Jean Wood is determined to spend the rest of her days in Savile Town, a small enclave of terraced streets in the once proud Yorkshire wool town of Dewsbury. This is where she grew up, went to the grammar school and got married at the nearby handsome parish church nearly half a century ago.
A widow of 75, she likes to visit her grandchildren and tend the flower-filled garden of her detached house on a steep road leading down to the area's community recreation ground, where the cricket club was once the boast of Savile Town. Few of her friends or relatives live in this part of town any more. Jean is one of only 48 white Britons who have stayed on, while all the other 4,033 Savile Town residents, according to the latest 2011 census, are of Pakistani or Indian heritage.
Their forebears were enticed here as cheap paid labor for back-breaking jobs in the wool mills in the late 1950s. Hard-working, they were soon buying up the terraced houses, building their own mosques and opening corner shops selling burkas, prayer mats and perfumes containing no alcohol, in line with the strict teachings of the Islamic Holy Book the Koran.
The change happened so quickly,' says Jean today. 'One day it seemed it was all whites, and then it was all Asians.' Jean remembers when the first Asian family moved into Savile Town, on a road named South Street where she was brought up. Her father worked for the Yorkshire Electricity Board, her mother was a housewife and she was in her teens. 'We peered at them and they peered back,' she says now, as she serves a cup of tea in her sitting room. 'We had never seen anything like them and they probably felt just the same about us. There was no prejudice, just curiosity.' Yet feelings between the two communities have changed dramatically for the worse in the years since.
Across the world Dewsbury was always famous for manufacturing wool products - it was said the town provided the coats for British soldiers' backs and the blankets under which they slept too. Today, it has gained another kind of terrifying notoriety. First, the leader of the gang of four bombers who attacked London on July 7, 2005, came from here.
