In the Grip of Too Many Regulations

First published in The Huddersfield Daily Examiner 17th January 2008

In a recently produced, well illustrated book, Streets for All- Yorkshire and Humber, (English Heritage) attention is brought to the importance of the appearance of streets and open places, not just for the pleasure of the people who live there but for investment. There are pictures that draw attention to the quality of the environment, with many examples of street surfaces and the materials that can be used, to verges, kerbs and signs, all the small thing that, make a difference.

One of the small examples of streetscapes is the street furniture, from traffic lights to bollards, from signs to lighting. One only has to think of the ugliness of a shattered bus stop, with broken glass littered around to realise that what we see has an impact. The appearance of a place matters; nothing is more dispiriting than a bleak windswept jumble of the kind of neglect that attracts nothing but accumulations of litter.

In the book Streets for all there are many examples of towns, large and small, that are transformed by the attention paid to the details of the streets. These illustrations are there to inspire, to show what can be done. Not one is taken in Huddersfield.

The absence of any examples of pleasing town management or the pride in trees that tries to make the best of things might be pure coincidence or it might be telling. If we look around at the streets, at the traffic lights, at the contradictory signs, the clutter, the lurid road surfaces, perhaps we should think us lucky not to be used as prime examples of bad taste, squalor and indifference.

This is surely not how the people of Huddersfield would like to think of themselves. And yet, there are two visual impressions that anyone coming to Huddersfield will be struck with and both are at the heart of what most distresses not only English Heritage, which is to be expected, but the Government in the shape of the Department for Transport, which is not.

One is the litter of street signs, and traffic directions, the bullying of visual instructions which are not only visually offensive but counter productive. The signs are like a competition of sergeant majors, all bawling contradictory orders and the top of their vocal powers. Would it be so difficult to replace this cacophony with a rational policy?

The other littering of the streets is in the form of shop signs and advertisements. In this Huddersfield is not the only town to be scarred by the insistence by nationwide retailers of making every high street look the same, of clashing colours and emasculated shop fronts. The argument for retaining such visual outrage is that it encourages shoppers and that to do anything about it would enrage powerful commercial interests.

Both arguments are flawed. The way for shoppers to know where particular shops are located is not to scan the horizon of several streets but to have allocation map, as in some malls. The way to attract business, as shown so successfully in other towns is to have aesthetically pleasing town centres, including discreet sings.

The questions remains whether Huddersfield is aware of the movement to make towns more pleasing and the commercial success that goes with it, or whether the town prefers to remain solidly indifferent.