if by pastiche you mean a kind of Disneyland version of Jolly Olde England like this laughable heap before me, then thank you but no.
You could argue, I suppose - and I dare say Victoria Gardens’ architect would - that at least it shows some effort to inject traditional architectural values into the townscape and that it is less jarring to the sensibilities than the nearby glass-and-plastic box in which the Co-op is happy to reside (which is, let me say here, a building of consummate ugliness), but in fact it seems to me that it is just as bad as, and in its way even more uninspired and unimaginative than, the wretched Co-op building. (But let me also say that neither is even remotely as bad as the Maples building, a Sixties block that rises, like some kind of half-witted practical joke, a dozen or so storeys into the air in the middle of a long street of innocuous Victorian structures. Now how did that happen?)
So what are we to do with Britain’s poor battered towns if I won’t let you have Richard Seifert and I won’t let you have Walt Disney? I wish I knew. More than this, I wish the architects knew. Surely there must be some way to create buildings that are stylish and forward-looking without destroying the overall ambience of their setting. Most other European nations manage it (with the notable and curious exception of the French). So why not here?
But enough of this tedious bleating. Harrogate is basically a very fine town, and far less scarred by careless developments than many other communities. It has in the Stray, a 215-acre sweep of parklike common land overlooked by solid, prosperous homes, one of the largest and most agreeable open spaces in the country. It has some nice old hotels, a pleasant shopping area and, withal, a genteel and well-ordered air. It is, in short, as nice a town as you will find anywhere. It reminds me, in a pleasantly English way, a little of Baden-Baden, which is, of course, not surprising since it was likewise a spa town in its day - and a very successful one, too. According to a leaflet I picked up at the Royal Pump Room Museum, as late as 1926 they were still dispensing as many as 26,000 glasses of sulphurous water in a single day. You can still drink the water if you want. According to a notice by the tap, it is reputedly very good for flatulence, which seemed an intriguing promise, and I very nearly drank some until I realized they meant it prevented it. What an odd notion.
I had a look around the museum and walked past the old Swan Hotel, where Agatha Christie went and hid after she found out that her husband was a philanderer, the beastly cad, then wandered up Montpellier Parade, a very pretty street filled with awesomely expensive antique shops. I examined the seventy-five-foot-high War Memorial, and went for a long, pleasantly directionless amble through the Stray, thinking how nice it must be to live in one of the big houses overlooking the park and be able to stroll to the shops.
You would never guess that a place as prosperous and decorous as Harrogate could inhabit the same zone of the country as Bradford or Bolton, but of course that is the other thing about the North - it has these pockets of immense prosperity, like Harrogate and Ilkley, that are even more decorous and flushed with wealth than their counterparts in the South. Makes it a much more interesting place, if you ask me.
Eventually, with the afternoon fading, I took myself back into the heart of the shopping area, where I scratched my head and, with a kind of panicky terror, realized I didn’t have the faintest idea where or when I had agreed to meet my dear missis. I was standing there wearing an expression like Stan Laurel when he turns around to find that the piano he was looking after is rolling down a steep hill with Ollie aboard, legs wriggling, when by a kind of miracle my wife walked up.
‘Hello, dear!’ she said brightly. ‘I must say, I never expected to find you here waiting for me.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, give me a bit of credit, please. I’ve been here ages.’
And arm in arm we strode off into the wintry sunset.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I TOOK A TRAIN TO LEEDS AND THEN ANOTHER TO MANCHESTER – Along, slow but not unpleasant ride through steep-sided dales that looked uncannily like the one I lived in except that these were thickly strewn with old mills and huddled, soot-blackened villages. The old mills seemed to come in three types: 1. Derelict with broken windows and TO LET signs. 2. Gone - just a grassless open space. 3. Something non-manufacturing, like a depot for a courier service or a B&Q Centre or similar. I must have passed a hundred of these old factories but not until we were well into the outskirts of Manchester did I see a single one that appeared to be engaged in the manufacture of anything.
I had left home late, so it was four o’clock and getting on for dark by the time I emerged from Piccadilly Station. The streets were shiny with rain, and busy with traffic an
d hurrying pedestrians, which gave Manchester an attractive big-city feel. For some totally insane reason, I had booked a room in an expensive hotel, the Piccadilly. My room was on the eleventh floor, but it seemed like about the eighty-fifth such were the views. If my wife had had a flare and an inclination to get up on the roof, I could just about have seen her. Manchester seemed enormous - a boundless sprawl of dim yellow lights and streets filled with slow-moving traffic.
I played with the TV, confiscated the stationery and spare tablet of soap, and put a pair of trousers in the trouser press - at these prices I was determined to extract full value from the experience -even though I knew that the trousers would come out with permanent pleats in the oddest places. (Is it me or are these things totally counter-productive?) That done, I went out for a walk and to find a place to eat.
There seems to be a kind of inverse ratio where dinner establishments and I are concerned - namely that the more of them there are, the harder it is for me to find one that looks even remotely adequate to my modest needs. What I really wanted was a little Italian place on a side-street - the kind with checked tablecloths and Chianti bottles with candles and a nice 1950s feel about them. British cities used to abound in these places, but they are deucedly hard to find now. I walked for some distance but the only places I could find were either the kind of national chains with big plastic menus and dismal food or hotel dining rooms where you had to pay £17.95 for three courses of pompous description and overcooked disappointment.