Month: September 2007

So, nearly a year since I blogged about these Leeds artists, I spent all of today with Dick, Dan and other members and friends of Imprint and Pointed Arrow, and a wealth of conversation, observation, storytelling and street-walking confirmed my deeply-felt instinct: that if you want to get re-excited about creatively engaging with the city from many angles, go to the artists. Some (by no means all of the) day’s highlights:

Discussing journeying with the Pointed Arrow crew whose most recent production (they prefer ‘journey’ actually) was titled, The Cursed Bones of Leonard Le-bec and involved them in a journey along the South coast in search of the bones of this elusive pirate. This was bound to be an elusive search as Leonard Le-bec is an invention of theirs but it didn’t stop people they met en-route affirming their story and adding embellishments of their own; nor did it stop the company members themselves digging up a few (metaphorical, metaphysical?) bones of their own as they discovered they were all coming from various directions to attempt this journey together.

Touring the astonishing Church of Saint John the Evangelist on New Briggate, with a commentary-by-headset designed by Imprint for a night event there last year, full of ghostly tales and very tall stories about the building and its occupants, past, present and undead. A jolly thrill.

Taking a walk by the canal basin with Dick, who is preparing with some trepidation for the forthcoming Imprint production, Nights on the Water, a series of evening trips as a unique floating circus, guaranteeing mystery and adventure on the hidden waterways of Leeds with a character called The Archduke Indigo. As if to affirm the spirit of edgy boatmanship in this place, we met two men steering their well-lived-in narrowboat at illegal speed into the lock, with their three little terriers slipping around fearfully-gleefully on top.

Gasping in awe at Temple Mills, Holbeck, a copy of an Egyptian fertility temple linked with Dana of the Ephesians and the god Horus who stands for a perpetuation of cycles. With impressive rapidity of thought Chris breathlessly connected ‘the birthing thing’ which this building represents with ‘the greed/mammon thing’ and the exploitation issues it has carried. Temple Mills is in the Leeds red-light zone. It’s also a facade, because behind it is a very ordinary looking, currently derelict, set of mill buildings. And it stands on a very empty, liminal piece of scrubland, ‘awaiting redevelopment’. All of which got us making further breathless connections about the values and spirits driving a city’s urge to regenerate… how? why? for whom?

A masonic(?) plaque on the wall at St John’s reads: SIC DEUS DILEXIT MUNDUM which Dick, on the ghost-night commentary cd, translates as GOD IS SICK OF US NOT LEAVING THE MUNDANE. Very funny. The dictionary translation is the possibly opposite-meaning GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD. Funny, I think we got a flavour of both of these perspectives in our interactions with Leeds today.

[Imprint and Pointed Arrow are involved in Leeds’ Light Night events in October… I reckon it’ll be well worth a night off my onward journey to get back here to see them]

On a plaque on the wall of 33 Park Square, Leeds is a brief life of its onetime occupant Sir Berkeley Moynihan, a pioneering abdominal surgeon who “prized ‘caressing the tissues’ rather than speed in surgery”.

Trying to get to know a city of the size of Leeds requires an approach as careful and generous as (I’d imagine) ‘caressing the tissues’. It is a task as challenging as (I’d imagine) performing an exploratory laparotomy – once you begin to open it up you realise the complexity of what’s inside.

Today I made a slight incision intro the city’s industrial history by walking into the centre along the River Aire, then the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, and stopping to see the vaults under the railway station, known as the Dark Arches. An iron bridge permits pedestrians to walk through the series of enormous brick-lined caverns, above the swelling water. Stepping onto this bridge for my first sight of the Dark Arches I’m sure I felt something move inside; it was a stomach-churning encounter.

They really meant it, the people who designed and built the Dark Arches, over the river, mighty and tough enough to underpin a major railway terminus. Strikes me, walking through the centre again today, that they still really mean it, the people redesigning Leeds, leaving no space unexploited, including airspace, for the newer buildings are reaching higher and higher. All this is good, for the local, regional, economy. I’m sure though that the Dark Arches and today’s Leeds superstructures also have a hidden history – that of the people employed, precariously, to build them. I know I’m not going to get deep into their story in the short time I’m here, but if I at least get a sense of it then I won’t be gutted.

