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The Scaffolder

Richard Bell’s Wild West Yorkshire nature diary,  Thursday,  4th June 2009

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THEY’RE TAKING down the scaffolding from a Victorian building, which I guess was, like so many more shops on the High Street, once a department of the Horbury Industrial Co-operative Society. The dormer windows have been repaired but curiously the original first floor windows have been left and they’re still open to the elements and to the pigeons as they have been for years.

Secret spaces like that intrigue me; I picture an empty room, bare boards and an accumulation of pigeon droppings, permeated by a strange silent calm about it contrast to the busy high street below.

When dozens of ‘affordable homes’ are currently being built on a paddock by the stream, with loss of trees and hedgerow, why do potential pleasant dwellings like this, in the centre of the village, remain empty?

It all adds to the mystery of empty rooms.