Invisible…? (a review of the travel literature…)

Posted on by
Reply

[posted by Steve Bottoms]

I’m responding here to Simon’s post, “Shipley before the River”, which makes some interesting points about the apparent invisibility of the town’s river (I’m assuming he means the Aire, though there’s also Bradford Beck of course) within the town itself…. That is, he couldn’t find any evidence of the river being represented in images, signposts, local amenities, etc. This is intriguing, given that Shipley owes its existence to its waterways: as Ian Watson’s helpful Shipley History website suggests, the original pre-Norman settlement was probably established here because it’s the place where two rivers meet… and then the town owes its modern, industrial identity and expansion to the establishment of the Leeds-Liverpool canal (which is of course fed by the Aire) in the late 18th C. Therea again, perhaps it’s that very industrial heritage — the old waterside mills etc. — that create a distance between the more lived-in parts of the town and the waterways themselves. So perhaps this disconnect has been here for a very long time?

It’s on the north side of the river that people actually live close to the water, and of course technically the north side of the river is Baildon, not Shipley at all! I’ve asked a lot of people what difference that makes, and the consensus seems to be – well, not much. Maybe Shipley and Baildon are a bit like Newcastle and Gateshead, all one thing really. And of course it’s all supposed to be part of Bradford now… Traditionalists might complain about this: Shipley once had an independent town council of its own, before being absorbed by Bradford in the 1970s. But the nature of jurisdictions is that they get blurry anyway: it was Shipley council that, during the 1950s, built the housing estates on either side of Roberts Park, on the north side of the river — so these were Shipley council houses, but the tenants paid rates (as opposed to rent) to Baildon council. Confused yet?

But to return to Simon’s points about the relative invisibility of the river in the town, we could turn that round and mention the relative invisibility of the town from the river. I’ve been doing a bit of a “literature search” in books about the River Aire, and it’s striking how totally overlooked Shipley is in these accounts. So for example, Ron Freethy’s Exploring the River Aire (one of those old-style, well-illustrated, paperback guide books) traces the river from its source at Malham all the way to Airmyn (the village where the Aire meets the Ouse), mentioning all points of interest along the way. There’s a section on Saltaire and Titus Salt, which includes a photograph of the Boathouse before it was a pub, with rowing boats for hire moored outside it… (by all accounts, this picture must have been taken quite a while ago! – though there’s no publication date on the book)  But the next section is simply called “Onwards to Leeds”. This mentions “The journey from Shipley into Leeds”, but Shipley itself doesn’t rate a mention except as something to be left!

It’s a similar story in John Ogden’s Yorkshire’s River Aire (this one does have a publication date – 1976 – and a foreword by Jimmy Savile!). There is a chapter titled “Titus Salt” which talks about Bingley as well as Saltaire, and then the next chapter is called “Bradford”, and deals with Bradford Beck as a tributary of the Aire… But this is then followed by a chapter “Mainly about Flying” (featuring the fascinating tale of Leeds/Bradford airport – or Yeadon airport as it once was). Shipley rates all of two sentences at the start of this chapter, simply by way of acknowledging the point at which river and beck converge… “The town is a busy, stone-built centre of the worsted industry and today appears on the map to be a mere northern extension of Bradford. But for goodness sake don’t say that to a local inhabitant; they are fiercely proud of their own identity.” Wow – belittling and patronising all in one go!

A more recent entry in this minor literary sub-genre of “books tracing the River Aire downstream” is Andy Owens’s Walking on Aire (4ward books, 2010), which is a vanity-published comic travelogue written by a Halifax-based would-be Bill Bryson. It’s actually quite entertaining at times, and pleasingly self-deprecating in tone (Owens moans about having to do his epic navigation of this “exotic” river on spare weekends, going home in between times to earn his keep…). Once again we start at Malham, and wend our intermittent way to Saltaire, but then – interestingly (?) – Baildon features quite prominently as “the next port of call”, where “I could find nothing whatsoever to say about the place”. Owens recounts pub conversations with local yokels drinking “Black Sheep’s Muff” in which he desperately tries to unearth something worth saying about Baildon, and eventually discovers tidbits such as the fact that the late lamented Countdown presenter Richard Whiteley was born here… But after spending four whole pages finding Baildon comically uninteresting, Owens moves on downstream to Charlestown — without Shipley even rating a single mention. In other words, it doesn’t even rate as a place about which to say that there is nothing to say!

All of this creates, for me (because I’m weird?), a kind of inverted intrigue… Shipley (and/or Baildon) figuring as a kind of negative zone or black hole of contemptuous neglect in accounts of the Aire. And yet Saltaire, which is technically part of Shipley (isn’t it?), is this jewel-in-the-crown World Heritage Site… Go figure, as our American cousins might say.

