Yorkshire

It's been nearly a year since I came to the UK and since then I've been lucky enough to make a few really close friends who've been nice enough to bring me home with them and show me around their hometowns and surrounding bits of England. Yeah, maybe the other non-UK-ers in London don't particularly care about the rest of the country and would rather shove off to mainland Europe, etc., for a holiday, but honestly I came to live in England because I love it HERE and prefer to see more of IT than travel on to somewhere foreign/abroad if I’m given the choice right now.

The last four days I've been touring Yorkshire, a county in Northern England and the biggest in the UK. But not only is Yorkshire a territorial region, it also has a very strong cultural identity and the people have their own distinct dialect. You know, like how there's that posh British English that the Oxfordians speak, there's Cockney English, English accents distinctly from Liverpool and Essex, etc...same with Yorkshire and to me, with an uneducated ear that can't distinguish between them all with any hint at accuracy, the Yorkshire kids all sound a bit Scottish. Maybe it's because they ARE fairly far north and thus have Scottish influence. Again, I don't know. According to the always-reliable Wikipedia: Yorkshire is generally not as stigmatized as other dialects, and has been used in classic works of literature such as Wuthering Heights. 

What I DO know, though, is that Yorkshire is very much the English equivalent of Ohio, particularly Cleveland. Similarly, most of is rural but what isn't is formerly steel and coal mining towns (especially Sheffield) which all deteriorated after these products were no longer in such high demand. However, Unlike Cleveland, I don't think their rivers were polluted enough from it to light on fire. Both places have rough, but proud, residents that work hard and often grungy, tough jobs, but it's still a tightly knit community of people, nonetheless. Both are consumed by rain and rarely see the sun, minus the rare peek though the overwhelming cloud cover. But as a result, Yorkshire is one of the greenest counties in England. Vast stretches of unspoiled countryside in the Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors are perfect examples. We both have similar music styles; basically, rock and punk. Def Leppard was from there, as was Pulp, Kaiser Chiefs, and the Arctic Monkeys. To go off on a tangent, other famous people from Yorkshire (and I only included the ones I think Americans will easily recognize, because the list was actually quite long) include: Dame Judi Dench, the Bronte sisters, Sir Patrick Stewart, Sir Ben Kingsly, Guy Fawkes, two Prime Ministers,

My journey took me first to Sheffield, where my connecting train was canceled due to flooding. I won't deny I was warned about the infamous crap transport outside London which makes traveling not only intolerable but literally impossible on occasion. Like I said, Sheffield traditionally has had heavy industrial manufacturing such as coal mining and the steel industry but since the decline of such industries Sheffield has attracted tertiary and administrative businesses including a growing retail trade, particularly with the development of Meadowhall. Meadowhall was our Day #2 excursion, so I'll come back to that. Thankfully, after a 2-ish hour delay connecting trains began running again from Sheffield and I was able to get on my way to Wombwell, final stop en route to my final destination: Hemingfield, a village in the metropolitan borough of Barnsley, South Yorkshire. We spent the first afternoon touring the localized area and taking photos.

The second day we took the train back they way I'd arrived the day before, but stopped before Sheffield, at Meadowhall. This is one of the Westfield shopping malls, I think, and is the largest one in Yorkshire. Built on top a of an old steelworks site with over 280 stores, Meadowhall was actually blamed for the closure of many shops in Sheffield City Centre and in Rotherham. The River Don runs alongside it and overflows from time to time, inundating the mall. Thankfully, despite the floods in the area the day before, the mall itself hadn't been submerged.

The next day we wandered around Elsecar, a coal mining village next to the villages of Hoyland and Jump, going through old antiques, drinking proper Yorkshire tea, and having a walk around the nature reserve where they apparently keep sheep at the bottom of a hill.

Monday we went to York, a first for us both. "York is unusual among English cities for at least two reasons. First, the industrial revolution largely passed it by. York did not undergo the massive economic upheaval (population growth, re-building etc.) found in other English cities. Second, the predominant in-migrations in the 19th century were from local (Northeastern and Yorkshire) dialects…. For these reasons, York has retained a somewhat conservative character." (Tagliamonte, 1998: 158). York is a walled city founded by the Romans in 71 AD. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence. In the Middle Ages, York grew as a major wool trading centre and became the capital of the northern ecclesiastical province of the Church of England, a role it has retained. In the 19^th century York became a hub of the railway network and a confectionery manufacturing centre. The city offers a wealth of historic attractions, of which York Minster Cathedral is the most prominent. It is the largest Gothic cathedral in northern Europe and since it seemed completely awesome we chose to spend the £5 to climb up to the roof. Afterward, we spent the rest of the day safely on the ground.

The cutest little street in York is called The Shambles. It is a very old street with overhanging timber-framed buildings, some dating back as far as the fourteenth century. It was once known as The Great Flesh Shambles. (During that period there were no sanitary facilities or hygiene laws as exist today, and guts and blood were thrown into a runnel down the middle of the street or open space where the butchering was carried out. By extension, any scene of total disorganization and mess is now referred to as "a shambles"). As recently as 1872 there were twenty-five butchers' shops in the street but now there are none. Although the butchers have now vanished, a number of the shops on the street still have meat-hooks hanging outside and, below them, shelves on which meat would have been displayed. The shops currently comprise a mixture of eateries and souvenir shops, but there is also a bookshop and a baker. 

 

After three days of essentially non-stop walking, we took the morning off before I had to leave for London, a five hour journey in itself. That's the problem when you don't own your own car any more, you have to rely on other people (or trains) to get you from A to B and, thus, are at the mercy of their time-tables. But, alas, I made it back safe and sound to my big city where another week of data analysis for my dissertation awaits.