‘There’s a lot of very kind people living here’
IN THE LATEST IN HIS SERIES OF VISITS TO COMMUNITIES AROUND HUDDERSFIELD, EXAMINER REPORTER ASKS IF BIRKBY LIVES UP TO ITS REPUTATION
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Would it run out of charge on the school run? And aren’t electric cars only for the super-rich? It was time to bust a few myths…
BIRKBY features heavily in the BBC gangland documentary Hometown.
It is after all the birthplace of Mobeen Azhar, producer of the eye-opening series.
Azhar’s brief was to investigate the police shooting of Huddersfield’s alleged drugs kingpin Yassar Yaqub. Understandably it wasn’t going to focus on the day-to-day of Birkby’s law-abiding majority.
Sadly Birkby has featured in these pages numerous times in the last two years with reports of shootings, stabbings and armed police raids.
But it isn’t Tijuana, Mexico. Daily life in Birkby, just north of Huddersfield town centre, is mostly quiet.
In fact, there’s quite a bit to recommend it so I went in search of the good stuff that gets sidelined.
“Birkby is good. Very good people live here, very kind people. They look after each other,” butcher Soubata Ali tells me.
Soubata, originally from Kashmir, has lived in Birkby for 30 years. He’s the boss behind the halal meat counter at Khadim’s supermarket, on Blacker Road.
He has regular customers Asian, black and white - some of whom he has known for decades.
An older Black Caribbean woman is quibbling with another butcher over the amount of fat he’s leaving on the cubes of lamb he’s chopping for her. It’s all goodnatured though, and Soubata comes over and hugs her.
I ask if he’s tired of the headlines about crime in the area.
“There’s no trouble,” he says. “Not on Blacker Road. Nothing happens.”
He says the trouble takes place closer to the border with Fartown.
But he also says: “The community is very good.
“People respect each other. Some of my customers I’ve had for 30 years. I give people respect.”
Michelle Goodwin, 30, is Birkby born and bred.
She agrees that stories about the area’s criminal underworld obscure the good stuff that happens there.
Michelle says: “If you are involved in that world then you will see it – but I’m not and I don’t see it.”
She helps to run Creative Connections, a women’s group at St Cuthbert’s Church, which helps women from the area’s ethnically mixed community to make friends through cooking and creative activities.