Walking the M62

Junction 24: thanks for the high places

Nine miles walk from Brighouse to Huddersfield today, via Elland, and the highlight: Junction 24 at Ainley Top, familiar to M62 drivers as the high edge on which sits a works unit with large windows facing the hills and towns of the north across a wide, open valley. The building looks like a 1960s hotel or a Bond movie penthouse and the views from there must be phenomenal. I sat in a wild field just below this junction on an afternoon clear enough to pick out the details of the towns and landscapes beyond and identify them on the OS map, an engrossingly enjoyable way to while away an hour or so.

It’s a cinematic cliche that characters from Northern mill towns always do their thinking, make their life-changing decisions, on hilltops overlooking their homes. Just like Liverpudlians always go to the waterfront for that purpose. Well, they’re cliches; but they carry deep truths.

Prayer at Junction 24

Thanks for the high places
where it is possible to take a long view
- through the long grass,
- over high fields,
of the temporarily tiny towns below.

Thanks for the high places
where monuments to human folly
- pompous pillars ennobling their donors,
- failed mills,
- churches deifying their buried benefactors,
are reduced to scratches and smudges on a vast canvas.

Thanks for the high places
where the geography of the roads and railways
- and clusters of homes,
- and industrial sites,
connects and clutches, resonates and reveals.

Thanks for the high places
where even the random shambles of industrial detritus
- abandoned works,
- stacked storage units,
- grassed-up quarries and ripped-up concrete yards,
take on shape, pattern, shade and colour.

Thanks for the high places
which stop you in your steps,
give cause for reflection,
permit you to turn your back on the rushing traffic
- to face your Elland, to face your Halifax,
- to face the grass covering your feet,
- to face yourself.

In the non-existent footsteps of the Halifax Slasher

I blogged about it two years ago, Tim Chapman's article for Strange Attractor called Haunts of the Halifax Slasher. Today Tim was generous enough to walk me around the town and show me the sites where in 1938 Halifax was gripped by 'two weeks of terror of a kind said to have been unseen since the days of Jack the Ripper', when 'women were cut with razors; right-thinking men patrolled the streets; bystanders who looked a bit odd were beaten up'.

The astonishing thing about this episode in the mill town's life was that there never was a Slasher, and the incidents were largely proven to be false, the self-inflicted wounds of fearful or attention-seeking individuals at a time of mass-panic.

The lynch-mobs searching out suspects, and venting their vengeance on innocent parties - they were real enough. Interesting to reflect on this whilst walking, unmolested, through Halifax's Asian quarter (the old mill area where many of the Slasher incidents took place) and talking about the persecutory prerogatives of the far-right in the town's current politics.

This walk took me into mental spaces I've not much visited so far on my journey - spaces of violence. Halifax is probably no different than any other town in its relationship to violence, but it has had its headlines: today we walked past the site of one of the killings by 'Yorkshire Ripper' Peter Sutcliffe in 1979. On 4 April that year he killed Josephine Whitaker (aged 19), a bank clerk, assaulting her on Savile Park Moor as she was walking home. In contrast to the unsubstantiated or hoax Slasher stories, Josephine Whitaker's murder was very real and is still, obviously, very raw.

Our walk took us down Gibbet Lane and past the celebrated gibbet, the original one possibly a millennium old, the method of execution for thieves of cloth or creatures and a precursor of the revolutionaries' guillotine. Having stopped for refreshments in the restuarant at Dean Clough, an ex-mill still massively imposing even in its current gentrified form, we then walked under North Bridge where, Tim recounted, 'On 15 August 1842, probably the largest mob ever seen in Halifax ... (thousands of) Chartist marchers [entered Halifax], ... singing Chartist hymns and the 100th Psalm: "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands." The Riot Act was read. At the height, a mob of some 25,000 people thronged the streets of Halifax.'

The Chartists were protesting for emancipation and parliamentary democracy, and also against the "cruel wars against liberty", the "unconstitutional police force"; the 1834 Poor Law; factory conditions and church taxes on Nonconformists. The march on Halifax was part of the Plug Plot, in which striking workers stopped production by removing the boiler plugs from the steam engines in their factories.

