I am learning about Leeds.

[postman]

.

 

[Scoosh]

As so often happens, when we go to 'assist' someone, we learn more and gain more from our 'assistance' than we feel we are giving.

Good on you, Postman !

 

[ASC1951]

The planners of the 60's have a lot to answer for,but i suppose in the 60's and if you lived in Adel,Roundhay or Alwoodley you were looking down your nose at the working class people,but hell these people just ripped apart the lives of thousands of men,women and children. i never knew any of this,but George is teaching me.I look forward to our times in the coming weeks.

I'm a few years older than you, I think, Postman, and I can remember all this regeneration stuff coming through the industrial West Midlands in the early 60s. The planners and social engineers thought that communities were only about the standard of housing and that once that was improved, the people in those areas would genuinely be better off in every expect - I can even remember the excitement about new 20 storey flats!
It was nonsense, of course, but some of the areas round me were truly awful. And George may have forgotten just how bad Hunslet was.

 

[postman]

Removed by myself,as i don't think it is appropriate to mention any conversation between me and George at this time.Even though they are only memories about Hunslet in Leeds.

 

[Hotblack Desiato]

Try watching Sir Arthur Elton's 'Housing Problems' (1935):

..both a propaganda piece and a document of optimism. With its iconic image of new flats rising behind an old row of slum terraces in Stepney, it shows what has been done to improve living conditions by the most 'enlightened' local authorities and planners, and provides an exhortation to others to follow suit. Rather than merely asserting the necessity of new housing, it uses the voices and stories of working class men and women to demonstrate the slums' dreadful conditions, and the benefit of the new estates.
Its method - ordinary people talking straight to the camera about their lives - was an innovation in documentary, though to a modern viewer the rehearsed words sound stilted. A more serious note of condescension might be gathered when the narrator tells us that slum-dwellers 'quickly respond' to their improved living conditions by becoming more hygienic themselves.
With hindsight, it might be easy to see faith in planned housing as the solution to social problems as naïve. Leeds' Quarry Road Estate, displayed as an exemplary piece of planning, was never fully completed; many of the vaunted amenities were never added to the basic housing, and the whole estate was demolished in 1978. Nevertheless, the full horror of the slums is brought home, as the badly-housed talk about the deaths of their children and daily encounters with vermin, and the camera pans around houses with crooked stairs, blown plaster and collapsed roofs.
Finally, there's a chilling pathos in the filmmakers' hope that in the next ten years the worst of the slums would have been cleared. By 1945, the Luftwaffe had indiscriminately destroyed large areas of working-class housing, and Britain faced a new and rather more desperate housing problem.

Personally I don't know Leeds but no doubt it still has its 'slums' as do many cities. Tucked away out of sight, out of mind very often.

 

[classic33]

Try the medical museum. near the hospital. Then Dock Green, public house nearby.

http://www.vrleeds.co.uk/leeds-virtual-tour/index.html

 

[Archie_tect]

If I could have had a crystal ball in the late seventies, I would've bought Cawoods old coal staithes in the canal basin behind the station....

 

[vernon]

I'm not a native of Leeds but the squalor in South Leeds was still evident in the early seventies when i used to come to Leeds train spotting and visited Holbeck depot and strayed into Hunslet on my way to Neville Hill depot. I was raised in poor housing stock and was brought up thinking that to have a council house was the pinnacle of achievement and aspirations but I felt as if I was lording it as I wended my way through what I felt was a different world.

There might well have been a high degree of social cohesion but the hints of what had been there in the past did little to make me think that it had been a nice place to be, Even now there is a great deal of redevelopment going on in the area and it is becoming gentrified with new housing developments along the Aire and Calder Navigation which can only be a good thing.

I have fond memories of from my childhood, unlocked front doors, members of the community keeping an 'eye out' for each others' kids, being given pennies to spend at the shop by neighbours, rolling tar balls on hot summers' days, fish and chips for under a shilling, Saturday morning visits to the ABC cinema, standing on the footbridge over the tracks going into North Road locomotive works and going home smelling like a kipper but these are tempered by:

• Freezing bedrooms with ice on the inside of the window glass in winter
• Being the last in the queue for the water for the tin bath
• Witnessing the community's acceptance as the norm of domestic violence after the pay day booze up on a Friday night
• 'leg of mince' for a Sunday dinner week in week out
• The labour involved in using the poss stick, poss tub and mangle on a Monday wash day

Aye. They were the days but our memories tend to be selective and the retro fondness has to be viewed through a reality glass every now and then to restore some balance.

 

[classic33]

If I could have had a crystal ball in the late seventies, I would've bought Cawoods old coal staithes in the canal basin behind the station....

They were already sold.

 

[classic33]

I'm not a native of Leeds but the squalor in South Leeds was still evident in the early seventies when i used to come to Leeds train spotting and visited Holbeck depot and strayed into Hunslet on my way to Neville Hill depot. I was raised in poor housing stock and was brought up thinking that to have a council house was the pinnacle of achievement and aspirations but I felt as if I was lording it as I wended my way through what I felt was a different world.

There might well have been a high degree of social cohesion but the hints of what had been there in the past did little to make me think that it had been a nice place to be, Even now there is a great deal of redevelopment going on in the area and it is becoming gentrified with new housing developments along the Aire and Calder Navigation which can only be a good thing.*

I have fond memories of from my childhood, unlocked front doors, members of the community keeping an 'eye out' for each others' kids, being given pennies to spend at the shop by neighbours, rolling tar balls on hot summers' days, fish and chips for under a shilling, Saturday morning visits to the ABC cinema, standing on the footbridge over the tracks going into North Road locomotive works and going home smelling like a kipper but these are tempered by:

• Freezing bedrooms with ice on the inside of the window glass in winter
• Being the last in the queue for the water for the tin bath
• Witnessing the community's acceptance as the norm of domestic violence after the pay day booze up on a Friday night
• 'leg of mince' for a Sunday dinner week in week out
• The labour involved in using the poss stick, poss tub and mangle on a Monday wash day

Aye. They were the days but our memories tend to be selective and the retro fondness has to be viewed through a reality glass every now and then to restore some balance.

*Pity that most of it is actually second homes for some who work in Leeds. Unaffordable for most people who live further out of the city centre.
Where do I get a pair of those reality glasses, or is that the view the bottom of a pint glass?

 

[Archie_tect]

They were already sold.

OK, when I was little and used to watch their yellow barges chugging up river full and down river empty through Woodlesford lock... if I'd saved my pocket money until I could have been a multi-millionaire.

 

[Supersuperleeds]

Home of the greatest football team ever

 

[classic33]

Home of the greatest football team ever

Wake up!!

 

[dellzeqq]

Home of the greatest football team ever

allegedly http://vimeo.com/2713691

Leeds has more trees per square mile than any other city in England. Also allegedly. And there are houses which have eaves gutters hewn from solid hardwood. Now that is very, very different. And, if one of said gutters should land on your head, you'd be killed instantly.

 

[perplexed]

Leeds has the world's worst road system.

Ever.