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.
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