Tim quotes Ted Hughes description, "Black Halifax boiled in phosphorus". Many of the old mills and civic buildings are scrubbed up nicely today, shining in lovely light York Stone. But having had The Slasher Tour, and reflecting on Halifax's dark industrial history and current issues of integration and tentative regeneration, it's easy to understand what Hughes was seeing.

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[Great also to share some good conversational time this morning with Tony Z, in Halifax's uniquely odd and wonderful Piece Hall. Halifax - another place on these travels which made me yearn to return. Thanks, Tim and Tony.]

Forgive me my transgressions

Forgive me my transgressions whilst eating.
Today I have used and disposed of:

7 tea bags;
2 mini containers of UHT milk;
1 mini carton of butter;
1 mini carton of strawberry jam;
1 serving box of Kelloggs Corn Flakes;
1 carton of cherry yoghurt with foil lid;
1 plastic bottle of pure orange juice;
1 plastic bottle of lemon lime and spring water;
1 plastic container for lemon and coriander chicken in a chilli pepper wrap;
1 plastic tray containing two slices of Soreen malt loaf (buttered) with foil wrap;
1 plastic pack of Coffee Primo all-butter shortbread;
1 plastic pack of Coffee Primo large eccles cake;
1 plastic pack of Galaxy hot chocolate drink;
1 complimentary copy of The Independent (to read whilst eating);
Various plastic or paper packages containing small amounts of sugar, sauce, salt, pepper, vinegar;
1 plastic pack containing a bunch of grapes.

I did buy a banana without any packaging;
I did also refuse a disposable carrier bag in Sainsbury's;

But: forgive me my transgressions whilst eating, for I am a helplessly modern traveller.

Forgive me my transgressions whilst walking.
Today I have taken the following routes:

- a walk down the centre of the motorway service station lorry park between two rows of articulated lorries parked, pulling in or preparing to draw away;
- a walk along the edge of the motorway service station slip road in search of a public footpath;
- clambering over a motorway service station boundary fence on the same search;
- sheltering underneath trees on a golf course during a downpour;
- a walk along a golf course approach road to connect with a public footpath (to a bridge over the M62 near J25);
- squeezing through a gap in temporary construction fencing on a pavement in Brighouse to get a better angle for a photograph of the canal;
- wandering around the expansive outdoor premises of British Car Auctions (riverside of the A644 Wakefield Road near M62 J25) to get a sense of the scale of vehicles on sale there;
- wandering around the Holiday Inn car park (uphill off the A644 Wakefield Road near M62 J25) to get a good view across the valley to the motorway and beyond;
- into the gents toilets at Tescos Brighouse without stopping before or after to make any purchases in the store.

I did keep to the prescribed pedestrian routes while attempting to cross roads in Brighouse;
I did resist the temptation to investigate the snack bar set up just outside the motorway service station boundary fence, serving cheap and fulsome food and drink to truckers;

But: forgive me my transgressions whilst walking, for I am an eccentric traveller.

Bats about Batley

I thought it was quite instructive, the comment made by the companionable man at breakfast. He folded the hotel copy of the Daily Mail onto his table and after sharing with me a news item he'd been reading, about cockroaches in a Rochdale hospital, he stood up, faced the door and said, "Oh, well, off to fight another day." To fight another day... he's at odds with it before it's hardly begun.

And I thought it was quite instructive, the comments made by the chatty ladies who'd made and served my breakfast, when I asked them what I could see in a morning in Batley. Silence, then: "Nothing much." Nothing much... they believe that there's little worth seeing in the place where they live and work and have their being.

Here is what I found worth seeing in Batley in just a couple of hours of wandering:

The Irish Democratic League Club, a thriving social centre with links back to Michael Davitt, 'a world figure in the cause of freedom [who] raised his voice and pen on behalf of the oppressed, irrespective of race or creed';

The head office and manufacturing centre for Fox's Biscuits, making Batley people the producers of Rich Tea Creams and Jam Creams, Nice and Ginger biscuits, and those wonderful chocolate Classics, for which a nation is grateful;

A young man wearing elasticated headgear leaning against a side wall of Fox's, on a break, indicating that the company is investing in its local people and training them in time-honoured fashion;

The Neoclassical style civic centre, shining in soft local stone: the Town Hall, a Carnegie Library and Art Gallery facing across a cobblestone square, and below, the imposing Zion Chapel, placing Methodism at the heart of Batley;

