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Sunday, 21 February 2010 11:45 | Written by Gaile | 
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Kirkbymoorside is a real town, unmistakeably in Yorkshire. Blessed with a bypass and surrounded by green hills, farmland and country villages, it has quiet amenities and real shops, serving the needs of local people.
Our buildings are in fine shape, date from many periods and rub shoulders agreeably, without being chocolate-box perfect. The town’s humane demeanour and appealing aspect, the pleasing contours and small surprises of its topography - all these are thanks to slow organic growth and owe nothing to heritage industry spin. We don’t need phoney Victorian lampposts - our quaintness is authentic.
Within yards of the main street, you can be standing in a field. These green spaces and the alleyways between buildings, like the snickets and ginnels that run through the housing estates, are crucial to the character of the town, which spreads itself uphill and down with neither pokiness nor sprawl. People walk around for the sheer pleasure of it and can choose from a variety of routes for most journeys. There are public spaces and public houses, old men on the benches, amiability in the air and as good a mix of people as of buildings in the town.
That’s why Kirkbymoorside’s visitor appeal can and should be limited to tourists who don’t like tourists -to those who encounter the town and feel grateful for it, just as we do. Because we’re a real town, we can welcome tourism without having to pander to its disruptive demands.
In specific ways, life in Kirkbymoorside is like a benign version of the 1950s. The shops are not high-street chains, there’s no mediocre supermarket killing off local trade, no parking meters, no daft one-way systems, no pedestrianisation. Yet we retain bank branches, a post office, a real bakery, hairdressers, electrical repair shops, a chemist - all the things so often under threat in contemporary rural Britain.
Unlike in harsher environments, where divisions are intensified and antagonisms seethe, here you don’t have to put your head down and run, grab your shopping or your pleasures and race away again to escape the noise and belligerence of brutish, neglected streets. Our town is alive, its main street busy, but it offers peacable communal space in which people can behave as they prefer to behave: with unguarded sociability, good humour, quiet politeness. Even the adolescent and the old can be seen talking to each other in Kirkbymoorside: the town offers space for that kind of civility and exchange to thrive in the present and offer hope for the future.
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Last Updated (Tuesday, 23 March 2010 01:24)