 

Shipley before the River

Posted on by
3

[posted by Simon Brewis]

This Friday, May 4th, I had my first day working on Multi Story Water Shipley. I thought I’d start by doing a little research. Rather than head straight to the river I wanted to get some contect of place and how the river might shape local identity. So I decided to spend some time in the town itself and search for evidence of how the river might be present in the town. I was looking for pubs, hotels and road names that referred to the river. I kept my eye out for public art that referenced water. I was almost expecting that at some point I would turn a corner and there would be an embankment or some other public architecture to bring people to the river. However after an hour there was no sign of the impact of the river in the town centre.

I grew up in Bedford, or ‘Beda’s Ford’ in old speak. In Bedford  the river runs through the heart of the town geographically and culturally, so i found the lack of evidence of a river a bit strange. But then I thought about my now adopted home town of Leeds, or ‘Leodis’ which means ‘people of the river’ in old speak. Now in Leeds we are barely aware there is a river even though the place is named after it! So perhaps I have come to expect too much? After an hour of searching I finally found something,  this picture on a notice board in the Town Hall:

After limited success in my first mission I decided to play another game I sometime enjoy in a new place. I search for maps of a place that are produced in that place. I like this game because I think how the local people map a place speaks volumes about it.

Still in the Town hall I found a brochure documenting good pubs in Yorkshire and there was a map, hooray! But no! Shipley wasn’t even on the thing! So I asked a man who clearly worked there if the map was right that there were in fact no decent pubs in Shipley? It turned out that the man was called Chris and he was the caretaker at the town hall. He was very quick to inform me that there were lots of good pubs and he corrected the map for me, here it is:

So now I know about ‘Fanny’s’ on Saltaire Road, ‘The Junction’ in Baildon, ‘Don’t Tell Titus’ (apparently named because the founder of Saltaire, Sir Titus Salt, was Wesleyan and therefore had little love for boozers…so this one was a secret)  and ‘The Boat House’. You will notice that Chris also put Baildon on the map…but he didn’t go far enough to mark Shipley on it? Apparently Saltaire was good enough? As I kept looking I started to notice a trend that in Shipley…Shipley was often was not marked on a map and that maps of Shipley were nowhere to be found. All I could find were maps and information about Saltaire!?

I braved the drizzle and went in search of the local Library, which was initially difficult to distinguish from the Asda. From what I can tell Asda might have helped build it? Is this a bit of modern day corporate philanthropy? Perhaps I will have to chase this up at some point…I met Sarah and Rebecca who were working on the counter in the Library. They seemed happy to talk, although they seemed slightly confused when I asked about maps of Shipley. However diligently they did find me one in a dusty folder under a desk, but it was still not one I could take away with me (and the river wasn’t on it).

I asked them why they thought I might be struggling to find maps of Shipley? Then I asked what, as a visitor to Shipley, what were the points of interest that I should see? The girls looked genuinely quite taken aback by the questions and one of them politely attempted to answer, and her answer contained the word I kept encountering… ‘Saltaire’. I quickly followed up by asking why when I looked for maps or points of cultural significance in Shipley that all I find is information about Sailtaire? They explained that Sailtaire is a ‘World Heritage Site’ which apparently puts it in the same league as the Pyramids!  Rebecca theorised that perhaps Shipley was a ‘cultural poor relation to Saltaire?’ My instinctive reaction was to feel a bit sorry and perhaps annoyed on behalf of Shipley. Has it had a raw deal? Has its cultural identity suffered because of what is happening next door to it?

Finally I asked Rebecca about the river and whether it was an important part of Shipley’s identity? She told me that she had lots of fond memories of the river and particularly ones that related to family outings as a child. She thought the river probably was important to people in Shipley but perhaps subconsciously rather than consciously? I thought that was a really interesting answer and something I want to find out more about. Is the river something that people appreciate without realising it? Rebecca and Sarah were really helpful and considering they are both local I hope I can find some way of engaging them with the project later on.

So as I head in the direction that Chris at Town Hall had told me the river was in I all ready have two questions to answer:

  1. Firstly, is it true that Shipley struggles with itself because of Saltaire? I spoke to a Policeman who told me it didn’t really matter because it is all Bradford anyway.
  2. And secondly, just because the river is not immediately celebrated in an obvious way is it still important to people in Shipley and if it is how is it?

If anyone has any thoughts please feel free to leave a comment.

 

 

Wet and Wild

Posted on by
Reply

Well, today we started our carefully planned attempts to start talking to members of the communities on the north of the River Aire in Shipley/Baildon. The best laid plans of mice and men are often frustrated by fate, of course — so there’s a certain irony in the fact that the day we’d chosen to start talking about “multi-story water” also happened to be the day when the Environment Agency ended up issuing 21 separate flood warnings across the country! OK, they were mostly in the south, but even here in the north it threw it down for much of the day… leaving our team of intrepid outreach workers traipsing around in the wet and periodically returning to the HALE bus (hired for the day) to try and warm up a bit. Then the generator on the bus broke down, and we were really stuffed!

