Ante Shipley: travels in the fourth dimension

This weekend featured a great zine fair in Shipley. 'Zine fair' + 'Shipley' are not words I would ever have expected to appear in the same sentence, and I spent most of my day's conversations in repeating that sentiment.

I was born in Shipley's maternity ward, went to school at Salt's like everyone else, my family did the weekly shop at Shipley Asda. Throughout my childhood and teenage years I walked every footpath, home along the canal, to the jobcentre, the library, the market which got worse and worse every year. And Shipley was a running joke. A place of zero creativity. No bohemians. No alternative culture, no live music. A place to get the train away from, to Bradford or to Leeds. Shops shut down, nothing replaced them. And it wasn't rough, especially, just dead. Disappointing charity shops. Woolworths for sweets, square architecture with the characterful buildings long since pulled down.

I picked up fleas one night from the Unit Four Cinema. I used to know the only Shipley busker - he was involved in the Rye Loaf protest camp against the Bingley Bypass and was a good guy. Our 18th birthday parties were in social clubs that seem to be shut down now. Drinking at the god-awful Noble Comb. And waiting at the bus stops so many many times, that this place is engraved upon my memory, is the geography of my past, is a picture of what the world is like, to me.

So I feel like I own it, as my history, as the past.

And then I turn up this weekend, and there are hipsters and zinesters and trendy families with hippy children hanging out. Soya milk. Punk-band T-shirts. Print initiatives all over the place, art zines, collectives of makers, free arts listings papers, really good and mind-provoking exhibitions in not just one room but a whole floor's worth. And everyone I speak to is living locally, or moving in: "We try to do more stuff around Bradford now, Leeds is just not as interesting." I was so touched. Because I do love Bradford, and I do hate Leeds. It's a part of growing up here to hold that opinion and to hang your emotions onto it. But it never normally gets outside support from intelligent, creative, happening people. Yet this year it does.

2012 seems to be Bradford's year. This is the second time I've come down especially for an event there, and I'll be back again later in the month for Bradford Threadfest, and then probably again in June for 'God Save the Zine'. We went to see a gig on Friday at the 1 in 12 where the beer's £1.60 a pint, and there were other gigs that same night in Saltaire that I would never have expected to happen.

But Saltaire's changed a lot now, gentrified and tidied up and with exhibitions on that are pretty good and have posh white haired tourists walking about the streets with expensive cameras, clutching exhibition programmes in their hands. Saltaire used to be dark and dingy and every pavement was covered in dogshit. No one from our school used to live there, but everyone's grandparents did. If you walked home through the village then it was kinda beautiful but also totally silent and empty at night: not even lights on in the windows cos the old folks were asleep.

In some ways I'm relieved it's not changed more: the ducks and geese are still in the same spots; there's not too many new developments; there's still scruffy old shops on some of the Shipley streets, and the massively overpriced cheese shop and other such turds are only one ingredient to the mix. I hope it stops there, and doesn't get much posher. But I don't resent the money and middle class culture spongers who've moved in. Walking up the hill to my folks' house, my own neighbourhood is exactly the same. And in Bradford city centre there are still the same characters going through the bins at home time - there's an old adage, which is still true, that someone who you would take to be a homeless tramp in any other town, is normally a respectable family man in Bradford: shuffling, ragged, grimy. I still feel at home there, and there are kids growing up in exactly the same situation as I was-  same geography, same atmosphere. But it IS strange when you return, and find your home has moved on...