Remember the ’74 carve-up... and this time think outside the box

IT WAS in the spring of 1977, three years after it had ceased to be an urban district council, that I first set foot in Ilkley.

I had gone there on a job, from the new metropolitan centre of Bradford, which now exercised control over the town. It was obvious very quickly the two centres had little in common.

In the first place, they were nowhere near each other – an inconvenience time has not remedied. And in the second place it was Leeds, not Bradford, to which Ilkley gravitated for work and leisure.

This was still the case a few years later when I made my home there, just up from The Grove. The decline of Bradford as a shopping centre in inverse proportion to Leeds meant there was little reason to ever go there.

The anomaly was compounded when Ilkley found itself part of the parliamentary constituency of Keighley – from which it is separated by a valley and every other factor imaginable.

The Ilkley vote may be responsible for having turned Keighley blue for much of the last decade, but the Conservative councillors it has sent to Bradford have often struggled to make themselves heard in a council chamber consumed by more metropolitan matters. It is worth bearing all this in mind as we consider, on this Yorkshire Day weekend, the political composition of another part of the county.

North Yorkshire is likely in the coming months to witness its biggest upheaval since the Local Government Act of 1974 did away with the old North, West and East Ridings.

It will be a watershed moment and there is much debate over which town halls should be able to lord it over the various districts.

It is also a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reconsider some of the eccentricities of that 1974 carve-up.

It was on the morning of April Fool’s Day that year that residents of the East Riding woke up to find themselves in a place called Humberside; those around Stokesley in the new county of Cleveland; and Filey, a frontier town whose border ran through the middle, in North instead of East Yorkshire.

The changes were seemingly arbitrary but they have created a precedent for considering the elasticity of North Yorkshire’s boundaries today.

These do not at present take in Ilkley – or Otley or Wetherby, for that matter – but they conceivably could. Any of those towns could legitimately claim to have more in common with Skipton or Harrogate than with Bradford or Leeds.

This is true not only in the characteristics of their populations but also in the value they place on their green spaces. For years now, the more prosperous areas of metropolitan districts have been easy pickings for planners with housebuilding targets to meet. Those who try to oppose them are dismissed as nuisances standing in the way of progress.

In Burley-in-Wharfedale, inside the old Ilkley urban district, residents have been accused of exactly that for simply trying to protect their village from the same malaise that has afflicted Bradford for as long as they have been part of it.

Planning disputes are not unique to metropolitan areas, but rural districts do at least offer a more level playing field. And representation is not just about little local disputes. It’s about sharing a common outlook, aspiration and sense of being.

That’s the point of local politics but it is defeated at a stroke when the disproportionate value of land in “nice” areas makes communities more valuable to their council than it is to them. It’s interesting to note the similarities of the Ilkley I remember from 1977 with that of today.

The Grove is still alive with lilac in springtime and the aroma of fresh coffee from Bettys and the place is as well heeled as ever, if not more so.

Is that the consequence of effective stewardship from Bradford or the efforts of those who live there? The state of other parts of the metropolitan district makes the answer to that rather obvious.

Ilkley is one of dozens of towns across the former Ridings that give Yorkshire the character we celebrate on Yorkshire Day and every other day.

They were often an afterthought in the reorganisation of 1974 and the lesson should be to think outside the box and outside the boundaries of West as well as North Yorkshire this time – not submit them to the vagaries of another frontier lottery.

There is much debate over which town halls should be able to lord it over the various districts.