Four black huts on the high street, one with door ajar and appearing to contain a scattering of colourful clothes. I wondered if these had some religious significance: prayer huts, for instance, but could not bring myself to ask any passers-by;

An Arts College with students out-of-class joining middle-aged men lazing on benches (self included) and passing shoppers in the lovingly-maintained Memorial Gardens;

The cobblestone crescent sweeping uphill to the railway station, its buildings awaiting some imaginative redevelopment but impressive - as the 1848 station itself - nevertheless;

Big bats at a busy traffic junction on a gothic arch in York Stone, which turns out to be the creation of Chloe Cookson and Rory McNally, a truly jolly and imaginative addition to the town's public space;

A busy Tesco's built on the stepped town centre's lower tier, in a massive space where once a mill perhaps may have stood - impressive footbridge from the high street pavement, a full cafe, a shelf full of Asian film, women's and lifestyle magazines (being ignored by the Asian shoppers), young men driving electric vehicles towing trolleys around the car park;

White and Asian adults passing by peaceably but generally without recognition; white and Asian schoolchildren talking, playing together;

An Assemblies of God Church next to The White Hart, a Working Mens Club and Institute, a couple of Mosques and the union flag flying Wellington pub;

Plenty worth seeing, then, from my perspective; plenty to take with me on the forward journey which turned out to involve some messing about on motorway bridges and recording ghosts [mp3] on a hidden footpath sandwiched between IKEA and the M62, Birstall.

Rhubarb and outlaws at the Hub of England

There is a perfect circle on every UK road map which is also a perfect circle on the actual land, and it is the very Hub of England. At 95 metres above sea level, rising from modest Lingwell Beck, between Thorpe sewage works and Lofthouse School, this is a vicious eddy in an otherwise still, modest landscape. It is the complex roundabout where the M1 and M62 motorways meet, the great circle where the country’s north and south and west and east collide, connect, combine, in corridors of rushing speed.

Like everything which revolves in restless motion and overwhelming metaphor M62 Junction 29 (M1 J42) carries a centripetal force which draws so many travellers into its heart. It drew me today, and so, at the mid-point of my westwards walk through suburbanised mill and mining settlements (Lofthouse Gate, Outwood, East and West Ardsley, and on into Batley), I stood at the very centre of The Hub of England.

On my approach to this power centre I found that it stands at the heart of an area known as The Rhubarb Triangle. The undulating farmlands of this area (bounded by Morley and Rothwell to the north, and to the south Ossett and Wakefield) are celebrated for their production of this sour vegetable which is, some say, enjoying a renaissance after some years out of savour with the public palate. In its heyday, The Rhubarb Triangle allegedly produced 90 per cent of all rhubarb. The environment here was perfect for it - ground full of ash, air full of moisture - and though I saw no evidence on my route, I felt sure that all around me in unlit depots, purple stalks were flourishing.

The maps suggested something else about this significant area. The name Robin Hood recurs: it’s a settlement north of Lofthouse, and Outwood boasts Robin Hood Bridge and Robin Hood Hill. Clearly the man of legend has connections here, at The Hub of England.

My search for signs of Robin Hood’s influence failed at first; it seemed like the homes of the absentee occupants, whose work carries them through The Hub each day, are their castles, and I see no evidence to suggest that the emancipation of the poor is on anyone’s agenda in Outwood. On Co-operative Street, Lofthouse, the corner building which once held a Co-op branch is now Chill, a beauty parlour, and there is a dispute there - visible in signs on Chill’s and residents’ walls - about customers parking outside private homes.

However, on closer inspection there is something of a healthy outlaw spirit in this area. A pub called The Rescuers, with a sign depicting an incident down a local pit which meant so much to the locals, in terms of solidarity during a crisis, that they renamed the pub to celebrate those who epitomised this human spirit. Graffitti on a NO EXIT sign in a garage forecourt, reading KILL POWER NOT PEOPLE, supported generously by this statement, in another hand: I AGREE. There’s the delightfully named Johns Avenue in Lofthouse Gate: would that be Little John, I wonder? And there are the thriving allotments on Ardsley Common, still growing despite the brash intrusion of the M62 roaring very closely by its edge.