Of his M25 project Iain Sinclair said,

The whole point was to walk the motorway spaces, and thereby to suck out information slowly and gradually from the ground.

For similar reasons I attempted to walk a Sign of the Cross through Leeds city centre today; not presuming to imagine that my doing so would bless the place, but hoping rather that by doing so I might perhaps find some form of blessing emerging from the path.

This was my route: from Westgate to Eastgate, up along the edge of the A64, New York Road, to the top of Merrion Lane, and a line southwards through Woodhouse Lane and Albion Street, ending at the junction with Boar Lane.

The Sign of the Cross (version): 1. Hand to the forehead: a prayer to the Father for wisdom; 2. Hand to the stomach: a prayer to the Son who become incarnate; 3. Hand to the shoulders: a prayer to the Holy Spirit. You have to turn Leeds sideways to match this with my route, so it works like this:

Is there wisdom to be found at the Westgate?

It’s the university edge of town, and today is one of the first days back for the nervous, excited students. The Burley Road newsagents and snack bars prepare for an upsurge in custom; outside Park Lane College prospective students queue to enrol; and at the Westgate junction stands the Nuffield Hospital, ‘one of the most technically advanced private hospitals in Europe and one of the leading providers of private healthcare in the area’.

The shining glass tower of Westgate Point houses many solicitors, and the reason for this seems to be accessibility, to the Magistrates Court and adjoining Crown Court just across the way. This is a key stretch of civic Leeds – The Headrow begins with the classical Town Hall (‘gorgeous’ – Building News, 1858) and continues with the Library and Art Gallery. I sit by the concourse watching civil servants smoking outside their workplace, observing an elderly lady, legs stretched down across the gallery steps, sharing her morning sandwiches with pigeons, and witnessing a couple of young Gallery staff struggling to carry and then assemble a large advertising signboard, a piece of the metal frame bouncing noisily down the steps in the process, she especially seeming to be enjoying her work, skipping as she followed him quickly back inside.

Is there wisdom to be found at the Westgate? I suspect that many in Leeds and from further afield come here seeking it.

Are there any signs of the incarnation at the Eastgate?

The further along The Headrow you walk, and onto Eastgate, the more you are aware that this is the business end of the route. Business, meaning trade from the high-street chain stores. Business, meaning the business of eating and drinking (I won’t attempt to try outdoing Stuart Maconie‘s brilliant ruminations on the ubiquitousness of Greggs in the North of England; I lost count of the number of branches I saw in Leeds today but began counting on The Headrow where there seem to be many). Business, meaning the sort of business which might start after a few-too-many in a place like Hoagy’s Bar (bottom of Eastgate, the nearest pub to the Bus and Coach Station) and end up at the Magistrates Court, Westgate.

The Eastgate is bustling with people doing all sorts of business. After the airiness of Westgate my senses feel assaulted by the rush and bustle here. I sit down for a rest opposite the Eastgate roundabout, looking up towards imposing Quarry Hill, former prehistoric camp, Roman fort, isolation settlement for plague victims, Georgian spa, Victorian slum, 1930s visionary municipal housing project, currently site of Leeds College of Music, The West Yorkshire Playhouse, Yorkshire Arts and BBC Leeds. Traffic roars and squeals around the roundabout, and I notice that the centrepiece, carefully restored for the millenium with a statue of a local war hero voted for by the people of Leeds, is not visited by anyone. It has become the purest and saddest form of traffic island.

Are there any signs of the incarnation at the Eastgate? If you have eyes and ears for them: there’s plenty of signs of life.

Is the Spirit to be found at the centre of town?

