Spirit of the Aire

My reading of Ben Aaronovitch's latest Rivers of London title, Lies Sleeping coincided with a walk around Granary Wharf and the Dark Arches in Leeds last week. Watching a full and turbulent river Aire following its man-made course underneath the city's railway station, I wondered if rivers really do have spirits or deities of their own - and if so, how the Aire feels about the latest interruption to its flow. After all, the Aire's seen monks washing fleeces in its waters, powered textile mills, used its strength to forge iron - even make putty. And springs along its course have brewed beer in Kirkstall, the city centre and Woodlesford. Since 1816 it has been forced to share its valley with the Leeds Liverpool Canal. But the canal, with its stagnant, managed portions of water, that can only move through locks under human control, is not free like the Aire, whose unbridled rush and flow of water makes it a living thing, such that no-one can enter the same river twice. The Aire moves to its own rhythm and varigates its own depths. Even when forced underground, it has a raw power and strength. The city's life now travels over or around the river that even once gave landlocked Leeds a dock. In our sterile modern world where the only flow worth having is data, the Aire's spirit needs to connect again with the city it bisects.

Leeds misleads

The BBC headline was intriguing at first glance. Leeds, the old home town (OK, city) 'may' be about to 'get' a New York-style 'high line'. Wow, I thought. One in the eye for the Big Apple. But wait, it turns out Leeds has had it since Victorian times and the last time people could walk on it was 1988. If it's already there - all 92 viaduct arches of it - how come we're just about to 'get' it? A more accurate headline would have read 'Leeds remembers it's got a High Line that's every bit as impressive as those in New York and Paris'. But then, the city is rather good at forgetting things - like the flax mill built to copy an Egyption Temple, Colonel Harding's campanile tower, the forlorn Queen Victoria's Arch, abandoned to fate and the elements in Beckett's Park, and the Headingley Bear Pit.

The barbarians are within the gates

These photographs show the sadly now closed Burley Library on Cardigan Road in Leeds.

Strangely enough, the disused building sits cheek by jowl with some very swanky new student accommodation and is situated within an area that has been term-time home to students from Leeds and Leeds Beckett Universities for years. Admittedly it's some time ago now, but when I was a student we spent rather a lot of our time in libraries. Looks like things have moved on now, though. After all, Leeds has always liked to think its at the cutting edge of social change. I can remember when it proudly proclaimed itself 'Motorway City of the 70s' - and if you want to see how well that turned out, try circumnavigating the Inner Ring Road around 9.00am or 5.30pm. Perhaps the city worthies should have kept the libraries and found enough money for a tram system. You know, like they have in Manchester, Sheffield and Nottingham.

Leeds - the Northern Powerhouse?

After the rejection of its planned (and long needed) supertram system, Leeds went all out on a trolleybus replacement. However, this has just been rejected by Tory Transport Secretary, Patrick McLouglin. As city councillors and rapid transit supporters go back to the drawing board, the 'northern powerhouse' seems to have relegated Leeds to the status of cramped garden shed. Another fine mess, and more years of choking in traffic. I can remember when Leeds styled itself 'Motorway city of the seventies' - it's now 'Gridlocked city going nowhere'.

Art at the Brewery

Spent the afternoon at the Tetley, the art gallery and community space housed in the former Tetley brewery office in Leeds. The brewery was controversially closed by parent company Carlsberg a few years ago but the imposing main office, complete with wainscot panelled boardroom and portraits of late Tetleys, remain surrounded by art installations and community event spaces.
Shame the beer served in the cafe is now brewed in Northampton, as opposed to the traditional, but sadly now demolished brewery that dated from the early nineteenth century that until recently stood next to the office. The smell of malt and hops filled the air for generations of loiners.

