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shivering in a wretched suit, a scraggy scarf his only extra protection against the wind…
    A coast of birds, of beauty and courageous fishermen, and a coast of ghastly paradox, where men grabble in the shingle for small coals, while about Maryport stand the gaunt frames of silent pitheads that guard enough coal to fill those sacks a million times… If ever men and women had cause to despair, those men and women of Maryport and the peoples of towns that share a like fate have cause; and if ever men begin to pride themselves upon their efficiency and high civilisation let them think of the peoples of such stricken towns and be ashamed.

CHAPTER 3
TOWN OF SURPRISES
    Of the Yorkshire industrial towns which I know, I like Halifax best of all. Most Yorkshire towns of the industrial area assault you with their ugliness and befuddle you with miles of tortuous tram-lined roads, flanked by pitheads and mounds of slag.
    That the towns are shapeless and unplanned is a fault they share with hundreds of others. That they overflow into one another so that a stranger hardly knows when he is in Bradford or Leeds, or Wakefield or Dewsbury, and after a time begins not to care, is a fault which it is impossible to forgive and hard to bear with.
    Halifax is different. It possesses everything which makes other towns ugly and yet it is beautiful. Gasometers, which would offend the eye anywhere else, in Halifax are part of a picture which is essentially titanic and grim.
    As I stood on the road that runs steeply down from Beacon Hill to the valley, there was no mistaking where the town began and ended. It lies in the deep valley of the Hebble with the dark peaks of the Pennines around it, shutting it away from the rest of the world. The hills sweep around the town in almost a full circle and, in the valley-bottom and running partly up the hill-slopes in terraces, is Halifax.
    It was some time before I could find the River Hebble. Standing on the iron bridge, which carries the road over the railway in the valley, I first heard and then saw the river. There it was, hemmed in by the bulk of brewery, carpet factory, railway station and goods yards, rushing and foaming along an artificial bed, bravely pretending to be a moorland stream. There is little hope for a small stream like the Hebble in a growing town. Not large enough to influence the building development, as the Thames did at Oxford and the Avon at Bath, and too small to merit special attention like the Lea and the Fleet in London, it is pushed and thwarted, forced from one channel to another and sapped to provide water for factories and laundries, until finally it disappears altogether and is remembered only by old men drinking their half-pints who call to mind the days when they fell, fished and swam in it. Someday the Hebble must disappear and the sound of rushing water in Halifax will be gone and then the silence of the brooding, impressive hills will, alone of Nature, be left to contend with the shriek of siren and the steam-crested roar of the hooters.
    Oxford has been called the city of dreaming spires but, unless you know your Oxford well, you will find it difficult to choose a spot where you can see those spires to their full advantage. Halifax is a town of smoking chimney stacks, rotund gasometers and melancholy church towers and steeples, and there is no need to seek a special vantage point to see them, for every road which runs down to Halifax will give you an aerial view.
    I counted nearly a hundred of the stacks from Beacon Hill before I gave up in despair. There is no denying the impression of power that comes from those chimneys. Perhaps it is the bold effect of their number. Perhaps not; but for a moment I had a glimpse into the mystery of Mammon worship. It was easy to see how firmly a man could come to believe in and reverence his own powers. Those chimneys were the smoking candles about the altar of a devilish god, a god who still remembered the child sacrifices that