The walk down Albion Street is all shopping. The spirit of credit infests the Merrion Centre, St John’s Centre, Headrow Centre, Albion Arcade, Leeds Shopping Plaza. It’s all very busy. A pleasant man originally from Huyton, seeking money from me, tells me this is nothing compared to a Saturday. Outside the troubled Northen Rock building society a long queue has formed, of customers withdrawing their money; but everywhere else people are busily putting more and more on their credit cards. A primary school party are huddled at the entrance to Shopping Plaza, being instructed about their expected behaviour inside, and most are open eyed in anticipation, though I notice one girl nervously clinging to a teacher’s arm as they move through the doors into the throng.

As I near the junction with The Headrow I’m curious to know what is at the junction; what, in other words, is to be found at the very centre of the Sign of the Cross I’ve been walking. I find that this symbolic centrepiece is a large, newly-designed building, taking up a whole block of The Headrow/Albion Street, and I’m fascinated to see that the name of this place is The Light. The Light at the centre of the Cross turns out to be ‘Leeds’ premier retail and leisure destination’. It boasts tenants like The Esporta Health Club and a Radisson SAS hotel, its shining floors host many designer stores, the Vue multiplex cinema is here also, numerous coffee shops and upmarket eateries and, I’m delighted to note (and Stuart Maconie would be too), a Greggs.

So this is The Light of Leeds. And if the Spirit is to be found at the centre of town then it is the Spirit of endless shopping. The overwhelming sense in this part of town, is of people forever restlessly moving, from shop to shop, to shop. Even if you’re not, this Spirit affects you. By the time I reach the end of Albion Street (not even having been through any of the lauded high-class arcades off Briggate or sampled the differently-wondrous retail outlets in The Market and The Calls) I just feel exhausted with the busyness of it all. I’ve made a Sign of the Cross but I’m not blessed by it.

On this junction, one man does seem blessed. He’s sitting at a table outside Caffe Nero, facing up Albion Street like me, his head almost completely shrouded in the smoke he’s just exhaled from a relaxing cigarette. Taking heart from this, my blessing comes a short while later as I sit with a nice large cuppa in Costa, reading the paper. For folks like us, the blessing isn’t in shopping. It’s in stopping.

Two-and-a-half miles a day is too quick … reflections on the walk so far, posted on the Wise Traveller blog.

“The North, where the M1 does its emergency stop, and away over the back of the hill is the M62, gouged into the moorland and completely out of its element. At one point the carriageways separate to pass each side of a farm, and a farmer brings his cows for milking at dusk, through a subway, into his central reservation. Thousands of tons of steel pass any given point every minute of the day, but when the winter brings the motorway to a frozen standstill, convoys are snuffed out by the snow in less than an hour, and vehicles are excavated weeks later like woolly mammoths out of the tundra… From the observation suite of Emley Moor Mast, not much short of a thousand feet of fluted concrete, with a hypodermic aerial on top, just south of Huddersfield, you can see both coasts. Or you could if you were allowed up it, and the weather was clear, which you aren’t, and even if you were, it wouldn’t be.”

If I’d read my Simon Armitage more closely then I’d have been better prepared for the shock, today, of seeing Emley Moor Mast on the horizon. In this tumbling land central Leeds has many tall buildings of note, but as Chris confidently (and correctly) pointed out as we stood (backs to the passing M62) at a high opening in the grounds of Oakwell Hall, nothing in Britain compares in scale with Emley Moor Mast. It’s the tallest freestanding structure on the British Isles at a height of 330.4 metres (1084 feet). If it had the nerve to stand next to it, that southern softy Canary Wharf would have to blink a long way upwards to the top of Emley Moor Mast.

The present Emley Moor Mast seems even more impressive when you hear that this is the third tower to stand on top of the bleak moor, the second one having collapsed in March 1969, brought down by strong winds and the weight of ice on the structure. Nearly forty years and still standing – that’s some achievement up there.