Inclement conditions no doubt accounted for why many people didn’t open their doors when they were knocked on. No doubt, also, a lot of other people were just out at work and were better called on in the evening (by which time we were sodden!). But what was actually really encouraging from my point of view was that so many of the people who did open their doors — to what were basically cold callers (and wet callers!) — seemed happy to talk and were really responsive to the project. First impressions: people in this area of really proud of where they live, love the river and the green space around it, and aren’t in any hurry to leave. Indeed, I met several people who have lived in the Higher Coach Road area since their estate was constructed in the 1950s, and are still happy here today! And these people (in their late 80s and early 90s now) have vivid memories of past events in the area that are really worth hearing… How the council raised the level of the land, from the flood plain, by pile driving the land to make it fit to build on. How the river itself, when it’s flooded in 1947, or 2000, or 2008 (?) has come right up to the lip of these raised areas… (On Aire Close, which is actually right on the river, I heard about how the floods of 2000 produced four feet of flood water in the living room!) There were also some amazing stories of people’s other river experiences: there was one man who, during World War II, was among the engineers who actually built the bridge over the River Kwai (and no, he wasn’t making this up – he ended up in a Japanese PoW camp, an experience which he does *not* talk about). So, in short, even on a wet and miserable day like this, it became clear to us there’s a gold mine of stories to be dug up here… I wonder what’ll be next!

Walking with Kevin Sunderland (Aire Rivers Trust)

Posted on by
Reply

I had a very enjoyable meeting today with Kevin Sunderland, co-founder and chairman of the Aire Rivers Trust  – a voluntary, charitable organisation dedicated to improving conditions in, on and around the River Aire and its tributaries — especially Bradford Beck. Kevin is a retired accountant, a keen angler, and a mine of information about these rivers and their use and history. Today, though, what he and I looked at, especially, was rubbish!

“Meet me at the back of the Aldi car park at 11am!” he told me. It sounded a bit like some dodgy drug deal or spy rendezvous, but I dutifully turned up at the appointed time and place. The car park shared by Aldi and McDonalds, in central Shipley, is skirted on two sides by Bradford Beck, as it flows towards the Aire, but you’d never know it unless you were looking for it. And what Kevin wanted to show me first was the great pile of industrial waste across the Beck from us, teetering on the edge of a sheer drop into the river. “Bit of wind or rain and that lot’ll be in the Beck!” Kevin pointed out. He’s also tried to point this out to the owners of the site, but he can’t get them to do anything about it. Perhaps the attitude to this particular bit of river is – out of sight, out of mind.

And that’s pretty much the story all over. We walked all around this bit of central Shipley… along the banks of the Beck (the bits we could get to) and also along the Aire, east of Shipley weir – where the Beck joins the main river. There are warehouses, superstores and old industrial buildings all around this area, and a lot of them seem to be run by people with little or no regard for the river they back onto – to judge by the rubbish (mostly packaging materials) strewn all over the river banks. Kevin says that, as head of a charity, it’s not his place to “name and shame” businesses, but I don’t have to be so polite, so let’s name the B&M garden centre for one… There’s cardboard and cellophane sheeting lying around all over the place at the back of their store (bit of wind, in it goes…), and we found one of their shopping trolleys lying in the Aire just downstream. Again, Kevin had phoned the manager about this, but nothing had been done. So together we fished it out and wheeled it back (covered in mud and moss) to park it outside their front entrance. That was today’s bit of environmental activism!

I asked Kevin if his concern about all this littering was primarily about trying to conserve water quality, or making life better for fish and birds, or what. Well, he said, he’s concerned with all of that — and he stresses that, generally, water quality in these rivers is a lot better than it used to be. There’s also a surprising amount of wildlife (we spotted trout in the Aire, lots of birds…). But cleaning up rubbish is as much about “aesthetics” as anything, he says. And surely a university arts professor like myself should have an eye for such things too…

Along Bradford Beck, just down the back of Shipley rail station, we found a whole string of trees covered in debris like this, stranded on trees since the last high water event. It’s basically sewage, Kevin points out — the stuff people flush down their loos in Bradford. Most of the older drainage pipes are also sewage pipes, and sewage solids are supposed to be skimmed off before the liquids get near rivers, but in storm conditions the theory doesn’t always work in practice…  We looked for fish along here too — apparently there have been minnows on this stretch lately, but the trout that were here got killed a while back by some kind of pollutant, and they haven’t yet returned.

Kevin’s tour eventually took us up the Beck almost the whole way into Bradford. He pointed out, for example, some of the old culverting — artificial brick bottoming for the Beck designed to speed up the water flow and thus get all the crap out of the city as soon as possible… But this stuff is terrible for supporting any kind of river life, except the odd duck bobbing on the surface…

Eventually we got as far back upstream as the point where the Beck disappears under one of the old mill building (now commercial offices). It flows underground through most of Bradford’s city centre. This point where it emerges into daylight is, Kevin points out, distinctly stinky… (the people in these offices must have to combat the smell everyday!) Bradford Beck used to be known as one of the most polluted rivers in the country. It’s not like that now, but the sewage smell here is still quite noticeable…

As I say, I really enjoyed meeting Kevin. He pointed out a lot of the less pleasant aspects of the rivers here, but his enthusiasm for further improving the situation is infectious. I suspect he’ll have many other stories to tell us as this project continues…