Call me someone stuck in the past if you will but I really do believe in localism. Gone would be the need to refer everything back to Whitehall for some form of rubber stamp before you can proceed. No I think that local people should make their own decisions and then implement them. This, of course, also means that the same local people have to live with those decisions whether they are good or bad.

The Hepworth at Wakefield is a great example of this. Here we have a gallery that caters for not only local residents, it is free for them to enter and also use the gallery as a ‘warm space‘ (a more damning indictment of years of misrule I can’t think of) as well as visitors such as myself from further afield who have to pay for the privilege. It’s exhibitions are always excellent even if sometimes they don’t really appeal to your individual tastes. Yet they always have a local flavour and rarely suffer from the bombast found at exhibitions in the metropolis. Every region or city should have such spaces and they should be celebrated, as the Hepworth is, rather than slowly run down.

So I would whole recommend a visit anytime you are in the area…I don’t believe you’ll be disappointed.

Ps…if you want a far more in depth review of one of the exhibitions currently on at the Hepworth then check out my fellow traveller David Manley’s blog.