Wisdom of the Ancients

I've always wanted to do a piece about the place I grew up in. It's a bit self-indulgent, and rather unflattering, but since Halifax has always provided me with pleanty of remoseful and bitter anecdotes and an acute awareness choking anguish, I thought it was only right to give back to the town that made me.

As a general rule, I love proving the older generation wrong. They're full of useless facts, set in their ways, deeply conservative and not very optimistic. It is great when they come out with outrageous statements like "Dogs can't walk backwards", "It'll rain today", "Those darned kids are so noisy" and "You can't drink a whole bottle of ethanol", and you go ahead and show them what the younger generation are capable of.

That said, I now invest a certain amount of time in what old people say, especially if it happens to be in line with my own views on a subject. In fact, the older the better. So I've dragged you out a quote from the sixteen hundreds, from The Beggar's Litany, because John Walter's had a point when he wrote:

"There is a Proverbe, and a prayer withall,
That we may not to these strange places fall,
From Hull, from Halifax, from Hell, 'tis thus,
From all these three, Good Lord deliver us."

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.

Halifax, West Yorkshire, is a wretched place. I did have some pictures of the town stored on my mobile phone until it got stolen, which is irony for you, I guess. These included the piles of rubbish that had been ripped open by desperados searching for food or something. There was a good shot of a bloody hand-print smeared down a cash machine, or pools of congealed reddish brown beneath cracked shop windows. It is impossible to go out on a Saturday morning in Halifax and not encoutner dried blood. I don't think there has been a time I haven't absently noted the scene of a possible homicide.

Let me paint you a picture. It's a smallish place, as places go, and always full of people. Tall gothic buildings that haven't been used since the seventies and eighties tower up out of the gloom. It is always gloomy in Halifax. I would say it rains a lot, but it doesn't feel like rain. It feels like nature is trying to wash away the filth with its tears.



Halifax taken in 2007 or 2008. No, honestly, it is. The slight smudging of the sky and the off-grey colour appears in most photographs of Halifax and is characteristic of the crushing despair that hangs over the town.

 There are lots of jewelry shops, the reason for which escapes me since no one has any money. There are a number of charity shops, which is a bit more in keeping with the demiographic, and far too many pubs, most of which are like a terrible nest of darkness.

"Halifax had one of the highest densities of pubs to inhabitants during a study that took place in the late 1990s. One such establishment that gained notoriety during November 2005 was the Zoo Bar. The nightclub had a history of under-age drinking, and became the first establishment in the UK to be closed because of the Licensing Act 2003. At the time of the police intervention officers reportedly identified 420 of the 500 people in the club to be under-age drinkers. The nightclub was identified in an American study regarding youths and alcohol and gained European notoriety. The nightclub was subsequently closed and sold to developers to renovate into flats. A recent report showed Halifax to have above average levels of drink related violence and associated issues."

- Wikipedia

I did drink in the Zoo Bar. I'm not proud of it anymore than I'm ashamed of it. It just happened. I wasn't particularly bothered when it got bulldozed anymore than a passing curiousity that someone could be expected to politely express at the scene of a car crash.

For a small down with nothing but broken glass and crushed dreams, Halifax is has a varied history. The organist of Halifax Minister, William Herschel, discovered Uranus. Dickens makes a few unflattering remarks about the town, and Defoe was once a resident. Crime was controlled by the employment of a machine - the Halifax Gibbet - which decapitated people unless they could get past a certain point - the Running Man pub, and escape. It is, to my knowledge, the only town to invent a serial killer through a collective bout of self-harm. The town hall was built by the guy who designed the Houses of Parilament, Square Chapel is the last... Square Chapel... in the country. And the Piece Hall is the last cloth hall and dates back several hundred years for people who are remotely interested. I didn't think so.

Trying to capture the complete desolation of Halifax, and wider Calderdale MBC, is difficult. The only way I can imagine this feeling to other people - since you get used to it if you live here - is kind of like that mute horror that you feel gripping your soul when something terrifically important goes wrong. Only all the time. Every second of every day. Pulling you towards the ground like you were a derranged Hobbit transporting the Ring of Power at the end of Lord of the Rings. As a rule, no one smiles in Halifax. Smiles are forbidden. They remind us that other people might be happy, athlough you can't enitrely put your finger on the many diffuse reasons why everything is so grim. It's not a single reason. It's an ambiance of tributlation, ordeal, and hopelessness.

So the next time you're in Halifax, get out while you still can. In fact, get out of the whole West Riding and don't stop moving. Don't look back in case you turn into a pillar of salt. And remember that it is sometimes alright to listen to people who are older than you. They've been around a bit, and sometimes the depressing truth is that they realised things you now hold true before you were even born. So on that note, I'll wrap up with a line from an unnamed Calderdalian, written a month before my birth.

"I feel that Halifax is a deadend town, I fancy being a chef but there's nothing doing round here. I did work away for a while and when I cam back I thought the town had altered for the worse. I arrived by train and the station was a dump."

- [Anon], Nothing Interesting Ever Happened to Me, pg. 79