Wainwright’s Folly

In the morning of our day in Halifax we were looking at a building that we subsequently discovered to be called the Square Church. We became engaged in conversation with a man in perhaps his seventies who was in Halifax to see his brother in a nursing home. He was from Halifax and worked there in his youth in a machine-tools factory, but now lives in Leeds. He had no idea what were the names of the buildings we were at that point looking at, he came from the other side of Halifax, he said.

We asked the man about going to see Wainwright’s Folly, which is an elaborate tall chimney built to form part of a dye works that was never completed, it sits at the head of a steep hill outside Halifax and so can be seen from miles around.

Wainwright’s Folly

‘Oh no’, said the man, ‘you can't walk there, much too far, you need to get the bus, the Sowerby Bridge bus’. But we did walk there, and it was not at all far, and on the way we passed through the Muslim area.

Halifax has relatively few Muslims as the carpet mills stayed just-about profitable for longer than the mills that produced cloth and so had less pressing need to import cheap labour from Asia, but it does have some, and what they work at I have no idea.

In the Muslim areas there were a number of Muslim religious houses with shy-looking women coming and going -presumably religious houses, yes we natural cynics shall give them the benefit of the doubt on that.

As we were waiting to cross a road in that area there was a crump. A smart Jaguar has crashed into the back of a small red car stopped waiting for the lights to change. Out of the red car got four young Muslim men and from a side street appeared a largish number of their friends, and the elderly man in the Jaguar looked a bit frightened. But actually, the Muslim men seemed fine, if understandably somewhat annoyed, so we did not think it necessary to get involved. I guess the old guy must have fallen asleep or something, for there was nothing unusual in the traffic stopped at the lights. he made quite a mess of the front of his shiny clean Jaguar.