Part Four – The Cycle Tracks 

  The cycle track in north-east York lies on the path of an old railway line.  Originally it took workers between the Rowntree's factory and Selby.  Or possibly goods between Rowntree's and Selby.  Or something between Rowntree's and somewhere else.  Rowntree's themselves seemed equally unsure what to do with it.  I crossed the tracks about a hundred times in my youth and saw an actual train about once.  The line closed down about twenty years ago and was gulped up by the expanding national network of cycle tracks, one of the few genuinely impressive achievements of the era.

 The approach from the eastern end, though, is uninspiring initially.  It requires a walk through either Appletree Village or Osbaldwick Village.  The latter is a brief attempt by Osbaldwick, actually quite convincing, to pretend it is a Cotswolds village rather than an anonymous middle-class suburb.  Appletree Village is just a grim sprawl which is only nice for those who like lots of bungalows, immaculate gardens and rich old people.  Linking the two, though, is Metcalfe Lane.  Not, for once, so-called.  It is a genuine lane between genuine fields, a rearguard action from the neighbouring countryside.  A doomed one, of which more below, but still a nice change from the faux rusticity we have just left behind.  The cycle track itself begins half-way along Metcalfe Lane.

 There are several constant features to this path.  One is the great bulbous metal structures, bright blue in colour, which spring up constantly but haphazardly.  Almost none serve any explicable purpose.  They may be actual sculptures, but if so are extremely abstract and there are no signs to explain their meaning.  Apparently they symbolically represent large blue lumps of metal.  (Which could in fact be the intention: you never can tell with modern sculpture.)  Another feature is the graffiti, sometimes subdued, sometimes rampant, never wholly conquered.  And a third are the gangs who gather on an evening to do the graffiti, and other lively things as well.  This isn't really a walk to make after the sun sets.

During the day, though, the first stage can be almost excessively pleasant.  Shut out the nearby electricity sub-station and it could be a stroll through a remote beauty spot.  The fields continue on both sides.  Tiny birds, and bats on an early summer evening, cannon over the path.  Flanking you are towering hedges of whitethorn – named after their distinct white flowers – and blackthorn – also named, I'm told, after their distinct white flowers.  Make this walk soon, however.  The meadows are council-owned accommodation fields which used to hold occasional herds of cows.  The cattle went long ago, however.  Nowadays the grass is only used for feeding the odd gypsy horse and for looking nice.  And since the council don't care about either gypsies or aesthetics, they've decided to build a bloody great housing estate here.  Despite the numerous derelict gaps in York which could be filled in first, despite that the area couldn't be more of a green belt if it wore a buckle.  Originally the ghastly development was to be called Osbaldwick Two: This Time It's Personal.  The latest tag is Derwenthorpe, presumably because someone understandably confused the trickle which is the adjoining Osbaldwick Beck with the (distinctly non-adjoining) River Derwent.  Thankfully the scheme has been hit by every planning permission glitch known to man or beast and delayed for almost a decade now.  It is too much to hope, though, that they'll abandon it entirely on the grounds that it will make our lives a little less pleasant.

 After a little while the fields give way to houses and gardens, the broken glass and litter starts to proliferate.  The cycle track is passing through Tang Hall, a housing estate I've already touched upon and timidly tried to avoid mocking.  The ambience only drops slightly, however.  The path is still overshadowed by trees and bushes, flanked by banks of wild grasses and nettles.  Creepers or flowers are just as likely to tumble from the gardens as dirty, superseded mattresses.  We are not talking about an outstanding beauty spot here but it’s nice nonetheless.  Hopefully this is what the first stage of the path will be like when Osbaldwick Two/Derwenthorpe/The Gardens of Earthly Delight/Whatever descends, providing it is managed carefully.  There again, I note that one of the putative builders is Persimmon.  Who are not precisely a byword for careful planning in these parts.

 The path ducks warily beneath Tang Hall Lane, as well it might, and then Melrosegate.  On the right is a community centre named after Alex Lyons.  Lyons was a former Labour MP for York and the second husband to Clair Short who died in 1993 after a long struggle with Alzheimer's disease.   He lost his seat ten years earlier to Conal Gregory, a man for whom the word 'egregious' could have been invented.  Lyons' defeat wasn't really his fault – 1983 was the year when every joker with a blue rosette could win power.  And while Gregory might not have been the biggest joker to serve under Thatcher – step forward Rhodes Boyson – he might make the top twenty.  He was constantly boasting that he'd take the fight for York's interests to the highest echelons of government.  Year after year, though, he remained resolutely on the backbenches.  One regular feature in my generally awful Sixth Form magazine were interviews intended to make the subject look faintly ridiculous.  Usually this was achieved through careful editing and unanswerable questions ("What's the capital of Woolworths?" "If you were stuck in a room with two chairs, which one would you sit in?").  With Gregory, though, we really did just have to turn the tape recorder on and let him get to work.  He was annihilated by the New Labour-ish Hugh Bailey in 1992, one of the few bright spots in a generally awful night.  Google him today and you get a lot of contributions to snobby wine pages, plus a claim that  someone poured "a soup bowl full of fresh pee" on him.