Anyway, I thought I’d left the big human-made M62 landscape icons behind at Ferrybridge, but clearly here’s another one which will shadow me for a couple more weeks at least, until I’ve made the Pennine crossing and dropped down below Rochdale. Conversation with Chris revealed the strength of positive feeling that local people have for this majestic construction. Its near-anonymity outside of West Yorkshire makes it another example of that ‘if it was in the South-East it would always be in the news’ scenario. It’s only in the news when it falls down, Emley Moor Mast. The rest of the time (effectively, all the time) it just gets on with the job of ensuring that the news reaches us.

Every luxury apartment comes at a price, I guess, and you get what you pay for, I suppose. And I got mine at discount rates. Tonight and for the next seven nights I’m in an ultra-modern central Leeds room with a 1250 sprung pocket memory foam bed, leather sofa, wide screen LCD satellite TV, free internet, lots of very nice kitchen equipment – and an online food ordering service so you don’t have to use any of it.

But I’m not surprised, neither am I unhappy, that this glamourised bedsit is also very hot (sun streaming through picture windows), very noisy (being on Burley Road, one of the city centre’s main access points, and down to one lane with road works), and has a view surprisingly not mentioned in the publicity – across the canal to Armley jail.

I’m pleased, that it’s not all perfect. Makes me feel that it may be quite a human place after all. Bit like my experience earlier today at Junction 32 Outlet Shopping Village, feeling rather misshapen and ugly amongst the fashion-conscious, when very incongruously the piped musak gave way to R.E.M. singing ‘Everybody hurts … sometimes’, which made me look around and notice that the place was full of plumpsters like me, and folks in wheelchairs, and parents struggling to control their vibrant offspring, and the variously-shaped and -gifted girls of Normanton Knightingale Cheerleaders all performing bravely for the passing shoppers.

Armley Prison notwithstanding (and historic neighbouring St Bartholemew’s church), the view from this fourth-floor window is of a real mix of urban Yorkshire life: a tatty drunk totters slowly across the car park watched by a well-dressed couple stepping out of a high-performance car; the students across the way in Opal 2, assembling for their first week of term, pick their way gingerly through local youths playing football around the traffic cones, and these students look to come from various cultures, and these youths are a mixture of white and Asian, and the staff serving my needs are a mixture of British white and Eastern European, and I’m aware that one of the themes of my coming weeks in Leeds and other West Yorkshire towns, will be the human mess and hopefulness of people of difference having to live close together.

Golf-shirted middle-aged Yorkshireman to his wife having just arrived in Junction 32 car park (concerning a leather-coated, slouch hat wearer passing by): “Look at that scruffy b…..d”. Polo-shirted middle-aged Yorkshireman on delivery-duty from Ruchee’s, at the door of my flat, with a generous smile on his face: “Are you hungry yet? … Enjoy it.” Luxuriating imperfections.

They call it Megawatt Valley, some people. The twelve-mile section of land through which flows the River Aire, the Aire and Calder Navigation Canal, the M62 (Junctions 35 to 33, westwards) and the A645 which carries traffic to and from the mighty coal-fired power stations of Ferrybridge, Eggborough and Drax.

They call it Megawatt Valley, some people, realising cleverly that the greatest, most significant flows through this area might be those carried through the power lines from these three massive monuments to our modern slavery to electricity. Clearly Drax (two clusters of six towers), Eggborough (two of four) and Ferrybridge (two of four) dominate the scene for many miles around, their size and graceful shapes an awe-inspiring spectacle. And having spent the day walking beneath their towers (Eggborough’s close-up), noticing the activity generated by them, realising that this valley is also a coalfield, I suspect that they dominate the commercial and industrial scene here too.

The Eggborough circuit: leaving the canal at Whitley Bridge station, on a three-passenger-train-a-day line heavily dominated by goods traffic, I stop to recall the railway accident very near here at Great Heck in 2001 when Gary Hart, driver of a Land Rover towing a trailer, dropped off the M62, down an embankment and got himself stuck on the line, causing an Inter-City 125 and a freight train to collide, and ten people to lose their lives.