Leeds and its squares

Leeds, my home town, likes squares. There's City Square, the proud home of the Black Prince's statue (though what connection he had with the place is anyone's guess), and his surrounding bevy of semi-clad nymphs. In 2000, the city created Millenium Square in front of the Portland Stone edifice of the Civic Hall. It was here that Nelson Mandela spoke when he visited the city to thank it for supporting him over the years and every Christmas features a German market, where dodgy tasting gluwein can be enjoyed/endured while looking for overpriced wooden toys and other nicknacks from the land of lager and lederhosen. Further back in the 1970s, the city fathers decided to honour the twin city of Dortmund with a square. Rather more downmarket this time, with a socialist-realism-ish statute of an overweight brewer. Now, it's just been announced that there's to be another square, Tower Square, just off Wellington Street this time, on the site of a former rail marshalling yard and subsequent home to a failed retail park. But Leeds hasn't got any squares named after its famous sons or daughters - be they Leeds-born or adopted, and I think the city planners should look to them before naming any new squares. Two candidates come to mind, Jane Tomlinson, the indefatigable charity endurance athlete who raised so much money for cancer research before her untimely death. OK, so she's got a race named after her already, but a square is a more permanent reminder. Or why not Moshe Osinsky (Sir Montague Burton), who founded his clothing empire in the city after arriving in England from Lithuania. In addition to his business success, he also went on to endow professorial chairs in industrial relations and international law at several leading British universities. His factory at Hudson Road, once the city's largest employer, is long gone, and apparently the only memorial to him in his adopted home is an out-of-town university hall of residence. Burton Square would do nicely.

Happy Anniversary

The picture was taken 100 years ago today - my grandparents married at St Andrew's Church, Burley, Leeds on 1 June 1914. Just 27 days later, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated in Sarajevo - a place that most of the people in the photograph would never had heard of. But by the beginning of August, WWI was declared and within 4 years my grandfather would be fighting in Flanders and of his two brothers, Arthur would be a prisoner of war in Germany, and his youngest brother, Albert, would be dead - killed in an air raid at Ypres. Of two of the male cousins in the photograph, one would lie about his age to enlist and another would endure the opprobrium and ridicule reserved for the conscientious objector. Before the public displays of remembrance start, I want to offer my family as an example - on this, the centenary of my grandparents' wedding - as a reminder of what war did to ordinary people, and how they coped with the horror of events way beyond their experience or control.