 Soon opening out on the left, meanwhile, is St Nicholas Field.  The last two letters on the sign are currently painted over by an unknown hand, a rare example of vandalism being used to resurrect an archaic word.  "St Nicholas? Fie!" I suppose they meant it to say.  St Nicholas Fie is a bit of a melange of a park but what you see from the cycle track is an impressively unkempt jungle.  A sort of shallow valley slopes down, possibly or possibly not with a stream trickling along the bottom.  The flanks on both sides are a riot of greenery.  Blank out many, many truths and you can almost convince yourself that you are exploring a lost dell in the Dales.  Keep concentrating on this vale, because soon appearing on the right is the Ebor Industrial Estate.  Don't be fooled by the tweeness of the name.  It's an industrial estate, so what you get are iron boxes masquerading as buildings and scary spiked fences.  The path then loops to the north and the Fie is taken over by a gypsy camp.

 The Layerthorpe gypsy camp is one of the oldest in York.  'Camp' here is very much a misnomer.  There are few modern caravans inside, let alone traditional Romany ones.  Instead there are a collection of small, ugly but functional little houses.  And running around the whole compound is quite a high wall.  The whole arrangement appears to work, I should point out here.  As far as I know, the gypsies are content enough and there are no more than the usual whinges from their neighbours.  Still, the inveterate liberal in me gets worried when we put a despised minority in their own little settlement and then build a wall around them.  There may be sucessful cases of this occurring in the past but I tend to recall the less happy cases.  Warsaw in the late 1930's and early 1940's, for example.

 Try to keep such melodramatic thoughts from your mind as you pass the camp, dodging the inevitable litter and cute little ponies.  Eventually the path runs under Layerthorpe.  This is the bridge whose parapets exhorted us to Ax The Poll Tax for over a decade.  The graffiti underneath is just as diverting, the classic jagged, colourful and indecipherable lettering interspersed with messages like 'Keep The Love.'  On the other side is a familiar feature of the latter stages of the cycle track.  The gardens are some twenty feet above the path, suspended by brick walls.  A little claustrophobic at times, worrying when you consider the age of the brickwork and, frankly, pretty pointless.  Surely York isn't such a hilly place that they actually needed any cuttings when laying down the railway?  Perhaps it was a clause in the navigators' contracts – x miles of cuttings regardless or their pay gets docked.  On the left is a large compound which, from its plethora of high fences, security cameras and 'No Ball Games' signs, can only be a community sports centre.  It also has an all-weather playing pitch.  These are generally considered good things, almost the basic criteria for gauging the success of a neighbourhood.  If they have three all-weather playing pitches then they're working; none at all and they're a sink estate.  But for we of a certain age the pitches also evoke chilling memories of Luton Town and QPR in the 1980's.

 You may have noticed a great deal of ducking under main roads on this walk.  But suddenly, perhaps inspired by a glimpse of Rowntrees ahead, the track becomes all assertive.  It will not creep beneath Huntington Road.  It will march over instead!  Dazed by either audacity or altitude, things get a little out of control on the bridge.  The most distinctive features are the lamps.  They are elegant objects which stand on the apex of three tall, slender arches running over the track.  The intention is clearly to create a sophisticated, almost Parisian, look.  But as the arches are welded to the solid aluminium slabs which form the bridge's parapets, the actual effect is rather curious.  Then there are the blue metal thingies.  Hitherto bursting up as spirals, lumps and, in one instance, the world's least comfortable looking seat, a blue metal thingy runs the whole length of the bridge.  It seems to be impersonating a thick water pipe.  Once again, no explanation whatsoever is offered.  At the risk of harping on about the graffiti, the pipe currently holds some fine examples of junior school subversion: "Pigs Are Fuck Pricks," "Big Brother Is Watching," "Fuck Xmas" "Pigs Are Cum Bastards" etc.

 On a historical note, and for those who think York has no cinematic heritage beyond the odd episode of Brookside.  On this bridge me and my little group of friends once shot part of The Perspiration Gang, possibly the worst short film in a long history of bad films.  It only had two lines: "You smell!" and then at the tense climax, "Can I join your Perspiration Gang?"  I think there are only two copies of the film in existence and if you come across one, do not approach it, stand well back and call for the relevant authorities.  Most of the shooting was done on the site of an old button factory off Wiggington Road, now covered with houses but then a tarpit-dotted wasteland.  The settings were great, if emphatically nothing else was.  More recently I came across a Homebase lorry wedged firmly under the bridge, having first sheared off most of its roof.  Getting stuck under or inside things is quite a regular occurrence in York.  It happens more commonly in the city centre thanks to the combination of narrow, winding thoroughfares and no sane transport policies.  Walmgate, especially, regularly hosts firmly jammed buses which have tried to manoeuvre through an opening designed for nineteenth century single-horse buggies.

 As mentioned earlier, Rowntrees has come into view ahead.  The cycle track is perhaps the best vantage point from which to appreciate the size of the place.  There is no better word than 'looming.'  The mass of brick dominates the houses and trees which stand in front of it.  The factory briefly vanishes again after the Huntington Road bridge but a derelict warehouse-type building appears on the left.  Somebody, with admirable thoroughness, appears to have completely filled it in with breezeblocks.  Shooting up behind the relic is an old brick chimney.  Factories, chimneys, industrial-era desolation… all of a sudden there is an intoxicating air of West Yorkshire.  It just requires somebody mispronouncing their 'D's as 'T's, and the sight of a face which isn't completely and utterly white, and the illusion will be complete.

 (to be finished)

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