Abandon Hope

I read somewhere that the Vikings called their new discovery Greenland in full knowledge that it was anything but green, but in the hope that it might attract settlers. The same principles were obviously used by nineteenth century town developers who gave endless rows of smoke-black terraces names such as Paradise Street and Bellevue Road. Far more realistic where the developers of Halifax who gave Lower Hope Street its name. Given the fact that it was but an axe-blade away from the site of the Halifax Gibbet, the decline in hope may have had more deadly origins than merely a limitation of economic prospects.

My photograph must have been taken in the early 1970s when Lower Hope Street was on its way to becoming Lost Hope Street, and demolition was already underway. There are no houses there today, just a series of warehouses and factories, waiting anxiously for the promised economic reawakening: more in hope than expectation perhaps.