I have some sympathy with the pioneering incomers who moved to the Yorkshire mill town of Hebden Bridge in the 1970s. At the time Hebden was in a near terminal decline, its factories closing in rapid succession. As a result, the town suffered one of the fastest depopulations ever seen in Britain, as the more animated locals left to find work elsewhere. The incomers, called ‘offcomers’ locally, sought to reverse this with a strong dose of middle-class culture, although being for the most part liberal Guardian readers they would probably baulk at the idea they ever sought to engineer working-class Hebden into something more bourgeois.
Nonetheless, that is what they did, and it worked. Today Hebden is as much an advertisement for the power of art and culture for social regeneration as the later examples of Hoxton, Liverpool or Gateshead. The
problem for the incomers is that despite the obvious benefits of having shops, schools and an astonishing cultural life for a town its size, the natives of Hebden Bridge don’t seem to like it. Instead, they simmer with a quiet resentment towards the colonists previously seen only in the more ungrateful outposts of the British empire. Perhaps it has something to do with the historic culture of the place being almost entirely swept away by this alien invasion. Or is it that the incomers can appear a bunch of opinionated busybodies?
I am also not sure how Paul Barker, an exiled native of Hebden Bridge, views the new arrivals. In the background of this book, part memoir and part social study, there is an unstated quest to find remains of the old Hebden in which he grew up. Often it takes the form of a simple conceit in which Barker travels to Hebden for a meeting or event but finds himself arriving early. Whilst waiting he wanders around the town looking for familiar landmarks and remembering people he knew and events he witnessed. It is not a subtle trope, but is effective and leads to a series of bite-size chapters, most of which could work easily as independent newspaper articles. Indeed, with his truncated sentences, which can at times read as ungenerously curtailed, Barker betrays his background in newspaper journalism.
Yet in this structure the book also shows a kind of split personality, as Barker’s own memories splice into earlier interviews he undertook in Hebden, some as long ago as the 1970s, which were more overtly sociological in nature. The transition is not always seamless, and the result is a style that is oddly cold. In relation to the incomers this coldness pushes them into the distance, as though Barker cannot really bear their company. With the locals, past and present, it brings them very much into the foreground, but they still appear as though viewed with the eye of a scientist describing the morphology of mould growing in a petri dish rather than with a warm nostalgia for home.
That is not to say there are no lighter moments in the book. Barker’s description of a screening of the German expressionist movie Nosferatu at Mytholmroyd parish church is almost worthy of Bill Bryson. The painfully trendy vicar believes the classic vampire film is not an inapproriate choice because it shows the church giving its buildings back to the community. Despite rows of empty pews Barker finds it difficult to get in because he hasn’t booked properly. He wryly notes it is a situation that illustrates the strange combination of liberalism and officiousness that characterises the new middle classes of Hebden. Finally, having seen the film, Barker is accosted on the way out by ladies from the Blood Transfusion Service keen to sign up donors.
Unfortunately this is a rare excursion into the wry side of Engish life, and you cannot help wondering why this book was written. If not for humourous effect, is it to mourn a lost way of life? Or is it meant to embody a need Barker has to return to his roots? It is hard to say yes to either of these, despite the book being subtitled ‘A Sense of Belonging’. Although Barker includes plenty of stories about people who did belong to old Hebden, he admits he always felt detached from the place. That leaves you feeling you are reading a kind of sociological text in which the author engages in the anthropological study of a place he just happens to know rather well.
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