The rich, arguably, are still robbing the poor, though, at The Hub of England, in newly malign ways. Signalled by a boarded-up Mace shop in Outwood which also hosted a Post Office. Signalled by the woman walking past the closed-down Bulls Head, Woodkirk, carrying a finely-designed Precis Petit bag.

It is possible to stand at the centre of The Hub of England because the quiet B6135 weaves its way above and beneath four sliproads and six carriageways, sitting twenty feet below the northernmost tip of the roundabout.

And at this confluence my senses were battered by high winds, at first, and then I was dizzied ... by the various flows above, beside, beneath me, by the curve of the roundabout’s edge, by the deep cuttings carrying slip roads underground, by a sight of the long ladders up steep carriageway sides marked EMERGENCY EXIT and a sense of what tragic, epic events these were designed for.

And then my eyes rested on some unexpected movement at a point where traffic was flying off the M62 Eastbound carriageway to corner-accelerate onto the Leeds-bound M1. Men, fluorescent-bibbed, strimming the grass at the roads edge. A thoroughly dangerous job, an act of tidying akin to that being gently enjoyed two miles away by others at Ardsley Allotments, but with gigantic vehicles screaming past the men’s bodies at high speed, thrashing them with the turbulence every time. Deafening; brutal. They are ordered on this job to serve the motorists whose need for speed demands high visibility.

This is what I witnessed, in Robin Hood country, at the very centre of The Hub of England, today.

Above Asda, only sky

Junction 33, Ferrybridge Services : a tatty-because-well-used service area, in which business is done out of the back of vehicles, men sit alone consuming overpriced refrigerator-packaged food, women serve at tills or as Travelodge bedders, young people from nearby run-down Ferrybridge Hill hang about and police and private security patrol the area attempting to alleviate the fear of car theft held by employees and regular users of this place. Little endearing about Junction 33, Ferrybridge Services on a wet Tuesday morning. It will cheer up, though, with the arrival of elderly folks' coach parties later today and hen parties at the weekend.

Junction 32, Outlet Village : not a place I stop at today, having already done that at the peak of the retail week, two Saturdays ago. Noticing the scale, though, of the neighbouring Xscape, where people I know come from as far away as Liverpool to practice on the ski slopes. People I don't know come, I guess, from nearby Castleford for the cinema, skatepark and bowls. It's quite a thing to have on your doorstep, though it does make the facilities of the town of Castleford seem feeble by comparison.

Castleford town centre: Nice seats, though, in the pedestrian area between the Co-op and Marks and Spencer. Lots of them, including single circular ones set in threes which pivot so you can either face inwards for a chat with friends, or spin away to turn your back on a stranger; all being well used by folks of all ages and types (self included) on a suddenly hot, sunny Tuesday lunchtime.

A young woman clips through the seated Castleford citizens asking them questions about what might be a local redevelopment issue, making copious notes on an A4 lined pad, and in one case taking their pictures. I imagine she is a keen young local journalist. I spin my seat in her direction hoping for an interview which would be more for my benefit than hers but she heads into the Co-op instead. Through the lobby of the Burberry factory on Albion Street rows of machinists are visible, working hard on the autumn/winter range. Despite (or maybe because of) the presence of a Factory Shop, and despite (or maybe because of) reports to the contrary (in 'chav hate' sites I shall not link to) it seems that no-one in Castleford is wearing Burberry. However on Bridge Street Penningtons Sporting Arms and Ammunition are trading in guns, crossbows and knives, which is enough to alert a stranger to possible dangerous traits in the local culture.

Junction 31, Wakefield Europort : today's destination and one of the most-anticipated visits of my entire walk. In my mind I'd pictured Wakefield Europort as a vast area chaotic with articulated truck activity, a motorway hell-zone. I'd imagined I'd be risking my skin walking into an area designed for massive speeding freight carriers. Perhaps it was the onset of the sunshine after Ferrybridge rain, or some other sort of reverie, but I found that at the major junction at the convergence of the motorway, Europort approach road and the A655, the traffic flowed smoothly through multiple lights and across numerous lanes; crossing it was easy.

