A wonderful little insight into the shameful architectural vandalism that largely occurred in this country during the 1960's. Thank God they started to list buildings from the 1970's onwards otherwise we would all be living in a concrete dystopia that would resemble Romania at it's worst under Ceausescu!!!
Interesting......most everything he said rang true and now some 50 years later, after decades of neglect and decay, many of those ideas have been put in place and the centre now looks surprisingly modern, clean, inviting and well developed, which for a post industrial town in the north is quite an achievement.
prettycastle1973 crap, its miles better than it used to be, looks pretty bad in the video and the narrator is very down on little old Barnsley. YOUUUUUUU REDSSSSSSSSS
What a great video loved the old cars , and the disused railway viaduct , one of my uncles used to work at Barnsley Exchange station he would love to get hold of one of the old station signs from there
i love my hometown but i wish they had kept more of the old buildings. can just about remember the viaduct should definetely kept that, shame, the guy on film talks a lot of sense.
That chap talks sense! YOu might call it depressing but hes spot on. Im not old enough to remember a lot in the town but from the pictures ive seen and from talking to parents etc.. the way they just knocked down our heritage and put up soulless concrete buildings was criminal. We'l never get that back. Its happening again now. Wish that guy had been brought in before they started pulling it all down - we might have some nice old buildings now like Chesterfield and Leeds etc..
There are still old buildings in the town if you gake the time to look - especially look up. All of Huddersfield Road, the Civic Hall, Town Hall, Penny Bank Building, Ashley Jackson's etc.
My Father was Born in Barnsley and the people there are very good easy to talk to i like to see the tykes win its alright Ian saying we should redevelope a place like Barnsley wheres the money coming from?myself i live in Bridlington i just like it by the sea. ❤❤❤❤❤❤
All those new building plans were built but are now being torn down to make way for new. Barnsley has been undergoing a massive makeover over the last few years and will be transformed into a fantastic place to live and work.
He was on the money for sure. They ripped the guts out of Barnsley. Look at Pontefract, it's what Barnsley could have been like. Full of original old buildings with a bit of new sympathetically added. They may do a good job of the new town center, but it will still remain without soul because the history has gone. Still, it will always be home to me, and a lot of the surrounding villages still retain their charm and character(s).
I'm from Barnsley and worked on the market in the 60's and every day I thank God I don't live there anymore, they could have made such a lot out of it but did nothing but throw up concrete building totaly without soul or thought to people having to live there
+Pube Well said Pube but David Storton has a point. I've grown up with those hideous concrete buildings and even as a kid I looked at them, I wondered, and I realize now that i hated them. I can't say that i'm fond of the new design either. It looks cheap and lacks character. Maybe it'll look better in the flesh but i'm not holding out too much hope. It'll probably be ridiculed and demolished in 40 years time. I like the new Bus station. It has imagination and character. it's just 1 or 2 buildings that are around it that make it look out of place. Hopefully when the soulless concrete shithole Market is finally demolished and the new market goes up we might see some symmetry and coordination. The town has some great Victorian buildings. Couple those up with some nice new architecture and you'll find they strangely go hand in hand. It's the monstrosities that went up in the 60's and 70's that make the town look bad. These type of poorly thought out buildings went up not just in Barnsley but in Sheffield too. The City centre of Sheff looks so much better now than it did 25 years ago. That's thanks to some major investment and architectural imagination. We could emulate them by investing properly in our town centre.Something else that would vastly improve the town is a Railway viaduct like the one that used to go to the Old Courthouse Station. What a travesty that this became unused and demolished in favour of our current set up. As usual the decision to choose the Sheffield Midland railway route was taken without enough thought. How many town centres have those stupid railway barriers continually disrupting the flow of people and traffic? I'm Barnsley born and bred, I live in the Oakwell area in a humble terrace but I refuse to hide behind sentimentality when it comes to our Tarn centre. Some awful decisions have been made over the years by the powers that be. I guess as the people of Barnsley we just learned to live with it but when some constructive criticism comes, you have got to take it in and look at it objectively.
I would love Barnsley to have the character that it did in the 60s it was an old fashioned market town and I lived there and worked on the market, but sadly those days are gone and we are left with what the planners think we should be living in , it's really a shame they don't have to live in this shite themselves
if those are the buildings i think you are talking about... they have just knocked a whole lot of them down if you are meaning near the bus station town center.. the most hideous things ever,, but thats the 70s for you.... The time of no style i call it..
the redevelopment of the market, which i think was opened by the Queen in 1977, lasted until recently and the next iteration has recently been unveiled. i've not seen the Glass Works up close yet, but it has to be much better than the previous concrete monstrosity.
Fantastic, just what most people in Barnsley were thinking. What were the council thinking, that could open a can of worms. What happened to all the exhibits in the civic hall museum are they all accounted for?
I'm a Barnsley lad, and was already a working man when this film was made. The guy is bang on in his comments. I wonder what he would have made of the present redevelopment. I know what I think of it - give an architect a pencil, a set square and a straightedge, then take away his imagination, and the new centre is what you end up with. The new library looks like a stack of shipping containers, with the rest of the development shaping up the same way. No character at all, soulless and bland.
