Which is the safest place to live, the fishing port of Whitby or the city of Bradford?
When I bought a second home in Whitby a small fishing port in North Yorkshire, it made me compare the quality of life in comparison to living in my home town of Bradford, a large inland city.
The reason I’m posting the question above is not simply for the answer. I’m also putting forward the thought that sometimes we live our lives not in the best places in our country.
In my opinion there is little doubt which is the correct answer to the above question, but I’m going to give you my answer at the end of this article when I explain what brought me to this conclusion.
I live on the outskirts of Bradford in West Yorkshire, in quite a picturesque little village called Idle, which is quite a funny name when you consider its true meaning. We have the famous Idle Working Men’s Club, with its emblem of a working man leaning on his spade, get the idea? People from all over the world ask for affiliated passes so they can say they are a member of the idle working men’s club. Idle is quite nice in itself, being an old Victorian village, but its only three miles from the centre of Bradford city and 9 miles from the centre of Leeds.
Being so close to the city centre is good for my business, which is installing security alarm systems and CCTV. I’ve done this job since 1983. Why is this? Because, unfortunately, city centres in the United Kingdom are surrounded by crime and burglary. I used to think there must be other parts of the country which were not quite as bad. Now I definitely think this is the case and I’ll explain why I think so.
In 2007 I bought a holiday cottage in the beautiful old fishing port of Whitby, North Yorkshire. The cottage needed lots of renovation work because I intended to let the property to holidaymakers as well as use it myself. It’s in a gorgeous setting near the harbour, in a very quiet old yard with outhouses. The first thing that crossed my mind was this is very easy to rob because it’s so quiet and there are no neighbours directly opposite. That was my security installer mind in force. So my first two jobs on the cottage were not renovation projects but firstly to install a security alarm system, which also had a telephone dialler which would ring me if the security alarm was activated and, secondly, to install a CCTV camera in the loft with a digital video recorder.
Then I moved on to all the necessary renovation jobs to make the cottage comfortable for holidaymakers. When I finished renovating the cottage, I asked the local and largest holiday letting agency to come around to view the property, quietly expecting nothing but praise for all my hard work and expenditure. It was actually the owner of the agency himself who came to view the cottage. He was a pleasant and professional gentleman, but I’m afraid his first words were not entirely complimentary! His first comment was: Why did you put a security alarm and CCTV camera on this cottage ? I explained my worries about the vulnerability from the burglary point of view, to which he replied that he had well over 120 cottages on his books in the area, and had been in the property letting business since 1970. Mine was the only cottage which had ever had a security alarm and CCTV installation. He went on to explain that there was very little burglary in the area. I suddenly started to have a different perspective on what it was like to live in an area like Whitby. Had I wasted my time and money because, even though there was no labour cost on the security equipment, as I had installed it myself, it had still cost just under 1000 UK pounds for materials?
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending how you look at it, I soon found out by asking local people their thoughts regarding burglary, that he was telling me the truth. They confirmed it was something which very rarely happened and was not a priority to worry about. Then, with a little time spent on my professional hobby of siren box watching, which basically means that when I’m travelling around Bradford I continually look at the Siren boxes on properties to see which company did the installation, I suddenly found around the Whitby area there were virtually no siren boxes to watch! As we say in Yorkshire, the penny had dropped, which means you suddenly see something from a different perspective.
I often meet older retired people in Bradford who have just been burgled and they typically say things like: It’s not like it used to be when we were young; you could leave your front door open without fear of intrusion. It looks like you can still, as long as you don’t live on the outskirts of a busy city!
So the answer to my initial question is, in my opinion, Whitby is much safer than Bradford.
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