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A speed date with Keighley
No time to dawdle. With an "on your marks, get set, go", we're taking up the Keighley tourist challenge... to see the town in 45 minutes. Why? Well, the Keighley Town Centre Association has put out a leaflet called See Keighley in 45 Minutes and I have 45 minutes to spare. It could be the start of a whole new trend in speed-sightseeing. See Rochdale in 30 minutes. See Barrow in 15 minutes. See Milton Keynes if you must.
You may laugh (unless you live in Milton Keynes). But nowhere, however unlikely, is safe from tourism. The other day, I picked up a leaflet called Discover Brighouse and Elland (which implies, when you think about it, that no-one yet has). Another leaflet proclaims: "Visit Doncaster... The Time is Now."
Everywhere, the theory goes, can be a "destination", particularly if it can drum up a bit of money. I'm actually planning guided tours of my attic office as I write.
It hasn't always been like this. Getting on for 20 years ago, before "heritage" smothered the leisure market with its fragrant pot-pourri, I went on a "media promotional tour" of Keighley. The aim was to persuade people not to drive straight through the town on their way to Haworth, for a bit of Bront and a nice cup of tea, or Skipton, only 10 miles away but in a different world.
The tour was novel, if low-key. We visited the Town Hall council chamber and an arty-crafty mill where Peruvian flute music wafted around, but the thing that made the biggest impression was a giant newt at Cliffe Castle Museum. It was, truth to tell, a model – about 10ft long, mean-eyed, well-fed and smiling knowingly as it clamped its jaws around an unhappy fish.
A delight for lovers of 350 million year old amphibians, it was, said a lady from the museum, a bit more theatrical than she would have liked. "Made by someone who went on to work for Walt Disney," she explained, and we smiled and nodded and moved on to some stuffed moles.
The giant newt, strangely enough, comes to mind as I arrive in Keighley by train. Like most visitors, my natural instinct is to cross the station for a ride on the wonderful Keighley and Worth Valley Railway, with its thrusting pistons and its unassailable maroon-and-cream nostalgia and its trains to Ingrow (famed for its toenails). But no. I'm going to try to see Keighley in a clock-watching 45 minutes.
For guidance, I've brought a couple of books with me. Nikolaus Pevsner, writing in his Buildings of England series in 1959, reckoned that Keighley may be "spacious, clean and friendly" but added: "No architectural monument is of much importance or significance." MJB Baddeley was even more outspoken in his Thorough Guide to Yorkshire: "Keighley has, of course, no charm for the tourist... a thriving but mean-looking town." He was writing in 1897, though.
And now, over a century later, a word of explanation from the Town Centre Association, which has launched a "Love Keighley" campaign, with car stickers, t-shirts and balloons.
"Quite a lot of people will visit Keighley to go to the Airedale shopping centre or for the railway or for Haworth," says Stephanie Bottomley, the association's administrator. "So the idea of the leaflet is to give them a taster of the town, to see some of the more interesting sites. It's been very popular, particularly with Japanese visitors. They like a set route and a timetable; very precise."
And that's what you get: a set route and a whistle-stop timetable. The Time is Now. "Turn left out of the station..." I glance up at the wyverns on the canopy supports "...and ignore the pelican crossing..." I ignore it, shun it, positively cut it dead "...cross over to the Victoria Hotel..." Momentary panic here. The trail reckons I should have taken two minutes so far, but I've lost 43 seconds trying to cross at the traffic lights.
No matter. The smart Edwardian parade on Cavendish Street stretches ahead, and I try not to be distracted by the model train trundling round the toy shop window or the enticing smell of fish
and chips.
Over an estate agent's Properties to Let window is a blue plaque, to Gordon Bottomley (1874 to 1948), a Keighley-born poet, playwright and art collector (particularly of the Pre-Raphaelites) who might be better-known if he hadn't been so fond of instantly forgettable titles: The Gate of Smaragdus, Gruach, The Riding to Lithend, Laodice and Danae. As The Literary Encyclopaedia notes, he deplored the dehumanising effect of industry and, in his 1908 poem To Iron Founders and Others, castigated factory owners and condemned "machines for making more machines". Dangerous talk in Edwardian Keighley.
I glance left at this and right at that, and forward at the UK's very first Carnegie Library (1904). A fine Art Nouveauish plaque on one side of the vestibule praises his "munificence". On the other side is a more utilitarian plaque marking the 1972 opening of extensions by the Secretary of State for Education and Science, a woman called Thatcher. Inside, a bust of Andrew Carnegie himself stares steadfastly at the battery recycling tub.
Just along the road is a former Temperance Hall, now ironically a Wetherspoons, and I've fallen behind on the timetable. I should have taken 18 minutes so far; I've taken 20. I hurry across the road to Town Hall Square, with its war memorial featuring a sailor with a telescope hoisted to his eye. Strangely, the timetable now shows 16 minutes, so time has clearly gone backwards as Keighley has pressed forwards, demolishing whatever was there before to create the Airedale Centre and its multi-storey car park "which holds a Safer Parking Award".
"We need to keep moving," says the leaflet, so only a cursory glance inside the Town Hall (24 mins), with its graphs of "Cumulative electricity usage" and its notice that "Your Eco-Steward for this building is Janet Cawood", and past shops, looking up to the first floors to spot the chartered accountants and solicitors whose offices justify the pillars and gables and turrets. After all this miscellaneous Victoriana and Edwardiana, the streets thin out to the more 18th century area around the parish church, in turn on the site of medieval Keighley.
Very quiet here, a little haven of history. A grassy graveyard, and a causeway of laid-flat gravestones, including John Naylor, died 1814, aged 20:
"Here lie the relicks of a lovely youth
With love of learning blest and love of truth."
As I write it down, a man with a rucksack comes up and asks: "Are you from the planning department?" No time to answer; I'm 10 minutes
behind (43 mins instead of 33) and at 46 mins the deadline has passed and I'm still outside Pets Utopia, gazing inside for hamsters and gerbils. There's the charming Royal Arcade, and a rare town-centre textile mill, and, after 55 minutes, I'm back at the station. I could have done it in 45, I suppose, with a bit of self-discipline.
Amazing to have covered what seems to have been a lot of ground in such a short time, and to have seen so much that's interesting, even if some of it has been only a blurred glimpse. What a good leaflet; what a good idea.
So, mission completed, I stroll up to Cliffe Castle Museum. And glory be, 20 years on, here's my old friend the giant newt, spotlit in yellow, and still smiling, still with the fish in its mouth, as it crawls up what looks like a roll of tufted carpet. There are explanations of how it's based on fossils found at Toftshaw Colliery, Bradford, in the 1860s, and a backdrop of the primeval West Riding in all its boggy, tropical mystery.
Discover the Primeval West Riding. The Time was Then.
See Keighley in 45 Minutes leaflets from 01535 618085, www.lovekeighley.com
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Sunday 12 February 2012
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