He sounds as depressed as I have always been, when visiting Barnsley town centre, even our local town in Wombwell was better than this. That's gone under as well now due to lack of jobs and money and community. There was real character and personality there in the 60's and 70's, especially around the markets, but it all began to die after the strike, with demotion of pubs to piles of rubble. This is integarl to death of these communities, as these drinking houses and pits were community hubs, but never replaced. In Wombwell there were two good markets too, although Barnsley was the biggest. I recall being dragged down there when about 5 or 6 (1963 ish) in the pouring rain, just like in the video, amongst many old uns who scurried around looking for a bargain, and whose ears were highly receptive to the cries of the market stallers who proclaimed great bargains... not one, not two, and not three, but five for a quid, but get it now, as it's a once in a lifetime buy. And they did, trampling over anything that barred their way to their bargain. The side of Barnsley up Huddersfield Rd from the Town Hall he highlighted had a nice feel to it, but it was the money side, whereas going the other way up the River Dearne Valley, and towards the Don Valley, was really, really rough in parts. This was the biggest and busiest industrial site in Europe, maybe the world, full of beer-swilling and hard-working men, who worked and played hard, oft in extremely dangerous and low-paid jobs. They had little time for genuine beauty, but plenty of time for beer and bargains, and so the town centre reflected this philosophy, where money tended to be spent on the very basics of life, along with pleasures, usually the pub, footie, or fishing. Back in those days, I don't remember seeing men around, as they were at work, apart from really old retirees, but it was nearly all older women with their headscarves over their heads, and thick, long coats drooping to the floor, as it was cold back then, real cold There are a few localised sites near Wentworth, and towards Huddersfield that have a distinct beauty, some elegance, that reflect wealth and thoughtfulness in their architecture, but those in the mining villages didn't seem to care, and neither did the Council. I therefore agree with other commentators here who suggest it was s h_t hole before these developments, and an even bigger one after, and now with abated breath we await the next development, and my preliminary view is that it's more of the same...a heartless, soulless mess, although the bus arrangements were improved, but then they couldn't get worse. Perhaps, this is the point though, these people's soul was in their communities, and the heart of these were the pits and the pubs, along with the canals and reservoirs where they fished, so shopping was a necessity to be done as cheaply as possible, and with as many bargains. Hence why the markets and £ shops and Wilkos thrived here, well before these emigrated into southern towns, during the general and more recent demise of the British retail town centres. And so as with life in general, you get what you wished for, and since hardly anybody gave a damn, you get a sh_t ole!!! I would be intrigued to see the localities before the 1900's though in a stand-alone scene, as there's plenty of nice stone houses around from those days, and we had all the canals back then, with lock houses, theatres and such, suggesting it was quite a cultured place, but for whom I wonder, for did the miners from those back-to-back red brick housing rows sat next to their collieries attend such places??? And did they give a damn?
Thatcher screwed this place real bad. The government really don't care about the north. I've lived in Barnsley for a while and I'm impressed with how much progress its made. They've knocked down a lot of the buildings, which they should've kept. I've never had issues with anyone in Barnsley and I don't mind the place. I've lived in Huddersfield and that's miles worse. It's a complete crap hole filled with 'wanna be' hard men. Barnsley is better than most industrial towns today.
This is fascinating. The guys a legend. I have absolutely no idea why RU-vid had this queued for me but maybe it knows what I want to watch than I do. Tbh being a kiwi its hard to relate to the urban decay as here. Theres a similar period Stockton and Darlington railway documentary with artist David Sheppard and he's just as disparaging regarding the then state of urban decay as Ian Nairn. Britain almost seemed to hit some trough of cultural collapse in the seventies. Just thinking of the morbese car industry and its self destruction. The stark reality of any form of civic or urban development or beautification plans. The essential collapse of the northern industrial heart (cars, manufacturing, mining that kind of thing). Even the apocalyptic vision as presented in Qatermass or Clockwork Orange: no nuclear wasteland, no robots or AI takes over the world; just the societal collapse, moral bankruptcy where the "weather" reports just predict counties' blackouts. Almost like Britain was just pushing time for a new awakening. Fascinating period. P.S why is Barnsley singled out? Is it some cultural capital of the North?
That's Ian Nairn. He traveled Britain and expressed his opinions on architecture and practicality of buildings and town planning around England and Scotland in several brilliant and controversial television series. Sure - a lot of the time he sounds rather depressing in what he says... but most of it is the truth. He really is quite a great presenter and has a unique way with words.
Michaelbrown1995 I agree, he does undoubtedly know his stuff and saying that I'd much rather have him presenting a program like this than those we have on tv today that look and sound good but haven't a clue on what they are talking about. I'm surprised by the quality of the footage and audio for that time. Whoever has preserved it has done an excellent job.
NOT TOO KEEN OF NEW BARNSLEY MARKET ME SEN NOT LIKE THE ONE IN 70S WHEN ME & MY SISTER ALISON WENT WITH OUR GRANDMA, WARING AND GRANDMA RAWSON 5:42 THAT WAS THE COURTHOUSE RAILWAY STATION THATS NOW COUTHOUSE PUB
yes, unfortunately. Like most of Europe. And still they come...with the likes of Merkel inviting over 1 million Muslims to Germany. Ha, you couldn't make it up.