And the Europort, though busy and vast, had a calmness about it which disarmed me, then pleased me. Servicing giants like Argos, TKMaxx, DHL, Royal Mail and Asda, many lorries sped past me along California Drive, Expressway and Tuscany Way. But as they drew into their terminii they seemed to be swallowed into a silence; inside those massive sheds (which cover acres and acres of low common land) it seemed that the systems of flow run smoothly. In the long walk alongside Asda all that I could photograph were the shining white sides of the distribution centres resting like gentle stones beneath a generous white cloudy sky.

If I were to compose a prayer for Junction 31, I thought, on the walk back, it would be a reflection on the realities of requesting Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread, because it all comes from here, this vast inland petrol-propelled port: bread (Warburtons), drinks (Scottish and Newcastle), groceries (Asda), clothes (TKMaxx), toiletries (M&S) and any other household goods you can think of (Argos); but then a long tailback of parked lorries obstructing California Drive demonstrated what happens when systems go wrong. Waiting for delayed access to the rail freight terminal the drivers' hunger and thirst were serviced by a burger man in a white caravan signed PETE'S EATS. Pete's presence indicates that this delay happens regularly. However the rail freight centre seems to be getting a makeover, there are signs of expansion and notices clipped to lampposts about further works, so perhaps the queues will stop and Pete will have to find another pitch.

Even this queue, though, seemed calm enough, beside one driver blasting his horn. And the atmosphere was easy inside the Whitwood Transport Cafe, a light, clean and generously-proportioned place which did a good bacon butty and mug of tea for me, and offers the drivers who use it some very good facilities - showers, a TV room, pool table, decent toilets and a bar. As haulier Colin told me, drivers generally get a very raw deal, in working, resting and eating conditions, so Whitwood - not out of place at Junction 31 - is to be applauded.

Beneath the tarmac the swamp is still there

It’s a two-kilometre walk from the main area of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, over bridges, through gates, across open fields, to get to the Longside Gallery. I walked it today because the Andy Goldsworthy exhibition continued over there, and (as you’ll understand if you’ve read any of my previous blogs about his work) I was keen not to miss any of it.

Slogging uphill into heavy rain made harsher by a high cross wind, I was forced to appreciate the unsubtle difference between a sculpture park and a gallery. Approaching the only place of shelter in the Longside fields I found the space occupied by a sheltering herd of cows, through whose breath and muck I had to closely manoeuvre. Dripping wet and treading filth into the exhibition room, and noticing that this was not being frowned upon but accepted by others present, I remembered that I was here to see the creations of a man who works entirely with natural materials, attempting to align himself with natural processes as he does that work, and recalling that to Goldsworthy, nature means red in tooth and claw, cow shit, deer blood and all.

This was driven home to me almost immediately as I approached the beautiful snaking line across the window covering the entire length of the gallery, through which could be seen the sodden route I’d just walked, and the cattle still trying to keep dry beneath those trees, and it was obvious how he’d created it by its unambiguous title, Cow dung on glass. I looked around the room and realised that every artwork here had in fact been created by animal or human crap of some sort - the many sheep paintings, created by sheep walking on a canvas over periods of time, and the blood drawings, made by hanging a cadaverous creature over a canvas, or splashing or trailing its blood, or mixing it with ice and letting it melt onto the canvas and dry.

Goldsworthy’s work seems very Yorkshire to me. Unsentimental, rooted in the earth. Like the folks who work the fields above and the coalfields beneath this part of this massive county. Goldsworthy spent his formative years in suburban Leeds, on the edge between urban and rural, and worked on a farm from the age of thirteen. His work is instructive for my walk because it’s concerned with revealing the processes by which we interact with the given environment. In an interview in the exhibition book Goldsworthy describes how as a child living in a newly-built house he felt profoundly effected by the relationship between the city and the countryside: ‘Beneath that veneer of tarmac, I felt the swamp was still there.’

His work is empowering for my walk because I feel it draws me closer to nature as I engage with it - treading in the muck on my shoes which Goldsworthy will add to the ever-growing Mud ball he’s making in the Longside Gallery, thrilling at the skill, sensitivity, deep patience and pure inventiveness which went into the making of the twelve-metre wide screen made of leaf stalks pinned together by blackthorns, standing pressing my back and cranium against the large arches he has created from large red, entirely self-supporting, sandstone blocks. It helps me to remember that beneath the tarmac the swamp is still there: to consider the significances in that.

