Which is salt and which is pepper? Goole split on its landmark towers | Yorkshire

New York has the Empire State Building; Sydney has its opera house. Goole has its “salt and pepper pots”, a pair of water towers that are the closest thing the east Yorkshire town has to a landmark.

The towers have been a source of local pride for almost 100 years, but now a debate has ignited over which structure is which after the local historical society announced plans to immortalise them in a cruet set.

Forget the argument over whether the cream comes before the jam: which of Goole’s non-identical twin towers is the salt and which the pepper?

The thinner, redbrick tower came first, rising to 43 metres in 1885. It was joined by its neighbour, a white concrete structure a metre taller and more than double the girth, in 1927. Both were given Grade II-listed status by English Heritage in 1987.

2026 will mark 200 years since Goole was purpose-built as a “company town” by the Aire and Calder Navigation Company, which constructed a canal from Leeds to Goole and docks leading into the River Ouse.

Goole Civic Society decided there could be no better way to mark the bicentenary than with mini salt and pepper pots for proud Goolies to put on the dinner table. There was just one problem: which should be which?

Margaret Hicks-Clarke, the society’s chair, said there appeared to be a generational divide over which way round it is.

“We got a group together looking at ideas for how we can celebrate the bicentenary and we thought it would be good to make a commemorative salt and pepper tower cruet set,” she said. “Then we came to think: well, which is which? Because you put one hole in the salt and more in the pepper pot, and we wanted to get it right.

“We had a little debate in our civic society and found we were around 50/50 split. So we decided that we would ask the people of the town what they thought.”

On Sunday, the Civic Society asked revellers at a vintage fair in Goole’s West Park for their opinion. About 150 expressed weighed in, with two-thirds insistent that the still-operational white tower represented salt, Hicks-Clarke said.

“Some of the older generation think that the red one, the brick one is the salt. A lot of the younger ones think it’s the other way around. I’m 68 and when I was a child I remember having a salt pot that looked like the red one, so I thought it was salt too. The youngsters think it looks like a pepper grinder. But when that one was built, they didn’t really have pepper grinders.”

Opinion is divided in the town. Charis Scott-Holm, 35, said: “The brick one is pepper and the white one is salt. It has to be the colour match. It’s insane to think it would be the other way round.”

For more than 10 years, Fraser Barrett has had a view of the salt and pepper pots from his workplace window. Since 2011 he has been posting a picture of them almost every day on his lunch hour on the surprisingly popular Goole View Twitter account. Having now posted more than 1,500 photos of the duo, he is well placed to adjudicate on the row.

“I’ve always thought that the thinner tower was salt?” Barrett, 51, said in a message to the Guardian, the question mark indicating that even he, a modern-day Goole laureate, wasn’t sure. “My logic is salt shakers are generally thinner than pepper pots?”

Surely the town’s Conservative MP, Andrew Percy, would know. Known for his outlandish statements – he once claimed to have never seen a copy of the Guardian on sale in Goole – he chose to sit on the fence on this most contentious of topics.

“Personally, as a lover of that east Yorkshire delicacy chip spice, I prefer to think of them both as chip shake dispensers,” he said.

“I haven’t the foggiest which one is which and never have, but in today’s world I don’t suppose it matters. They can be whatever they want and be happy being either a salt cellar, a pepper pot or both. We are just delighted to have them both in the town as they help put us on the map.”

Ultimately, Goole Civic Society has vowed not overrule the popular vote in a Boaty McBoatface-style scandal. “We are going to let the public decide,” Hicks-Clarke said. “There isn’t a definitive answer. Nobody really knows.”