Twenty-four hours ahead of schedule, may I wish you all a happy Yorkshire Day.
Tomorrow will see the usual festivities to celebrate God’s Own County. But in one part of Yorkshire, a handful of volunteers will be plotting how to promote their small part of England’s finest region.
I refer to the would-be ambassadors for Huddersfield who will meet in the railway station tomorrow to plan how to sell the town to visitors.
The proposal is for a small group of volunteers to run a visitor information point in the station where they can transfer their enthusiasm for the area to any passing passengers who show an interest.
It’s a wonderful idea – the meeting is at 2.30pm tomorrow in the station if you’re interested – but even its originator admits it’s the second best option.
“It would be lovely to provide a fully staffed tourist information centre with paid employees, but as the council faces even more cuts it just isn’t realistic,” Clr Paul Salveson told the Examiner on Monday.
It’s worth recalling that Huddersfield used to have a tourist office, staffed by paid employees, on Albion Street. But it was closed a few years ago in one of Kirklees Council’s typically far-sighted moves.
Perhaps, from their grim lowland base in the Civic Centre, the paper shufflers hadn’t realised that the district they control contains some stunning landscapes – the kind of places people might like to visit, whether for an afternoon, a day or even longer.
If the bureaucrats had looked up from their balance sheets, they would have seen Victoria Tower sitting proudly in the distance. Maybe one of them should have said: “That looks like an interesting building, maybe we should put a visitors centre up there so people can come and spend time and money in Huddersfield.”
From many other parts of their domain the bureaucrats would have been able to see an even more impressive landmark – Emley Moor Mast.
Did none of them ever think: “Hmm. The tallest free-standing structure in the UK. Do you think maybe we could turn that into a tourist attraction? If only there were some catchy fact about the mast that we could use to grab people’s attention.”
But I suppose such things require a modicum of vision and ambition.
Instead, the penny-pinchers honed in on the Albion Street tourist office as an easy win as the cuts got underway. Shutters down, £14,000 a year in rent saved, job done.
No doubt the council’s apologists will point out that the office was replaced by a couple of tables inside the front door of Huddersfield Library. But if this was such a great replacement, there would be no need for tomorrow’s meeting of volunteers.
What made the Albion Street closure even more galling was the fact that it came so early in our decade of economic gloom.
The council’s short-lived Labour / Lib Dem Cabinet decided to shut the office way back in 2009, before that other coalition was even a glint in Nick Clegg’s eye.
A year before Austerity Osborne got his hands on the country’s finances, Huddersfield’s tourist office was already gone.
What we’re left with is a council which seems to have little or no interest in promoting Huddersfield as a place to visit.
Remember the BBC programme Town a few weeks back? What a wonderful showcase for Huddersfield’s landscape, its industrial heritage, its musical tradition.
But where was the council’s tourism promotion off the back of what was, in effect, a 60-minute commercial for the town? I didn’t notice one.
Am I being too cynical by asking if the bureaucrats were put out by the fact that an hour-long celebration of Huddersfield didn’t include a single mention of the word “Kirklees”?
Instead of a properly staffed, properly resourced promotion of the town as a great place to visit, we’re left with the raw enthusiasm of volunteers at the railway station.
It’s sad to reflect that these ambassadors will be directing visitors out into St George’s Square, a place which retains its grandeur despite Kirklees rather than because of it.
As these would-be tourists stand on the square’s pink granite, they will look over at the historic birthplace of rugby league and see a damning demonstration of the council’s failure to promote Huddersfield.
Right in the centre of town stands a beautiful and historic hotel.
And – just like the tourist office on Albion Street – it’s closed.
