THE Examiner is running a series about the town centre this week. Business experts are giving us their views on how to reverse the decline of central Huddersfield.
Now, for what it’s worth, you can have my two pennies.
If my last trip to the town centre is anything to go by then the place is in serious trouble.
As I parked at the Queensgate multi-storey I noticed there was only one other car on that level.
Jenny and I found that the town centre was so quiet we could hear the birds singing in the trees and the previous night’s takeaway wrappers rustling in the wind.
In the deserted, windswept Piazza, pigeons outnumbered humans 10 to one. Only the pound shop was open for business so we headed down to the Kingsgate instead.
Barely half the shops in Huddersfield’s flagship centre were trading and none of them was doing much business. When I wanted to buy a jumper in Next I had to go and find a member of staff to come to the till.
It was a similar story out on New Street where the coffee shops were among the handful of shops open.
Walking round the town centre was strange, even a little eerie. If you have a morbid fear of crowds – and a phobia of open shops – then it probably would be an ideal day out.
In the interests of accuracy, I should declare that our visit took place on Sunday – i.e. New Year’s Day – when much of the town’s population was tucked up in bed nursing a hangover.
It is, of course, grossly unfair to judge the town centre based on one of the quietest days of the year.
But it is somehow appropriate, as we look forward to 2012, to ask if what I saw on New Year’s Day was actually a glimpse into the town centre’s future.
Will the time come when the centre of Huddersfield looks as much like a ghost town on a typical Saturday afternoon as it does on New Year’s Day?
Perhaps things will never get quite that bad – but who could deny that the town centre is heading in that direction?
In the five years since I moved to Huddersfield I’ve noticed the area within the ring road become noticeably scruffier and quieter.