Category: North

Briggflatts

When I was a youth I used to read T S Elliot’s Four Quartets and this. This was lost to me and then I saw it had been re-issued with notes, a CD of the poet reading it and a DVD of the documentary from which this You Tube was culled. Poetry should be read […]

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Scarborough

I like Scarborough. Because there’s still a touch of the dowager about it – still hints of brio. I like Scarborough because when I was tiny we used to go to the East Coast resorts. Because of the way the sea crashes over the North Promenade. Because of the 50s cricket ground where Yorkshire CC […]

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The end of the world in Bradford

Bradford is a suitable location for an above ground art bunker to display pictures of the real bunker. Hollowed out, the survivors fending for themselves – the back draft from the big bang took it out sometime time ago. But nobody in London bothered to man any kind of emergency control centre over that one. […]

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Hull

As he wondered around Hull in a strangely heightened and impressionable state there was something about the place that reminded him of Belgium. …the tendency towards tired and overblown monumentalism   …something in the extravagant, blowsy, theatrical gestures …the exhausted imperialism …the peculiar and unpredictable municpalism ….the scruffiness, the deadpan appreciation of the sinister and […]

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Viva Hunslet!

Enjoyed a tribute the Leeds locomotive building industry (RIP) that was D2578’s Homecoming Weekend at the Middleton Railway. In my related internet explorations I came across the Leeds Historical Exploration Society’s site – which is a site of record of their various expeditions. Among their explorations is one of the last surviving of evidence of […]

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Dayrover days in the early Eighties

Before the de-industrialisation of the North, and the unit-isation of the railways, the youth cult of bashing was in full swing. Bashing being the art of accumulating haulage behind railway locomotives – either by type, or by distance, or by both. At that time the railways were still stocked with rolling stock from the ‘modernisation’ […]

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Ginnel culture

Some tourist cities can keep their dignity and their secrets and not vanish into backdrops for mandatory photocalls – or become imperfect versions of the made in china replicas on sale at the the gew gaw shops.  Having as much history as possible helps in order to disrupt and overwhelm.  Rome’s good at that – Paris not so good. York hovers just about on the […]

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