The main street in Eggborough begins in dusty industry (Bowman’s Flour Mill) and then gives way to the gentle sights of retired men, morning papers in their hands, waiting anxiously for buses, older people and mothers with young children circulating between the surgery and the pharmacy, the Eggborough Church (denomination unstated) covered with a large banner announcing this weekend’s Harvest Festival (I bet they do that in style here), and people using telegraph poles to post notices about forthcoming village events and – in one case – to list a set of furniture and other household goods for sale – all enquiries welcome. At its junction with the A645 (terrible to cross) the road gives way to industry again – car sales, garages, mini-market, butcher and hairdresser.

The power station fills the skyline, increasingly so as the road comes to meet it. Along the perimeter road, every hundred yards or so, are identical white noticeboards each with the same eight pieces of A4 paper posted inside. Close inspection reveals that these are legal documents, detailing the High Court injunction which stops anyone accessing the power station land without the consent of Eggborough Power Limited – and in particular Zoe Armstrong, Alison Templeton and Anna Harrison, evidently the main protagonists in the Camp for Climate Action which has protested here.

As I walk the perimeter (sunwise, at midday) I realise that I’m having a little difficulty because there are no pedestrian paths here (though the verges are wide enough to permit them). I realise that as poke my digital camera through fences and stand at gateways clicking, the CCTV cameras of Eggborough Power Limited are training themselves on me. It dawns on me that if the drivers of wagons and service vehicles passing me on this road give me any thought at all, then they may judge that this t-shirted, dusty-shoed rucksack-wearer is probably one of those Climate Campers.

I’m not; though I share their concerns I think they’re a bit shouty for me, and I wonder if they’re addressing the right people (Eggborough Power Limited are after all just supplying most citizens’ needs to have at least ten electrical items plugged in and humming with power, twenty-four hours a day).

But if it weren’t too dangerous I’d walk symbolically in the middle of the road, on this issue, as I also think that while the protesters are too shouty, Eggborough Power Limited and those who run Drax, Ferrybridge, etc, are too silent in reply… if this circuit of mighty Eggborough means anything maybe it’s to tread into the ground a desire for all sides of the climate / power debate to walk together and have a mature, open conversation about it. I’d like to learn how to be part of that.

The Eggborough circuit ends with a lovely half-hour at Whitley Lock by the bridge beneath Junction 34. In the triangle of land with the gentle canal at its edge and the violent M62 / A19 junction at its point, a farmer runs a tractor across his field. Slowly, bumpily, dustily, repetitively. Ploughing.

If I’m honest, I have to admit that this East Riding section of the journey was the one I’d least looked forward to, the one I was glad to be able to complete early before moving on to more fascinating places. This great long stretch of flat agricultural land which even on paper makes a mockery of Will Alsop’s proposed SuperCity (the idea of a continuous urban settlement across northern England with the M62 as its spine), in reality is indeed just mile after mile of dull and dirty ground.

There have been pleasant surprises: lovely canalside Newport, the incongrous majesty of Howden Minster, gentle industrious Goole. And the landscape has revealed sufficient icons to have led my eye onwards and upwards all the way: the Ouse Bridge, Goole’s steeple and tower, the monstrous chimneys of Drax.

But there have been enough encounters with the unattractive rural (farm dogs, stampeding cows, blocked footpaths) to give me a sense of relief that this long stretch is almost over.

I can’t even form a prayer for Junctions 36 and 35, because I found neither of them to be physically approachable on foot, or particularly connected to anything accessible: Ballardian nightmare traffic islands, real non-places. Except maybe what follows is a sort of prayer.

Taking up a few acres below Airmyn New Wood, J36 serves Goole traffic, and is close to an industrial park with a giant glassworks, a Tescos distribution shed and numerous smaller businesses. But unlike the neighbouring M62 Trading Estate nowhere on this park is accessible to anyone without a permit, pass or permission. This is presumably why its laybys and edge-roads are peppered with the vehicles of travelling reps and delivery drivers either on the phone (negotiating access) or checking paperwork (ready for the ritual at the security gates) or snacking (killing time before the regulated appointment).

