Keeping the Best, Creating the Rest

"We looked at Helmsley, Pickering, Malton and Kirkbymoorside. this latter immediately appealed to us. It has everything we could possibly need for normal living, with all the necessary services close at hand, all the important shops, and a friendly market. It was clear that the towns to the east and west were both focussed on tourism as their main economic strength, whereas Kirkbymoorside presented a community at peace with itself, with a mixed population.friendly and supportive and welcoming."

Kirkbymoorside is a real town, unmistakeably in Yorkshire. Blessed with a bypass and surrounded by green hills, farmland and country villages, it has quiet amenities and real shops, serving the needs of local people.

Our buildings are in fine shape, date from many periods and rub shoulders agreeably, without being chocolate-box perfect. The town's humane demeanour and appealing aspect, the pleasing contours and small surprises of its topography - all these are thanks to slow organic growth and owe nothing to heritage industry spin. We don't need phoney Victorian lampposts - our quaintness is authentic.

Within yards of the main street, you can be standing in a field. These green spaces and the alleyways between buildings, like the snickets and ginnels that run through the housing estates, are crucial to the character of the town, which spreads itself uphill and down with neither pokiness nor sprawl. People walk around for the sheer pleasure of it and can choose from a variety of routes for most journeys. There are public spaces and public houses, old men on the benches, amiability in the air and as good a mix of people as of buildings in the town.

That's why Kirkbymoorside's visitor appeal can and should be limited to tourists who don't like tourists - to those who encounter the town and feel grateful for it, just as we do. Because we're a real town, we can welcome tourism without having to pander to its disruptive demands.

In specific ways, life in Kirkbymoorside is like a benign version of the 1950s. The shops are not high-street chains, there's no mediocre supermarket killing off local trade, no parking meters, no daft one-way systems, no pedestrianisation. Yet we retain bank branches, a post office, a real bakery, hairdressers, electrical repair shops, a chemist - all the things so often under threat in contemporary rural Britain. 

Unlike in harsher environments, where divisions are intensified and antagonisms seethe, here you don't have to put your head down and run, grab your shopping or your pleasures and race away again to escape the noise and belligerence of brutish, neglected streets. Our town is alive, its main street busy, but it offers peacable communal space in which people can behave as they prefer to behave: with unguarded sociability, good humour, quiet politeness. Even the adolescent and the old can be seen talking to each other in Kirkbymoorside: the town offers space for that kind of civility and exchange to thrive in the present and offer hope for the future.

Superficially, much of Kirkbymoorside's value may seem to hark back to the past: and it's easy to say that all such looking back is suspect, as if nothing can be taken from the past and kept alive, as if "realism" must involve scoffing at the backward glance, and as if things always move and change in a straight line, rather than in circles. But because the present works, the future is being worked on.

We can and must build on Kirkbymoorside's distinctive current bustle, by developing contemporary facilities and enterprises to teach and foster skills for the future - trade apprenticeships, small-scale high-tech industry, green pioneering - so that Kirkbymoorside does not get Disneyfied and suffer Death by Giftshop, nor surrender its distinctive small-scale character in the press toward high-street conformity and out-of-town sprawl, but rather, builds upon itself as a centre of know-how and craftsmanship, a provider of artisanship and expertise, a focus for the farming hinterland, a living demonstration that small is not only beautiful but fitter and better at responding to new opportunity without sacrifice of character or quirks.

Kirkbymoorside thrives because its inhabitants enjoy the life it lets them lead, here and now in the 21st Century, and our commitment is not to looking back and pining for some imaginary golden age, not to stopping the clocks, but to moving Kirkbymoorside forward, with courage and creativity put into its development, convinced that its humane virtues are priceless, and that they can remain intact.

Kirkbymoorside ~ Keeping the best, Creating the rest.

Michael Gray - Kirkbymoorside