For two weeks (Feb 26-March 11) I’ve lived in the town of Castleford. It’s about a 20-minute train ride from the bigger city of Leeds. Castleford seems to be a pretty socioeconomically depressed town. There’s just nothing here. I was reading about it on Wikipedia and it seems there used to be a lot of coal mining going on here and a lot of people moved here in the early 1900s for that. More recently, there used to be factories here. But even as late as 2015 and 2016, some of the factories closed down, and they have just not been replaced with any other jobs. It’s kind of a sad place to visit. But I suppose if you live here, it feels normal. It seems like people are close-knit. I was just a little surprised at how sad the mall is that’s in the center of town; there are lots of storefronts that are closed. I walked through town on the first Monday to get an overall sense of it. I walked around to see if I could find a nice coffee shop to work in and there’s just not a thriving, cute part of town that you would want to sit in and just be. There’s a lot of potential for it to be like that, but it seems like the local government would do well to refurbish it so it’s a little bit more friendly on the eyes. At the same time, businesses would need to relocate and open and it doesn’t seem like a great place for that. So, I didn’t spend a lot of time in town because it just feels depressive. And the fact that it’s overcast most of the time doesn’t help. However, I will say that I walked across the bridge over the river and saw some nice sites that way over the water front. There are some pretty old churches around town as well, though the areas around them are not kept up.
The highlight of my experience of Castleford itself (in addition to the school I write about in a separate post) was the family I stayed with. I rented a room from Airbnb and it happened to be a family of four who live there and rent out several rooms. Their house is not really in a suburban part of town, but it used to be something like a store front and they’ve renovated it. I had a room on the bottom floor, and apparently there are three rooms in the top floor that they also rent out. They were so warm and kind to me. The mom, Amanda, even made me a lunch one day when I wasn’t able to get to the grocery store the day before. They have made my time here feel warm and comfortable.
But every chance I’ve had, I’ve left Castleford to go to some surrounding cities, which include York, Leeds, and Birmingham, since it’s really convenient to get to lots of places.
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