There’s something quite manly, not macho but humanly tough, genuinely physical, about the Goldsworthy approach, which rubs off on you. So it felt ok to have been soaked, walking through cow muck and very close to the steaming backsides of the cows themselves to get there. It felt good and appropriate, after spending time with all those blood drawings, to be warmed inside by the venison pie served to me at the YSP restaurant. Goldsworthy the Yorkshireman does a lot of work with black holes and I think there’s a lot in his work which is appreciated by the sorts of tough Yorkshiremen who’ve spent their lives working down black holes, in pits and quarries and steelworks.

I shall hope to return to this exhibition before it ends next January, though, because I missed some of Goldsworthy’s furthest-flung outside works today. I could have got over to see them but it would have meant trudging a few more kilometres over fields, and it was raining, after all.

With Otley folk

A weekend off-route at the Otley Folk Festival, but much of Leeds was here, for this is a popular annual event and not just for the music and merriment, it seems. A number of visitors I met and performers I saw used to live in or close to Otley, and still only live nine or ten miles away in the city, and for them this is an occasion for returning to a significant place. Plenty in that to dwell on, but not too much, for this was all about being entertained by the likes of Stanley Accrington whilst enjoying a pint of Timothy Taylor, in the company of friends. Enjoying being in a town which still feels like a town, self-consciously enjoying just being itself at play.

The geography of power from Cottingley heights

Photos I most regret failing to take on this walk due to camera batteries running out:
1. Narrowboat on the Humber opposite Winteringham, a fortnight ago.
2. Elland Road stadium and the city from the heights of Wortley, today.

Leeds is hilly, quite a shock after Hull and its East Riding hinterland. And it's taken me almost a week to appreciate this properly, as I've mostly been in the centre or along canal routes. A six mile hike via Armley up to Cottingley fixed that today.

Not the great central Leeds power icons but the two 25-storey residences of Cottingley are reputedly the highest towers in the city. They are unmissable from the high green of Wortley Recreation Ground, which rests nearby those other high icons of south Leeds, St Bartholemew's and HMP Leeds, Armley. My route connected all of these today, and revealed more about the geography of power.

To say that Leeds is hilly reveals little. My route, and subsequent conversation with Barry in the church at Cottingley heights, helped to form the impression that residential Leeds consists of a series of islands which are separated by the old low fields, the river basin, the canal route, through which run the railways and major roads, with the industrial works, warehouses and retail sheds clustered along them.

This struck me on the amazing walk down Highfield Garth from Wortley Recreation Ground, past Elland Road stadium, up to Beeston, down Crows Nest Lane and then up again to Cottingley. The stadium is big on the near horizon from the top of Wortley and the Garth drops steeply and directly towards it over the Leeds to Huddersfield railway line, continues by way of a necessary pedestrian crossing over the hectic A58 Whitehall Road. From there the route falls steeply again into a suddenly narrow twisty track between high wire fences, the other side of which are various types of residual industrial sheds: reconditioned tyre merchants, a vast storage area for portacabins and portaloos. The track continues beneath the Doncaster and Sheffield railway line, before emerging in the open space of Islington, another expanse of industrial and commercial sheds on the A62 Gelderd Road and down Low Fields Road.

Here industry and leisure sit together. The Leeds Wall is no historical jewel - it's an indoor climbing centre; another shed proclaims SOCCER CITY - FUN CITY, and the vast triangular canopy over Elland Road dominates the scene, displaying without irony in possibly the largest typeface in West Yorkshire, the words LSS WASTE MANAGEMENT - THE BIG YELLOW SKIP PEOPLE. Leeds United have been in the business of managing waste for the last few tortuous seasons, the wasted fortunes of misplaced ambition, but this vast stadium (sitting on the far side of the M621 motorway in a low sea of industrial units) still proclaims a greatness, despite the team's current position 67 places from the top of football's league ladder.

