Robert Beaumont

My abiding Bradford memory is of the aftermath of the terrible fire at the Valley Parade football ground in May 1985, which claimed 56 lives. As a young reporter on a Yorkshire paper, I had been sent to the scene to write what was then quaintly called a colour piece. There was precious little colour anywhere when I arrived. The air was thick with the stale stench of smoke and the atmosphere laden with grief. When a hardened Fleet Street hack tried to light his cigarette outside the charred ground, two residents of Manningham Lane screamed at him. In a nearby pub, seemingly oblivious to the tragedy, an ageing stripper danced to Ruby Turner’s ‘Move Closer’ as sweaty businessmen leered at her and gulped their lunchtime beer. This was a city fractured and forlorn.

‘From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows’: that was in 1835, but it could be today Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French political commentator, visited Manchester in 1835 when the city was the capital of the world’s textile industry. He wrote: ‘From this foul drain, the greatest stream of human industry flows to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish.’ This was ten years before Benjamin Disraeli coined his famous ‘two nations’ phrase about the rich and the poor in his novel Sybil. Disraeli was referring to England as a whole, but — thanks to his involvement in the Chartist movement — I suspect he had Manchester in mind.

At last, a fine statue of Brian Clough — but still not even a plaque for Jesse Boot ‘All Nottingham has is Robin Hood — and he’s dead,’ said Brian Roy, a Dutch footballer who starred, briefly, for Nottingham Forest in the 1990s. Roy’s assessment of this bleak East Midlands city, as wounding as Orson Welles’s jibe about the Swiss and the cuckoo clock in The Third Man, was fundamentally true — until guns arrived on the scene in 2002. Suddenly Nottingham had an identity, albeit an unwanted one. After a series of high-profile murders, the tabloids labelled it ‘Shottingham’, gun capital of Britain. It is a label which has stuck, even though knives have replaced guns as the young criminal’s murder weapon of choice.

Paul Theroux, in The Great Railway Bazaar, paints a louche portrait of the capital of Laos. ‘The brothels are cleaner than the hostels, marijuana is cheaper than pipe tobacco and opium is easier to find than a cold glass of beer,’ he wrote in 1975. When Theroux finally got his beer, the waitress told him sex was on the menu too. Gosh, if only I’d know about Vientiane in my gap year. It might have taught me more about the real world than three months at the British Institute in Florence and a lost week in Fez. These days, of course, Laos is firmly on the gap-year trail, but Vientiane (one hour from Bangkok by air or 11 by train) has cleaned up its act. If you want a cold beer and a smoke in a pristine hostel, it’s not difficult to arrange.

I must declare an interest from the outset. I was born in Wakefield. I have never been especially forthcoming about my birthplace, not because I am ashamed of it, but because few people know or care much about this little city. Wakefield’s points of reference, ranging from the Battle of Wakefield in 1460 to rhubarb, a maximum-security prison and Sir George Gilbert Scott’s imposing cathedral, are not sufficiently etched on the public consciousness to allow conversation to flow easily or constructively. Even our esteemed business editor had to have his arm twisted a little over lunch before he agreed to include it in this City Life series.

On Wednesday, when John Prescott finally steps down as Deputy Prime Minister, the city of Hull will breathe a collective sigh of relief. Just as Joseph Chamberlain defined Birmingham in the 1870s, so Prezza personified Hull for the past decade. Chamberlain built a great industrial city — but Prescott has reduced this proud, historic port, whose eastern parliamentary constituency he has held since 1970, to something approaching a national laughing stock. It seems unlikely, for example, that Hull would have been named the ‘crappest’ of Crap Towns: The 50 Worst Places to Live in the UK, by Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran, had Prescott not lived there.

The relationship between Newcastle and Gateshead, proud communities separated by a majestic stretch of the River Tyne, has never been harmonious. J.B. Priestley may have come from Bradford, but he spoke for most of Newcastle when he remarked that Gateshead ‘appeared to have been invented by an enemy of the human race’. Until recently Gateshead’s major tourist attraction was the dingy multistorey car park that featured in the 1971 cult gangster film Get Carter and still towers over the town like a malignant ghost. One Newcastle grandee contemptuously referred to Gateshead as ‘that heap of rubble across the water’. So can we assume that the rebranding of the city as NewcastleGateshead has gone down like the proverbial lead balloon on the north side of the Tyne?

Had Lou Reed lived in Leeds rather than New York, his signature tune ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ could just as easily have been inspired by the derelict, crime-infested Holbeck area of the city as by the mean streets of Harlem and the Bronx. In the Seventies and Eighties Holbeck, just a five-minute stroll from the city centre, was Leeds’s guilty secret. It was the haunt of drug addicts, prostitutes, alcoholics and criminals, while its sprawling, post-apocalyptic landscape was a chilling study in urban decay.This didn’t seem to matter to most people, least of all to the city council. But for students of history it was a terrible shame.