Huddersfield

Hilary and I visited Huddersfield and Halifax. The reason we went to those two towns was that, if we had ever been to either of them before, we could not remember it. And as with so many places, few people visit as tourists because the locations are not on the itinerary, yet both are full of interest and could be on an itinerary if anyone ever were to draw one up.

Both towns developed in the eighteenth and ninetieth centuries on the back of wool. Employment was in the mills, with ancillary industries like machine-tool manufacture. Now there are no mills, and thus no ancillary industry, so what do the people who live in those towns do? Halifax kept going a bit longer than many other northern wool towns as its speciality was carpets, but no carpets are made there now, they finished in the early 1980s.

In Huddersfield now a big employer is the ever-expanding university. This has had a lot of money pumped in, some of it from sponsoring firms, and the university campus feels quite buzzy. And of course if you have a university you begin to get things like restaurants and cafés appearing in town, some of which look quite good – we had lunch in a very pleasant café  – though as yet these are on a small scale.

As no one will should need reminding, Huddersfield’s most famous son is . . . Harold Wilson. There’s a statue of him in the square outside the railway station, which looks like he has just got off a train and is bustling to a meeting, which I think is rather good, very appropriate for outside the railway station.

Huddersfield Station is rather extraordinary, looks more like the headquarters of a bank than a railway station.

Outside Huddersfield railway station. White spots from:
Bolts on plinth
Discarded chewing gum
Bird shit (on Harold’s eyebrow and hand)

But the university will not provide employment for everyone and there are many dull-of-eye poor people shuffling about in Huddersfield, and pubs with angry-faced drunks outside having a smoke mid-afternoon. I was taking photographs outside the art gallery, innocuous enough photos:

Huddersfield Library and Art Gallery, A strange statue outside, plus hangers around.

Now the question is, do people gob their chewing gum onto the ground on their way into the library, or on their way out?

Shambling drunks made comments, obviously they don’t see many people taking photos in Huddersfield.

We went into the art gallery, which is not something we often do as once you’ve seen one . . . but with this one we wanted to see inside the splendid building as well as out – dating from the 1920s or 30s we guess – and the exhibition they had on we found to be rather good, a wide range of paintings on a local-interest theme.

But Huddersfield is in many ways a poor town, complete with the symbols of the lower market such as tattooists, in this case one called The Bleeding Art, which as a shop name we could not decide whether was very clever or very yukky.

And Huddersfield still has its buildings, some of them anyway, monuments to the time of civic pride, religious fervour and confident hope for the future.