St Bartholemew's (somewhat ironically for a high Anglican church) is on Wesley Road, Armley, and the rise up to west Beeston's three churches is by way of Wesley Street. A residential area, a busy Friday afternoon Co-op, a school, a pub or two, all at an impressive (or isloating) height, before another drop by Windmill Hill down Crow Nest Lane where new housing blocks sit perched, a little out of place, over farmland, and as the towers of Cottingley rise above everything in fields of green the lane - suddenly feeling like the rural route it has been for centuries - crosses the southbound railway and then passes more industrial units (chemical companies, a store for Metro bus stop signs).

Cottingley is truly an island. It takes a few minutes to cross the A6110 Beeston Ring Road which runs beneath it on the east side. The M621 borders it to the north, the A643 Elland Road to the south, and the Huddersfield railway line to the west. It rises rapidly and high above these, this modestly-sized 1960s estate built on 'New Town Principles'. It has been compared to Bransholme in Hull, but it's nowhere near as vast. It is, however, isolated by all that lies below, just as Bransholme is isolated by its position on the edge of the city and by major roads which surround but bypass it.

In the modest and pleasing worship space in the multipurpose Cottingley church building, just beneath the vast towers, Barry talks about the positives of the geography of power as it affects this deprived but decent community. Being an island strengthens a community's sense of itself; sharing a clear geographical and sociological space encourages a cooperation between churches of different denomination. As a candle burns beside us for the International Day of Prayer for Peace, boys use the church door as a football goal and Barry talks about seeing his role as an advocate for these youngsters who are too easily written-off or reviled. When the church rebuilds the wall which a car demolished, and renovates the sign which currently reads CHURCH IN COTT LEY, Barry is also going to build a special wall designed for the boys to kick their ball against.

This intention reminds me of a sight I saw across the industrial valley. Wortley Recreation Ground resounded with rattling, metallic sounds which sounded, at first, like possible acts of vandalism. But the source of the noise was one young man singly enjoying the facility of a large skateboard park which the authorities have placed there. It seems that, uphill, in the geography of power, it's possible for tiny hints of grace to be found.

Power in the hidden land

It's like a forest, and it's in the right place to be one. A deep green valley where the canal branches, just prior to its intersection at the weirs above Armley Mill. It's like a forest in that it makes special sounds of its own, clicks and sizzles, just as the waters beyond have their gentle noises, and as do the wind-caressed trees which define this area. It's like a forest, but an unnatural one. For the wide acre of hidden Kirkstall, hemmed in between canal and mainline railway, bordering Kirkstall Valley Country Park and the municipal golf course, that vast space, is filled with electricity switching gear, capacitors and cables rising high on frames and pylons behind fences bearing forbidding notices.

Visitors make their way to this hidden land behind the Vue cinema / Hollywood Bowl complex, down Redcote Lane past Fitness First, the golf links and Goals Soccer Centre, under the railway arch. They may perhaps be heading towards their boat moored at the Aire Valley Marina or their caravan at the neighbouring Leeds Caravan Park, but whatever the purpose for their journey they will first encounter this forest of killer energy, a power centre for the city now, as in ages past.

From the 1930s Kirkstall power station stood here, initially a dirty coal-fired unit which covered the surrounding streets in fly ash, later burning oil before that became unprofitable in the mid-1970s. The fly-ash is still on and beneath the ground, the power is generated elsewhere (maybe at mighty Ferrybridge) but this place, unknown to most of those who pass by daily along Kirkstall or Armley Roads, plays a key role in keeping Leeds lit, the mobile phones of its citizens recharged.

But some do see it and understand: the canal fishermen enjoying the potential in these live waters, the ubiquitous dog-walkers and joggers on their round-Kirkstall route, those entering or leaving Leeds by train who catch a view of this electrical forest from their moving window, the narrowboaters, the caravanners, those with an interest in industrial history who decide to look in on this force-field after their visit to Armley Mill museum, and the men and women of unknown provenance like me, who happen on the place by randomly slipping away from the over-fussy leisure park by a canalside back route.

This is where it all started, really, Leeds: by the river, beneath the Abbey where a major seat of power first lay. Today the church's power is peripheral (symbolised by the Parish Church's off-centre position in the city) and the river is quiet, and the Kirkstall Valley is a hidden secret keenly held by those who have found it. But on every fence in the switching station acre there is a picture of a falling man, struck by power from above, and he is a reminder that the city's power isn't all in its central skyscrapers. It's out here, too, in these unlikely places where it's always been.