Yorkshire Luddism: Fiction and commentary 1: Tourism

In the 1980 when I first walked round the Luddite areas of Huddersfield there was little in the way of plaques, no trails and only one guidebook Kipling/Halls’  On the Trail of the Luddites .   By 2015 there are, plaques on many sites associated with the Luddites, a ‘Luddite Trail’ footpath and a Luddite statue.  Except for the Luddite Trail, that uses a symbol, all of the above involve interpretational texts and all these interpretations have to position themselves in the spectrum of opinion discussed in ‘Issues and Interpretation 1'

Luddite trail symbol: Crossed 'Enoch Hammers' Hartshead Moor

This implicit politicisation of tourism is shaped by a larger economic mechanism; the emergence of ‘Heritage England’.     In a ‘heritage culture’ the past, however traumatic, is marketed as a tourist attraction.  This forms part of a post-industrial landscape/economy where information, not artefact is manufactured.   This marketing is controlled by commercial interest and local planning.  In 2013 someone stuck a plastic reproduction of a Blue Plaque commemorating the Luddites executed in York to the pavement near the execution site outside the court house.   It was soon removed.   

'Official' Blue Plaque.  It assumes readers know who the Luddites were and why they attacked Rawfolds. 

The York incident shows the extent to which controversial material has to be carefully mediated in order to convert it into a tourist attraction.   The Huddersfield area is a classic example of the passage from Industrial to Post-Industrial economy.  There is a bewildering mix of run-down commercial and trade centres studded with expensive housing developments.  Such developments frequently focus on the old mill buildings.    Some are falling into ruins, some have been converted into luxury houses, others support smaller industries (see ‘Setting: Millscape’). The contrast mentioned above, between ruin and luxury is starkly illustrated each side of Lower Westwood Lane at the foot of Linthwaite.  To the south-west Westwood Mills is overgrown; to the north east the Titanic Mills have become the Titanic Spa and Hotel.  

             Westwood Mills succumbing to vegetation;                                                 Titanic mills converted to luxury.

A romanticised version of the part becomes part of the ‘value’ of such sites, using the word ‘value’ in both its monetary and aesthetic sense.   In this context the Luddites become an exotic, outmoded threat, with something of the ambience of the highwayman.      Accidently or not, this was caught up in the dress of the Luddites who demonstrated machine breaking at the London Anarchist bookfair of 2012.https://undergroundhistories.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/bookfair-luddite-2012-014.jpg

For the novels the Luddites are not distant threats.    Though the books treat the Luddite movement as a brief flare up that soon died out, the texts are permeated with explicit and implicit messages to the workers and governments of their day.    Evidently there is a fear that the Luddites might have heirs.    One of the first books written about the Luddites , Frank Peel’s 1880 The Risings of the Luddites, Chartists & Plugdrawers, sees the Luddites as an integral part of the often violent political and industrial struggles undertaken by mislead workers protesting against the emerging Industrial society.  One hundred years later this perspective was reversed by the first edition of Alan Brooke and Lesley Kiplings’, 1993 Liberty or Death: Radicals, Republicans and Luddites 1793 to 1823, which sided with the rebels.    

See 'An English Heritage: 21st Century' section of 'Caldervale after the Luddites: Radical Landscapes 12820-2012' for comments on this Luddite statue erected in Liversedge in 2012