Martin Wainright Says One Last Thing...
Above: MArtin Wainwright
When my wife and I got chatting with a barmaid and she asked where we from, her face cracked open in a great big grin of delight. ‘Leeds? Coo-ool. I’ve just finished at Huddersfield Uni. I love the place. In fact, I’m homesick for it.’ It made my day, to hear a Northern town rhapsodised down south, especially when you glanced at the view from the bar of honey-coloured cottages drenched in wisteria and thought to yourself: does she really prefer Moldgreen and Paddock to this? My reaction was especially gleeful because she had fallen in love with a smaller Yorkshire town, or to put it bluntly, somewhere other than Leeds.
One of the great advances for Yorkshire during my 20 years back here as a Guardian reporter, has been the revolution in my native city’s image in the South and London. We all know about that: clubs, Harvey Nicks and especially 60,000 students out for a good time. The other night we drove back through Headingley on a warm June night with the car windows open, and had a series of chats (because you know how traffic crawls between the Original Oak pub and Grove Lane) with a string of kids dressed as bananas, bank robbers, fairies and teddy bears.
It was the end of exams and they were celebrating three or four great years up here. Only one of about 15 had a Yorkshire accent; all the others will have headed back now to Surrey, Bristol or Wales and I bet you that they will be great ambassadors for Leeds. But Huddersfield? Well, our barmaid is in distinguished historical company. You may not go along with the politics of Karl Marx’s chief lieutenant Friedrich Engels, but who can fault his decision that Huddersfield is ‘the handsomest by far of all the factory towns in Lancashire and Yorkshire by reason of its charming situation and modern architecture.’ That was in 1845 and things have only improved since, particularly in cleanliness and especially with the arrival of Huddersfield University.
Most of us probably only glimpse its signs and nameplates as we swirl around the ring road (part of my family’s lore and legend, because my Dad would often remind us that the hilliest stretch was given Britain’s first heated road surface in winter, by a particularly enlightened Liberal council). But anyone who has business at the uni, such as the barmaid in the Bell at Charlbury, discovers a fascinating world. Rather like the entire Victorian streets swallowed up and preserved on the Leeds University campus, Huddersfield’s academics Martin Wainwright.
My reaction was especially gleeful because she had fallen in love with a smaller Yorkshire town, or to put it bluntly, somewhere other than Leeds. and students have grouped themselves round the canal where it loops round accompanied by the river Colne. The last time I was there, I surveyed the summery scene of students flopping about on the grass, boats going by and mellow buildings old and new, and I thought: Now, where does this remind me of?
The answer was the Backs at Cambridge. OK, you can laugh. Huddersfield doesn’t (yet) have a King’s College chapel or a Christopher Wren library – although its Grade One listed railway station makes the equivalent at Cambridge look like an abandoned set of sidings. But the ambience of students, grass, quietly flowing water, dragonflies and ducks is very similar. How long will it be before they have punts? They tried them, you know, when York University opened its campus in the grounds of Heslington Hall in 1963, complete with its meander of waterways leading to that great big lake. But, I was told shortly afterwards, the lining of this artificial Venice was never designed to take the impact of sturdy young people wielding punting poles.
Ram! Rip! Glug, glug, glug… and they had to send off for a very big puncture repair kit, sell the punts and start again. This has been claimed and denied to me so many times since then, that I cannot be sure where the truth lies. In journalist’s terms, it is one of those stories where you hope not to ask the one-too-many question, which unravels a delightful but gossamer plot. But anyway, in the context of punting at Huddersfield it doesn’t matter, because the bed of the Narrow Canal is made of sterner stuff. Its main danger is a different one, familiar to novice punters, when the pole is plunged down too firmly and encounters a century of gloop.
This is the moment when the slender piece of wood or aluminium suddenly assumes a life of its own; and if you don’t let go of it, you cling there like Captain Jack Sparrow in the opening shots of the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, before sliding gently into the drink. But then that’s what student life is all about, isn’t it? In 60 years time, I bet, today's kids will come back to the Huddersfield Backs with two new generations of Northern fans, and say: ‘Look that’s where your Nan fell in.’