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Narrated by James Marriott
Unless you live in Barnsley you are unlikely to have heard of Eldon Street. Until now that is, because at 3pm tomorrow this historic but now rather run-down high street will be celebrated not only on the radio but also in verse and song – and by none other than Simon Armitage, the poet laureate. What Thomas Hardy did for Wessex, Zadie Smith for Kilburn, Bram Stoker for Whitby and Dante for Florence, Armitage is doing for Barnsley in a BBC Radio 4 programme called The Ballad of Eldon Street.
Which is slightly odd, because although Armitage strikes southerners like me as the very embodiment of Yorkshire, he confesses it’s the wrong sort of Yorkshire for this assignment. “I come from Huddersfield, which is
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