An elegy for Oldham

My home town of Oldham is the sort of place people imagine when they think of ‘The North’. It has mill chimneys, redbrick terraced streets and a rain-swept football ground (the third highest in the country) where supporters of the perpetually struggling Oldham Athletic queue for hot Vimto or a bag of black peas.

Oldham is now the most deprived town in England, according to the Office for National Statistics. Crime and unemployment are high; investment, wages and prospects generally are pitifully low. Boarded-up shops and dilapidated factories tell a sorry tale of economic woe.

It wasn’t always like this. My family’s home, in the leafy suburb of Werneth, was in one of many large houses built around 1900 for the managers of the local textile mills. From the fine mahogany mantelpieces to the art-nouveau fittings, everything was of the best, testimony to the industrial wealth that once coursed through Oldham’s veins. I attended the local grammar school, where the head, a Balliol man, was proud to send a regular cohort of pupils to Oxbridge.

Assessing what has gone wrong is not straightforward, because Oldham — or some of it at least — has always been deprived. Well-heeled as Werneth was, there was still a derelict coal mine just up the road, while at the other end of that same road were slums of real Orwellian squalor. On my way to the sweet shop I could peep through a sooty brick archway into a Lowry-like world of tiny, crumbling homes arranged around a filthy courtyard. Thin, ragged children would play around a central block of outdoor privies. And this was in the 1970s.