If your head’s still spinning as an effect of the long uphill slog back up to Beaumont Park from town, the last bit very steep indeed, then you may be able to interpret the OS map of Huddersfield as looking a little like an octopus – a small core (ring road no larger in diameter than a racecourse) with arms flailing out in all directions.
If you count the major roads as arms then there’s eight of them, off to New Hey and Halifax, Bradford and Leeds from the north; off to Wakefield and Penistone, Woodhead and Manchester from the south. They connect the core to the outside world, but they sever the constituent parts of Huddersfield from each other, as I realised when I tried crossing some of them this morning.
Huddersfield is also (and more historically) severed by rivers, and its constituent parts are starkly separated from each other as they rise up like independent islands from the deep valleys. The Colne, weaving up from Slaithwaite accompanied by the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, north-eastwards to join the Calder at Bradley; the Holme, which takes a southern route into town from Last of the Summer Wine country and its feeder reservoirs; and various other becks which mark breaks in the landscape – the rifts they cause to the built environment are further accentuated by gradient and generational attitudes. People don’t say they belong to Huddersfield; they say they’re from Aspley or Newsome, because there are rivers and roads to cross and hills to ascend or descend before they can take the town centre into their physical and mental environment.
Stephanie is aware of this because the River Holme cuts right through the parishes she serves, and the hills rise and fall in ways which make it impossible for the constituent parts to be a whole. Today we took a long view of this (continuing yesterday’s theme), gazing out from the well-cared-for Beaumont Park towards the giant folly of Castle Hill, then stepping out beneath that very folly to see the whole runnelled creature, Huddersfield, from above.
And then we dropped down into Armitage Bridge to consider how this all looks close-up. The parish church, thoughtfully modernised after a fire two decades ago, cared for and cared about and carrying potential, the mill buildings trying to kindle business tenants but looking now just that bit too empty to sustain, the neat and tidy modern homes of out-of-village commuters and the old cottages tumbling down steep hills below Big Valley. Generous and well-kept allotments, cricket, football and rugby pitches, a seemingly well-active angling club: all signs of a busy local social life not immediately evident on a Monday late-afternoon.
Two large tower blocks rise incongruously over the village at Berry Brow, where Kirklees council positioned large numbers of asylum seekers some time ago, two miles out of Huddersfield centre and a world away from established support structures, a project which they worked hard at to redeem. Beneath them nestle some rather costlier private homes and, though we discussed the racial tolerance in the mix of Huddersfield compared to other towns on the M62 axis, I have it in my mind to consider further, on this journey, Ian Bradley’s repeated observation in Believing in Britain, that the line between a healthy tolerance of others and a dangerous indifference to them is one which is often crossed and must be watched.
This applies in places like Armitage Bridge, which looked to me like the set of a Hovis advert, where a sentimental view of northern English working-village life may be a draw for monied incomers, but where all concerned to build a community there have to embrace the realities of belonging with others different from themselves.