It’s also why people like me (random cranks) don’t stand an earthly getting through any of these gates. I calculated that Tescos Distribution Centre security staff probably wouldn’t buy my purpose in accessing their site: ie, to enable the possible creation of spiritual connections between the salmon and cucumber sandwich I’d bought earlier at Boothferry Road Tescos, and the place from which it (probably, latterly) came.

J35 is connected to nowhere nearby – it serves no local roads. It forms an inverted triquetra pattern in the fields between Rawcliffe and the Aire and Calderdale Canal / Dutch River line, as the M18 drops southwards from here, linking the busy transPennine route to the Don Valley towns.

I got closer to the M18 than the M62 on this stretch, following the long, sludge-brown banks of the Dutch River out of Goole to its southwards turn just beyond the motorway, where (I think) it becomes the River Don. But my road led north from there, to a bed at the Brewer’s Arms, Snaith, which I’d expected to be a rough-and-ready room in a rough-and-ready town, in the massive smoking shadow of Drax. It turned out to be a clean and comfortable room in a friendly gastropub which serves beer brewed in the town itself – and whose youthful bar staff had a thing for The Smiths.

Most evenings on this trail through the agricultural outlands of the East Riding I’d booked in my accommodation covered head to foot in a powdering of dirt from the miles of wide, open and desperately dry fields through which I’d walked, looking (I guess) and feeling (without doubt) like a character from Steinbeck – a gap-toothed hobo seeking something elusive in a dustbowl. Most evenings I seemed to fit in just fine that way, with many of my fellow-lodgers being itinerant labourers on the fields or at flood-damage repair jobs. Here in Snaith, though, with only one more dusty day to go, I smartened up quickly and ate a hearty meal, moved by the emotionally truthful, harshly comforting songs of Morrissey and Marr:

You shut your mouth
How can you say
I go about things the wrong way?
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does.

Restless last night, due to the undoubted thrill of having reached Goole, and perhaps more immediately to the high temperature of my rooftop room in the Clifton Hotel and Chinese Restaurant, on busy Boothferry Road.

In the midnight dark I opened my eyes, frustrated from my futile attempts to slumber, and sat upright as facing me in a sepia glow on the opposite wall, was an apparition. The shape of a cloaked person, with a thin head or perhaps wearing some sort of crown – like one of the Magi – looked down on me. Formed on the wall by streetlight diffusing through net curtains this still, nocturnal visitor seemed to me a calming presence. Not the shape of those fevered ghosts I’d encountered underneath the Ouse Bridge, more a quietly welcoming spirit. In my state of altered consciousness it didn’t take me long to decide who this kindly visitor was. I gave this shape a name: The Goodly Spirit of Goole.

This morning I was disappointed though not surprised to find that The Goodly Spirit of Goole had gone. That is to say, I couldn’t see it any more. But I sensed that it must be somewhere in this town. So I decided to make this a day in search of The Goodly Spirit of Goole.

Here’s a list of some places where The Goodly Spirit of Goole wasn’t:

– on overheated Boothferry Road where traffic queues are constant and complicated by the many trying to manoeuvre across it from smaller side streets;

– at the concrete works where the young man operating a dumper truck was layered with dust and embroiled in relentlessly repetitive and nerve-jarring work, like many of his dockland colleagues;

– at the doors of St John’s church: locked (though the gardens were incongruously peaceful as containers were lifted and loaded loudly in the docks just over the wall.

– on Goole’s Clock Tower: erected in 1927 to mark the Centenary of the opening of the docks, adapted in the late 1990s to become the base for a huge CCTV camera set [blogged about here].

There’s far more places to list where I sensed that The Goodly Spirit of Goole might be.

I sensed that The Goodly Spirit of Goole might be at the town centre shops where I realised again that shopping isn’t merely a series of economic transactions: it’s what people do to meet other people, in places like this – where husband, wife and newsagent share some gentle teasing, where two ex-colleagues of different ages and genders have a warm ‘catch-up’ conversation outside Iceland, where a young woman enjoys showing her baby to a friend who is equally delighted to hold the child – incongruously so, he being a generously tattooed punkish person.

