FEBRUARY 2001
Last month we went to London for the weekend and did the sort of Londony things people from the provinces do when they visit the capital. We took in a couple of museums, saw the William Blake exhibition at the Tate, enjoyed a show and, in the early evening bustle that is unique in this country to London, had a meal in Covent Garden. We liked the recently opened Queen Elizabeth II Great Court at the British Museum; this has received mixed reviews but seemed to our lay eyes well done and among other things provides covered public access to the Reading Room. I could happily spend a week at the British Museum and indeed once did in a previous life when I was researching some seventeenth century history.
Cottages in Rawdon
We
stayed with old friends at Harrow on the Hill in the shadow of the famous
school. One should be as comfortable with friends one has known a long time as
one is wearing one’s favourite sweatshirt. I’ve known David since my first
term at university (yes, so long ago); in David’s case it’s not so much a
sweatshirt as an old large baggy cardigan.
We
drove back to Yorkshire on the M1. I’m never sure where the Midlands end and
the North begins. You follow signs to the North but it isn’t defined. OK,
Nottingham is the Midlands and Sheffield is the North. But where is the
frontier? Are Mansfield and Chesterfield the Midlands? Anyway you know you are
in the North when you pass the Yorkshire boundary and see Sheffield to the
left. Next to the flyover at Meadowhall between Sheffield and Rotherham are
two redundant but listed cooling towers known affectionately as Salt and
Pepper. They serve no purpose now and aren’t attractive in any aesthetic
sense but they act for me as a sort of marker – I’m home and it’s grim
up North, or so you proudly claim to keep outsiders away.
The
Times and Radio 4 report, with tongue firmly in cheek, that Barnsley may
become the Lourdes of south Yorkshire. The well of St Helena has been
rediscovered. In medieval times the waters of this well were thought to have
healing powers and pilgrims regularly visited it. Unfortunately the well was
lost at the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century. Now it
has turned up on a school playing field in the middle of a Barnsley housing
estate; honestly, I’m not making this up. St Helena protects holy places so
it’s good to know that Barnsley is in safe hands. John Wesley said that
there was ‘all manner of wickedness’ there.
| Bingley
lies on the Aire between Shipley and Keighley. It is an attractive town, older
than the Industrial Revolution, though the main street is ruined by the
headquarters of the Bradford and Bingley Bank or Building Society, however it
styles itself these days. Among the old stone buildings is this monstrosity
which is of the part nuclear bunker and part slagheap concept. Twenty-five
years ago Bingley’s finest Victorian church, Holy Trinity, designed by
Norman Shaw, was demolished. Perhaps the finest Victorian landmark in Bingley
now is the Mornington Road Methodist Church built in the 1870s. The church is
listed; indeed Bradford Council’s planning department has described it as
Bingley’s ‘most important listed building’. Fortunately it is in good
condition. According to Private Eye, Bradford Council has recently approved
plans to demolish it. One can
only hope that there are sufficient people who care enough and have enough
clout to prevent this. As Private Eye says, ‘to lose one listed Victorian
church in Bingley may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like
carelessness’.
|
Bingley Five-Rise Locks |
In
what sounds like the plot of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera or the story line
from Jack and the Beanstalk, a Sunderland (County Durham) greengrocer is being
prosecuted for selling a pound of bananas. As well as the political
correctness police and the Health and Safety gestapo together with their
sidekick, the negligence industry, in this country we now have legislation
requiring the use of metric rather than imperial measures. No matter that
everyone lives, as they have done for a thousand years, using imperial
measurements – we weigh ourselves in pounds and stones, we travel miles, we
drink in pints and we measure length in inches, feet and yards; if one asks
for a pound of sausages they must be sold in grams. This nonsense is of course
to please Europe and all but Council officials will ignore it. But Council
officials aren’t spending their own money and have nothing better to do so
this guy is being prosecuted. His customer asked for a pound of bananas and
was sold a pound of bananas; we can’t have that.