IT’S not very likely the strange person who sprayed his ‘tag’ on the top floor wall of the Co-op building at the end of New Street was making a point.
Our graffiti sprayer is no Banksy.
He didn’t have a message for the world and was satisfied merely with painting GIPS, adding a lack of imagination to the sins of life endangerment, trespass and criminal damage.
The graffiti appeared some months ago and I’ve been watching to see whether anybody cared to cleanse it, given that it stares untidily down Chapel Hill past the new Kirklees College at one of the major entrances to the town.
Not much chance of that, I suppose, in a recession. But one can always hope.
We shouldn’t give vandals the oxygen of publicity, but on this occasion, but he/she has accidentally drawn attention to larger affairs.
The first section of the Co-op, with its clock tower, is a Victorian structure. The second addition, built in 1936, is one of the North’s best examples of the English Modernist style of architecture, with its distinctive long windows and masses of ashlar fronting.
Unsuited to the Co-op’s needs by the late 1990s, part of the building spent some time as the Heaven and Hell night club before the lot was sold to Kirklees Council in 1977 for about £2m.
Cynics would argue that any town centre property that falls into Kirklees Council’s hands is automatically destined for dereliction, and this would be untrue.
But the Co-op building is huge, iconic, and at one of Huddersfield’s major gateways, and thus is cast in a role symbolic of the town’s perilous economic state.
Graffiti man Banksy brought intelligence and political purpose to his acts and in so doing elevated vandalism into an art form way above GIPS’ level.
But in some strange way, the Co-op’s vandal has left a default message that is just as poignant.
