Digging for gold

tauringhuang.

Aug 25th 2008
From Economist.com

Unexpected frolics in a newly happy Yorkshire town


GREAT cold sheets of rain thump down on Castleford, but the doughty families out to enjoy what remains of the Yorkshire summer are undeterred. Pulling up the hood of my coat, I feel a bit envious of a toddler being zipped into the waterproof bubble around his buggy. He, on the other hand, is waging a furious campaign to be let out.

That’s the spirit. Castleford has been rained on long and hard in the last couple of decades, but it remains unstoppably brassy. The closure of most of the coal mines in West Yorkshire that used to support the place left a fifth of Castleford men unemployed during the worst part of the 1980s, and even now it is among the poorest parts of the country.

But Castleford has replaced its great black pits with a gleaming white mountain. The Xscape leisure centre, which opened in 2003, claims to contain Europe’s biggest indoor “real snow” ski-slope. Young men who might once have worked underground now teach snowboarding.


All in good funAnd here’s something their grandfathers would never have predicted: last year the town hosted the Bollywood Oscars at its gleaming new multiplex cinema. Amitabh Bachchan and other Bollywood luminaries strolled through the streets, to the delight of the local Asian population, not to mention plenty of white Yorkshire folk who got hooked too. Proud locals have taken to calling their town “Cas Vegas”. (Not to be outdone, nearby Pontefract now styles itself “Ponte Carlo”.)

I am braving the rain to inspect the latest outlandish offering from West Yorkshire’s party town: a gleeful, muddy place called Diggerland, which opened last year. There can be few people who have not, at one time or another, looked wistfully at a building site and considered a career change. H. E. Services, a big plant hire company, spotted this in 2000 and now runs four Diggerlands around England, from Devon to Durham. All your heavy machinery fantasies can be lived out for £13 ($24) without even flashing a driver’s licence.

After piloting dumper-trucks around a field in a muddy ballet, we queue to operate the mighty arms of a full-size JCB which, thrillingly, can chomp down on the soil before being raised high in the air and released, sending great mouthfuls of earth flying back down to the ground. Some of the other machinery has been specially adapted: on the next ride we are scooped up in the jaws of an even bigger digger and whirled around at speed. (Seats and belts have been fitted, though I see one smart Yorkshirewoman lose a shoe.)

Turning these workhorses into fun-machines makes literal Castleford’s transformation from a town reliant on heavy industry to one driven by tourism and the service industry. It is useful to have such a clear illustration, because it seems that it really needs spelling out. Policy Exchange, a think-tank which is based in London and sometimes shows it, recently recommended that people in the poorer cities of northern England should simply abandon them (they are “beyond revival”) and flee to the south. To the Conservative party, which is close to Policy Exchange and previously believed itself to be close to winning over northern voters, this has been embarrassing.

Castleford shows that it is also wrong. It is certainly true that staff at Diggerland, nearly all of them locals, would struggle to find work in the industries that have traditionally kept West Yorkshire going. But they need not head south; they have jobs in a new, successful industry that is grateful for their labour.

“I came and asked, have you got any work? And they just said, what size shirt are you?” explains the teenager taking us on a bumpy ride in an eight-tonne monster. Worrying for his anxious passengers, perhaps, but surely good news for the local economy.