The Myth of Beef Tomatoes

Nearly 30 years ago, I worked with Keith, a keen gardener, at a printing company in Leeds. Keith’s main interest was growing flowers, but he, like many gardeners at the time, also liked to grow tomatoes. Perhaps it was the novelty of growing something that demanded light and warmth in the wet and usually cloudy north, but he enjoyed the challenge, with the added dimension of being able to claim that he had grown tomatoes that were larger than his neighbour’s or work-mate’s efforts. Keith used to talk about another former workmate who had seen large beef tomatoes when he was on holiday in Spain. This person, whose name escapes me, if indeed, I ever knew it, had managed to dry the seeds of a large Spanish beef tomato, from which he had grown his own tomatoes in his greenhouse back at home. The story seemed plausible, more than that, it set up the challenge: would this successful gardener share his seeds? Keith asserted that the exercise had been repeated for a number of years, but, unfortunately, he had now lost touch with the grower of those wonderful Spanish-originated tomatoes. A few years later, I was working at another printing company, when a similar story reached my ears. This time, it was a machine-minder called Lewis, whose cousin – certainly not the person Keith had mentioned – who was the successful importer of the rare sun-dried seeds, even though the modus operendi sounded very similar: the tomato was eaten on holiday in warmer Spanish climes; the putative grower procured another specimen, extracted the seeds and managed to dry them on a hotel room window sill, before packing them within the family’s luggage for the return journey. In those now far-off days, when we still had a printing industry worthy of the name, printers were inveterate potterers, so this part of the story, which relied on ingenuity struck a chord. Some of my co-workers had turned pottering into an art form and spent years perfecting the skill of obsessively creating things of little apparent use, both in and out of their paid working environments; these strange ‘hobbies’ ranged from complex indoor recreational activities, such as crazy golf or indoor cricket games that could be hastily removed if the boss appeared, while others became factory-renowned experts in cacti and succulents, geneology (years before Who Do You Think You Are? graced our TV screens), and there were also renowned home brewers and winemakers. Some of this latter grouping led me to experiment for a while, until, that is, my then cellar became home to a few dozen bottles of lethally explosive cider. Sitting upstairs of an evening, my television viewing was punctuated by random subterranean detonations, followed soon afterwards by the sharp aroma of apple and the soft tinkle of broken glass falling from shelf to floor, which led me to abandon the project. And yet, thinking back over the eccentrics and the pranksters, for example, the work’s foreman who delighted in wandering into a local DIY shop at lunchtime, where he would surreptitiously set a couple of the mouse-traps that formed part of a long-standing basket display, before loitering in the adjoining paint aisle to await activation by an unsuspecting shopper, you have to mourn the passing of interests and diversions that enlivened the working day, for we were not yet enslaved to desk or screen and prevented from interaction by stress, deadlines and worry; co-workers were ‘mates’, not ‘colleagues’. Collegiality now means isolation for many, as opposed to being alongside others in the collective exercise of labour. We even tolerated those whose productivity was lower than our own. For example, my first boss would urge us to keep the noise down after lunch if one of our number was in the darkroom. It only occurred to me later that my workmate was having a short rest: a power-knapper years before his time, and that the boss, normally such a stickler, was fully cognisant of the fact. We could also cover-up for the unfortunates who suffered equipment or fitting malfunctions or transgressed health and safety norms. In this category fall the paste-up artist who joined with the mythical three old-ladies by becoming locked in the lavatory when the bolt stuck, and had to be rescued by the boss, who effected the release with the aid of a liberally applied hammer that just about drowned out our laughter. Or the camera operator who managed to slip and fall from a darkroom bench when changing a light source filter. The front of the bench was fitted with an exposure control switch that became entangled in his left trouser bottom as he rapidly descended. This caused a rent in his trouser leg that extended from ankle to crotch. The dull thud was heard by many, but he refused to open the door or a while. Indeed, he only did so when convinced that ‘Charlie’ wasn’t in the building: he had fallen so hard onto the control switch that ‘I’m surprised there aren’t two lumps on the back of my neck’ were the first words he said as he shakily emerged into the light, and ‘the last thing I needed was Charlie howling with laughter when I opened the bloody door’. The biggest beef tomatoes ever grown in the north might have been the Leeds print industry’s very own modern myth but I still want it to be true. Now that the indoor games have been packed away and graphic design software has swept away the darkrooms and cameras, even the very businesses where we worked, that the memory of those tenuous claims to fame have achieved the status of waymarkers to a past, where, sadly, we did things differently but with more style and fun than we can ever claim now.

When Dad and Uncle Harry Couldn’t get a Pint

Dad and his best mate Harry, home on leave from Italy. A Joiner and a Caretaker turned Sapper and Fusilier sergeant 'for the duration' went into Leeds for the night. Two lads from Burley walking down the Headrow and into Vicar Lane called in the Robin Hood for a quick one. That’s how the story starts. Start of a home town night out. Harry was a big man, a sergeant in battledress, he goes over to the bar. Dad’s the smaller one of the two. It’s Harry’s shout, and shout he does. The barman goes red in the face as the drinkers at the bar part. “And I’m telling you I can’t serve you in here. Leeds is closed to the British. We can only serve Yanks and Poles in here”. Now Harry liked the Poles, fought with them at Monte Casino, though neither he nor Dad really got the Yanks. Too much money, too many cigs, too many girls. Dad never forgot three days’ blinded from the flash of one of their anti-aircraft guns defending the harbour at Bari, always grumbled how “you’d think they’d won the bloody war” at war films on TV. But denial of beer in the Robin Hood was an indignity of war they remembered and passed on; for them it was a war story in their very own backyard. If they’d hailed from Białystok or the Bronx, instead of Burley, then that genial mine host would have pulled their pints, but there was to be no beer in the Robin Hood for those two squaddies that night. D-Day Dodgers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4hny_XRaw4 By the same author: Short and Curlies Gnosis

