Do we have enough civic pride in Huddersfield? Have your say

Sep 6 2010 Huddersfield Daily Examiner

WE don’t have enough civic pride.

That’s the opinion of Huddersfield residents who have described the town as having a few too many eyesores.

Two year ago businessman Ron Kitchen highlighted a range of problems within the town centre, which included Nazi-related graffiti adorning a wall for months before being cleaned after the Examiner revealed it was there.

Two years on, we went back out on to the town’s streets to see what had changed.

And in some cases, it seemed the answer was – little.

Bags of rubbish are dumped almost daily on the steps leading to St Peter’s Gardens – the town centre’s only green space. Between eight and 12 bags of rubbish can be found on the steps and underneath the bushes on any given day.

A spokeswoman for Kirklees Council said: “The bags at St Peter’s Gardens are only there for a short time each day as they are bagged street sweepings awaiting collection and this is the scheduled collection point.”

But Mr Kitchen, of Edgerton, asked: “Why do they leave them on the steps to a garden?

“Is that the best place for a pile of rubbish?”

Across the road the situation wasn’t much better.

Two years ago the stairwells of a council-owned building on the corner of St Peter’s Street and Byram Street were overflowing with rubbish.

Today the situation has got worse – the building is now derelict, several windows and a door are boarded up and the stairwells are still full of rubbish, including a national newspaper dated April this year. Tape covers the council sign, although that is now peeling off.

A spokeswoman for Kirklees Council added: “We will organise for the rubbish in the stairwell of the council building to be removed.

“Stairwell rubbish is the responsibility of building owners rather than the street cleaning team.”

Mr Kitchen added: “The upkeep of the town is totally non-existent.

“I don’t think there is any civic pride.

“If a building in Oxford or Bath was the state of some of these the council would make the owners do something about it, whether they owned them or not.

“They’ve put in a load of hanging baskets but it doesn’t cut the mustard.

“We’ve designed a new square which has buses running through it – it’s a town not a big city, we don’t need buses running straight through it when there is a big bus station two minutes’ walk away.

“The Britannia Buildings are one of the finest Edwardian neo-classical buildings in the north of England and somebody has allowed a load of white advertising stickers to be placed on every window.

“It had scaffolding round it for a year and nothing was done.”

During a half-an-hour trip round the town centre we found evidence of 20 different examples of graffiti – four on just one section of Wood Street.