Sunday, May 30, 2010

some memories of west Bradford

Well, this is grim. Intelligent comment is to be found here, in Jamie Kenny's interview with David Wilson.
Would you say that serial killers are a kind of negative indicator of the health of society in the sense that the fewer victims there are, the better society functions?

Serial killers function best within fractured communities, where people don’t look out for each other, and when the gap between those who have and those who have not is wide. In cultures such as these no one really bothers to notice the elderly neighbour living by themselves, or the kids who are homeless because they don’t view these people as having value, or being connected to their lives. Serial killers also exploit homophobia and our laws related to those young people who sell sexual services. When I was in Ipswich in 2006 I used to point out that less than an hour’s flight away was Amsterdam and that no Dutch serial killer had ever targeted prostitutes.


There's also a nasty surprise; according to Chris Williams, who actually met him, he was working on precisely that question, whether the 19th century's apparently low murder rate was explained by the fact that the victims of Victorian murderers were more likely to just vanish rather than be reported to the police.

Well, Yorkshire scores another historic first. I used to work off Thornton Road, and also in Dockfield Mill in Shipley; they're both places where the death of the textile industry left behind a lot of rotting mill buildings that then got re-purposed by all kinds of odd little businesses. Dockfield Road is less so, more traditionally industrial, and there are terraces of classic working-class homes part of the way along it, just about where the pie van parked up when I was working in an envelope factory.

Thornton Road, though, is nothing but old mills and warehouses, now become small engineering workshops, garages, curry wholesalers and the like, a sort of Yorkshire favela development. The district, in the valley between the university and Great Horton Road on one side and Manningham on the other, is not identified with any community - hardly anyone lives there, they only work there or cut through the backstreets to avoid the inner ring road. (Oddly enough, the anarchist 1 in 12 Club is round there too, up the hill towards Westgate. And so are the Quakers.)

The vice trade moved down there after the girls were driven out of Lumb Lane, further uphill (uphill and downhill are always important directions in Bradford) and northwards in the centre of Manningham; this event has been variously considered to have been an example of community vigilantism, Islamism, and also to be associated with control of the drugs market and black/Asian tension, which later led to serious violence. In the 1990s, you could drive past any time of the night or day and see drug dealing going on - I also remember that one of the corner shops still had a sign outside advertising paraffin.

When I worked in an industrial bakery further up the road towards Lidget Green (and its Pathan community), and would walk back down towards the city centre, stinking of roasted high fructose syrup and cream-style product, I remember passing a huge billboard for Coca-Cola with some pouting model reclining across it. Some Four Lions character had decided to deface this example of imperialist decadence and fitna, but rather than aiming for the cleavage or the thighs, or for that matter the Coke, they'd chosen to tear down the face.

3 comments:

Laban said...

When were you there ?

I was there in 70s/early 80s, when Pathans were decidedly thin on the ground in Lidget Green, and the street girls were still in Lumb Lane.

Thornton Road was more famous for the Black Swan, home of fine Tetleys and the Satans Slaves bike gang.

Alex said...

Before my time. I moved there in 1981 as a tiny yearling ranter, and was there or back until 2004.

No discussion of pubs round there should miss the Fighting Cocks, off Thornton Road towards the Grattan distribution centre in Listerhills. Apparently it was once turfed and given a flock of sheep.

Charlie Stross said...

I was there circa 1989-90, doing a one year sweat-shop degree at the Uni; lived on the other side of the valley, had to walk through that way to and from campus every day.

'Grim' just about describes it. I've seen worse areas -- Harehills in Leeds, for starters, or some of the outlying sink-hole estates around Edinburgh -- but it's pretty grim.

kostenloser Counter