Senior moment: Appalling square is more New York than Yorkshire

Aug 29 2008 by Helen Roberts, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Appalling square is more New York than Yorkshire

Former teacher John Berryman is originally from South Africa and now lives in Slaithwaite. He is the founder of Able Fuels, of Fartown, and has also worked as a tree surgeon during his varied life. Here he gives his view on a subject which continues to raise controversy

`We trusted public servants who have slowly become more like our masters. We have paid them to foist this puce purple farrago on us. Dig it up!’

IN the moot point regarding St George’s Square we have representatives of two political parties defending their respective positions with the Conservatives wanting to save money and the Liberal Democrats to save a space.

Now money is real and a space is just that but which has the greater worth? The people of Huddersfield voted by 87% to protect this space in a poll in the Examiner this week and being Yorkshire know the value of money.

Are they dyed in the wool, backward looking, or is there something intangible about a space that transcends any question of money?

The aesthetic qualities of St George’s Square are now beyond dispute. There is something more, very deep, that embeds a place in the minds and feelings of the people who cherish it and use it. Sensitive renewal should acknowledge that in an unspoken way a communal awareness of a sense of place is part of what binds us together, shared memories and experiences across the generations that give us a sense of belonging. That knowing that the built environment around us was delved from our own land and fashioned by the hands of those whose vision created it. Landscape and buildings at ease and comfortable with each other. Now unfolding is a jarring tension in one unfortunate juxtaposition of materials.

Many years ago there was a television documentary that compared and contrasted the fortunes of Halifax and Huddersfield in the way in which the respective city elders chose to redevelop their respective towns. The actions of the guardians of Huddersfield and their officials were excoriated with evidence aplenty shown on film. Now it is happening again. It is not regeneration, it’s degeneration.

How did this come about? Since the issue re-emerged I have done some research and my dismay began to turn to anger.

The council official I eventually reached was less than helpful. There had been “full consultation” etc.

I contacted English Heritage to be told that the council had been advised that local natural stone should be used in preference to any other material. I then found that the existing landscape, favoured by the majority, had been designed by our own landscape architects about 15 years ago and had won the “Europa Nostra” – a European-wide accolade. This department was excluded from involvement in this current parody by the funding agency, Yorkshire Forward.

Returning to the consultation referred to earlier, I further learned that it had been the sort used by organisations that wish to control the outcome of the process. Ask the “right” questions in a subtle way and the “correct” answers can almost be relied on. So four options were offered, not five. A fifth would have been to retain the original, suitably enhanced and modified, a question that was never asked and therefore never answered.

I began to fume about penny pinching parsimony, a landscape scheme blighted by the latest fashion in landscape design with all the ephemeral disadvantages of fashion. Did road engineers and accountants have more influence on this scheme than architects, conservation officers and English Heritage in this offensive endeavour? I begin to smell a rat and will search further.

There are three groups of people who have made me grumpy. The politicians have not served us well, they are our first line of defence in protecting our heritage. Worse are the contemptible bureaucrats who shelter behind the institutional constipation of ingrained reticence, the inertia of proper procedures and mealy-mouthed formulaic platitudes.

But those that make me most grumpy are myself and my fellow citizens. We let it happen.

We trusted our public servants who have slowly and imperceptibly become more like our masters. We have paid them to foist this puce purple farrago on us. Dig it up!

PS. If the Queen is the symbol of our nation we naturally chose the place we are instinctively most proud of, the focus of our town, St George’s Square and our famous Choral Society to entertain her and those who came to share with her. Now we sully it, slashing it with pink cosmetics to make the gracious old lady of a space look like mutton dressed as lamb.

More Andy Warhol than David Hockney. More New York than Yorkshire.