I sensed that The Goodly Spirit of Goole might be at the Library in the morning conversations between staff and users of all ages, all friendly, well-informed and inerrantly helpful, with the children enjoying their game of whispers, around the table where elderly men meet to go over the papers, fill in the Times Crossword, and chat, and at the computers where those of working age type intently to learn new skills.

I sensed that The Goodly Spirit of Goole might be down Bridge Road at the snack bar which offers needed relief to the hardworking men of the docks.

I sensed that The Goodly Spirit of Goole might be at the Waterways Museum, close to the Viking Marina, where enthusiasts talk over the details of their days work restoring and maintaining boats of various fashion, for the enjoyment of (today) children from a special needs school and young men on a maritime First Aid course.

I certainly sensed The Goodly Spirit of Goole at a place I called The Henge, possibly created by those who constructed the Nature Trail from the Waterways Museum: a circle of stones with three central pieces, the large one triangular and designed to cast a dial-like shadow towards Goole town centre at sundown. Designed from old railway or canal side stones, and well-maintained (with well-cut grass) this place of wonder, hidden between the Aire and Calder Navigation Canal and the Dutch River, aligns itself to various power centres: Goole Parish Church steeple, the town’s landmark Water Tower, and the mighty smoking chimneys of Drax.

Walking back townwards from The Henge, I realised something about The Goodly Spirit of Goole – he could be a Dutchman. For much that is endearing about Goole (I write, I know, on just one day’s evidence) is related to the continental flatlands whose topography and trade it shares. Bicycles are in abundance here, people of all ages and conditions riding them everywhere, including down busy dock roads and even angry Boothferry. Docks and dykes abound, each reminders to the people of their tenuous hold on stability and security, their complex relationship with water which is both source and potential destroyer of life and income. Ships load and unload here from Rotterdam and many other Northern European ports.

As I approach the Old Goole Bridge, flanked by two identifiably Dutch-styled pubs, The Goodly Spirit of Goole seemed to identify himself to me, in the name Vermuyden. The pub ahead is called The Vermuyden, as is the terrace behind it, and the large school down Boothferry Road, and numerous other places in Goole. They are named for Cornelius Vermuyden, 1630s constructor of the Dutch River, which drained the countryside here and opened up valuable trade routes. Vermuyden is thus rightly celebrated as the founder of the modern port of Goole. None of the above would be here but for this man’s work.

The Goodly Spirit of Goole – has to be a Dutchman. He’s been quite a revelation to me.

Hail historic Howden
huddled in the sun.
Hail the mighty Minster: audaciously lasting and large.
Hail its saints Peter and Paul guarding the West Wall
Hail John of Howden, each subsequent cleric’s local exemplar.
Hail the wood carver Mousy Thomson, and the thirty little mice he crafted into the Minster’s beams.

Hail the cheese shop of Howden
and its pavement patrons supping morning coffee;
Hail the sleepy craft shops, the well stocked sweet shops,
the high-priced hairdressers and fussy boutiques of this holy town.

Hail the Co-op serving all
and the Press Association offices
bringing the world to Howden and Howden to the world.

Hail the workers of Howden Dyke and Kilpin Pike
– the smartly-dressed Renault mechanics sitting against a wall;
– the staff of the massive Ebuyers shed;
– the dockers, truckers and sewage workers on this wide twist of the River Ouse.

Hail the magnificent M62
as it crosses the Ouse in high style;
Hail the traffic above;
Hail the herons, swans and sheep beneath.

Hail Booth (whoever he was) and his ferry
Hail Boothferry and its Bridge

Hail the restless spirits which live directly beneath the M62 Ouse Bridge
Unsighted but booming, creaking, groaning
Endlessly aching
In the empty concrete vault
Above ploughed fields.

[Hear the Ouse Bridge ghosts here – mp3]