What's in a Name: the University That Needs to Grow-up

Soon after the official opening, my dad found himself standing in front of the then Leeds Polytechnic's new Brunswick Building, when a man came up to him and asked what he thought of it. Dad was a joiner and spent much of his working life on major construction projects. Taking in the front of the building, he said to the stranger that it was neither symmetrical nor finished (the right hand side was punctuated with the protruding rusting ends of metal wall ties). Hearing dad's assessment, his interlocutor took a sharp intake of breath before announcing that he was Patrick Nuttgens, the Polytechnic's Director and the architect responsible for the building! Nuttgens, who was Director of the Polytechnic from its opening in 1969 until his retirement in 1986, channeled his considerable talents into architecture and higher education. Not always popular in his adopted home city, he was nonetheless a leading advocate of urban development with a human face and of wide access to higher education, based on merit, not ability to pay. Fast forward a few years after his retirement to 1992, and the Polytechnic became Leeds Metropolitan University. The new name, a tad too pretentious for some, was felt to add a certain cache to the institution's new status - and served to differentiate it from the neighbouring, and longer established, Leeds University. Twenty-one years after attaining university-status, Leeds Met's current leadership (who don't tend to go in for Nuttgens' like longevity in office) appear to have decided that 'Metropolitan' has been outgrown, and propose spending £250,000 on a makeover, that includes the options of substituting Metropolitan with 'Headingley', 'Beckett' or 'Riding'. Susan Price, Leeds Met's Vice-Chancellor and leading advocate of change, wants a 'consultation with stakeholders' - whoever they might be - but offers little by way of explanation as to how a name adopted in 1992 has become 'outgrown'. With finance cuts blighting further and higher education provision and courses closing in many universities, including the loss of some language teaching at Leeds Met, a more mature outlook from the leadership would be more welcome than this ridiculous cosmetic attention grabbing exercise.

An Aire of Nostalgia

A walk by the river Aire in Leeds.
Spent part of the day on a Ramblers' walk led by my former science teacher along the river Aire from Leeds City centre to Woodlesford.

The route was strewn with memories for me. Starting with the Calls , where I learned to row and sail with the Sea Cadets, we walked past Crown Point Bridge
and the Royal Armouries. Sad to see the former location of the Sea Cadet unit at Leeds Lock Island now abandoned, with weeds poking through the parade ground and the buildings falling into dereliction.

The walk took us on out of the city's waterfront area, under South Accommmodation Road, running parallel to Hunslet Road to Thwaite Mills - and the site of the present location of the Sea Cadets (I carry a permanent reminder of the Bofors gun in the form of a lump above my left ear, where the barrel caught me a blow that needed stitching one summer Sunday afternoon in July 1976).

Lunch at Thwaite Mills allowed me to catch up with John Clark, walk leader and former Science Lecturer at the then Kitson College of Technology. John succeeded in teaching me the rudiments of physics as part of my City and Guilds course in Lithographic Printing in the early 80s. He told me he'd retired in 1992 after 24 years at the College. His quiet manner and assured delivery were still in evidence during the walk as he described the route and places of interest, such as Atkinson's Mill in Hunslet.
Afterwards, I remembered an occasion when John, a strict Methodist and teetotaler, deviated from his planned lesson (how Ofsted would've had disapproved!) to give his class of printing apprentices, who were anything but teetotal, an impromptu lecture on the action of yeast and sugar in producing alcohol and carbon dioxide: proof positive that good teachers are born, not made.

Great day, walking along the river bank and back through time - sweet memories of a landscape that was far removed from the gentrified waterfront, with its mill conversions and purpose built apartments. If any of my former TS Ark Royal shipmates read this, Old Myron's Navy's still pulling, just not by Crown Point anymore.