“Without the people at the bottom, there ain’t the top.”
Ian Holloway, football manager.
If Bradford is ever to regain any sort of reputation and standing as a modern city, clinging on to examples of why it became an ugly lame duck is certainly not the way forward.
News here of plans to redevelop surely the ugliest building in the city centre, no mean achievement, into yet more flats harks back to another age.
Proposals would see the building – built in the 1970s as the headquarters for Yorkshire Building Society, converted from office space into an apartment complex. Circus Developments (Bradford) was this week granted permitted development rights for the conversion.
It is a spectacularly ugly building but what makes these plans even harder to fathom is that not far from here, several equally ugly blocks are coming down.
There are also plans to redevelop most of the surrounding area, a commercial wasteland following the opening of The Broadway centre. If the Council had any vision they would surely object to this.
After all, as the saying goes, you can’t polish a turd.
Lockdown
I’ve purposefully taken a few weeks off from the blog, in some way to readjust to the new normality for however long it is with us. Part of my new daily routine has been a dawn chorus walk always with the aim of picking up the excellent Yorkshire Post.
I’d fallen out with newspapers but was impressed by the editor’s passionate campaign on social media, in effect, to save the paper. True to his claims, the journalism is excellent and generally devoid of C-list celebrities.
If newspapers are to survive they need to appeal to a broad church. Consequently, there are one or two regular columnists whose columns I cut our regularly, useful as they are to wrap my vegetable peelings in.
You can’t please everybody and doubtless some readers here might consider my offerings pap too.
The Beautiful Game?
Football long since lost the claim to anything beautiful, certainly as far as the top level is concerned. It has not come out of this crisis well at all, unable to come up with a coherent response from management and players alike, resonating with the issues many of its fan base are struggling with.
Of course footballers are not the only filthy rich members of our society, it is just that they attract more adulation and recognition than rich city traders and hedge fund managers.
At the very least they ought to be able to look after their own. The initial attempts by the likes of Liverpool and Tottenham to furlough non-playing staff were rightly reviled and reversed quickly.
But, given the average Premier League footballer’s salary is a staggering £70k a week (R4 Today programme 9/4) here’s a very simple idea given there will be some 500 across the 18 clubs – lets include the managers too.
Beneath the riches of the Premier League is everyday reality including the 71 other league clubs plus those further down the pecking order. Surely far more intelligent people than me could have devised a collective response from on high to take care of those beneath.
The game is on a knife edge, having lived beyond its means for many years. If it fails those that support it there may be no coming back.
The Edge
On recommendation of the YP correspondent Phil Harrison, I watched The Edge (Amazon Prime) despite my determination to avoid all things Amazon – I borrowed a device and gritted my teeth.
It charts the England cricket team’s rise from the basement of world cricket rankings to number one in the world, albeit short-lived. Whether you like cricket or not, it is a compelling study of the intensity of top-class sport and the pressures on players we rarely see as spectators.
One of the best sporting films I’ve seen, this is the sort of challenging television a public service should be offering. Instead we get the inane in abundance from the BBC.
No Brainer
There is no doubt that working from home prolonged my working life. I can hear the guffaws already but stay with me as I explain. When my division of Barclays introduced laptops, I was still struggling with mastering Space Invaders.
However, when they sought volunteers to trial “remote working”, it was only natural I put my hand up. After all, I’d pioneered a form of virtual working for several years.
There were other added benefits, notably that I would see far less of my boss – lets call him Happy – which was certainly good for his mental health and saved me pondering most days which window to throw him out of.
So he readily agreed and off I was into a brave new world. That was almost thirty years ago and it is staggering that employers and employees still resist. If any good can come of Covid19, surely our working practices have to change.
Our transport networks are overcrowded and outdated. No matter what “leveling up” promises are made, it would take decades and billions to achieve efficient mass transit systems in the North.
Far better now to think hard about how we work and travel to work.
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