This beautiful/amazing/welcoming/friendly Yorkshire I’ve never witnessed

[Agsjsgkahs]

I appreciate this is probably provocative

But I’m from Yorkshire, a shit hole town in West Yorkshire, very close to where happy valley was filmed. I lived there for 18 years and went to school in a neighbouring, and also not great town.

I now live in Scotland, but wherever I go people clock my accent and tell me what an amazing place I’ve come from, amazing to live, couldn’t imagine ever leaving, x,y and z live there. So friendly and welcoming.

The town I am from is inherently racist and the schools are more or less (unofficially) segregated on race lines. Racist language seeps into many conversations, largely but not exclusively, aimed at the Asian community.

I went to a Catholic school in a neighbouring town and even this attracted harassment. My friend who is mixed race (her own description) was called all sorts of horrible slurs and told to go home.

People who claim benefits were hated upon, and most people seemed to think they were paying everyone else’s benefits. (My party trick is to tell them what being a net contributor to society means).

We of course have a conservative MP. And I would say are a new Tory heartland.

I have also lived in North Yorkshire which was not much better, and definitely even more racist and xenophobic.

I’ll give it to the county that it’s green, and maybe parts are nice to look at. Not West Yorkshire.

I have never lived in South Yorkshire or the East Riding so maybe this is the Yorkshire people speak of, but the West Yorkshire I left four years ago and North Yorkshire I left weeks ago certainly isn’t.

So basically, is it just me that’s sick of being told I come from some paradise, that really isn’t

The town I am from is inherently racist

You're accusing a whole town of being born having negative traits they cannot change. That could be described as you being racist OP

And then there's this, probably class based, regional snobbery

I’ll give it to the county that it’s green, and maybe parts are nice to look at. Not West Yorkshire

But you also admit that you have only really lived in the green parts

You say in the rest of the OP that you have lived in North Yorkshire, which is expensive, spacious and rural, and that you also lived in a borderlands semi rural small town in the Pennines. But you then complain that "West Yorkshire" is not nice to look at.

What do you expect a deprived post industrial densely populated working class northern region (WY) to look like exactly?

Maybe you should check your privilege at not having lived a typical WY experience and stop looking down on working class people in the county, who haven't been as fortunate as you, as to where in the county they live?

I'm from one of Keighley's villages and I agree - the countryside is a stunning place. Those rolling green hills!

When you state:

"...I don't think anybody in the world would say Keighley is nice (but it's just a few miles from Haworth and the start of the Dales. It is an absolutely beautiful part of the world)..."

I don't think such comments do Keighley justice.

Keighley has an illustrious history in the mill trade (we were an impressive part of the Gilded Age - that's why Carnegie gave the first Carnegie library to Keighley), beautiful architecture, and very friendly people...

I know what you mean - our history is in the past, as times have changed, our architecture needs looking after and there are politics in the town... but if we scrape away the "soot' we still have something...

There are many many places in the UK that are a shadow of Keighley, and when Keighley is ranked as one is the worst places to live I cannot help but think it's people from other towns in the Bradford district that have voted it as such... People are so b*tchy in the Bradford district with really parochial attitudes.

Bradford Council doesn't help - it seems to suck in all of the money from its wider district to prop up it's core, the City of Bradford. The Keighley district is very wide (some 40 square miles), so that's a lot of rate payers who are pumping money elsewhere.

I know many people who have moved to Keighley from all over England - and Bradford district - and they certainly have stories to tell about other places...

That's life! Wherever you are, enjoy yourself and live well.

:)

I am an immigrant who has been in Yorkshire for decades. I fully understand what you are talking about.

I love the beautiful countryside and feel very welcome in my neighbourhood and city. But then I live in an expensive neighbourhood surrounded by highly educated left thinking professionals who have traveled wide, celebrate other cultures and work in professional multicultural environments.

My experience of living in a picturesque village and visiting them is very different, we are often treated as if we are stealing their benefits or their jobs, racial slurs are not that infrequent and we are denied service in restaurants and pubs unless we have a white British person more often than you can imagine. I have been joking for years about the need for Yorkshire to have a Green Book of its own.

The bottom line is that, if you are white and British, you are not the target of racism, therefore you are unlikely to know or experience how unfriendly and racist people can be unless you have an immigrant who feels close enough to you to tell you about what they experience.

Oh my, this thread is a resurrected zombie thread.

Let’s let it go back to its grave…