In which we are introduced …
(misquoting A.A. Milne)
… to a Story About Gledhow and Me
Since joining several online photography communities, I've found friends who dwell on different continents, in different countries and in wildly different environments – living, for example, in the shadow of Ben Ohau (New Zealand) and on the Arctic circle in Lapland, in Gothenburg, Sydney, North Queensland, Tasmania and the Netherlands, and also throughout the Great Britain from a hillside in the Scottish Lowlands to Norfolk in the east and to Gloucestershire in the west.
We all reveal a few clues about our surroundings in the photographs we share but, otherwise, we rarely get a rounded sense of each other’s environs.
My Snapshot of Leeds
Mixing the old and new
I often mention that I live in Leeds – an industrial city in West Yorkshire, in the north of England – and that we’re less than 3 miles from the city centre, and I always wonder what picture this statement paints. One of Victorian magnificence – the Town Hall, the Infirmaries, the Mechanics’ Institute; or of cobbled streets – though strictly, they’re called setts, not cobbles; of the paintings of John Atkinson Grimshaw? Or perhaps it’s the same impression projected by the ‘Visit Leeds’ website:
“A city at the heart of the action, bursting with life and cultural energy. A vibrant creative community, with award-winning national theatre and dance companies, a world-class arena, and a thriving independent food scene you won’t find anywhere else. A renowned retail destination, where big brands meet Victorian arcades. And a welcoming host for international sporting events, colourful carnivals, and … a skyline filled with breathtaking architecture.”
Or maybe it’s the “dark satanic mills” of William Blake’s poem; or dull, grainy, monochromatic photographs showing back-to-back housing (in repetitive terraces banked on the hillsides), ginnels, privy-yards and slaughterhouses? This is a view that aligns with George Bernard Shaw who declared in 1921, that the “only thing to do with Leeds was to burn it” and that “trained artillery men [should] pour high explosive shell into the place, until every vestige of that city of slums was wiped out.” (He was “in one of his comic moods”, apparently).
And when I exhibit ‘backdoor envy’ as soon as someone says that their backdoor looks out onto a golf course, or onto open fields and I explain that I open my backdoor and see the neighbour’s backdoor, I guess that tips the picture towards, at best, a dull, urban setting of brick and concrete.
Our ‘street’ – a cul-de-sac
(we live on the left, near the top)
© Google Street View
In one sense, my description is completely accurate – we do live in Leeds and the immediate view from our backdoor does show another backdoor – but, at the same time, it’s disingenuous. As the street view above attests, my simplistic description is somewhat misleading with its over‑emphasis on ‘the urban’.
In fact we live in a very leafy suburb and within half a mile of our house there’s a sports ground, three schools with extensive playing fields, Gledhow Hall (which the artist JMW Turner painted in 1816), Roundhay Hall, Gledhow Field, Gledhow Lake, Lidgett Lane Allotments and the Roundhay Fault Line (yes, an official geological fault!) And if we follow the fox path through the smeuse in our hedge and across Mrs. Johnson's garden, we quickly reach the corner of Bracken Hills Wood – it's only 150 yards away. We could be there in minutes – the fox is there in seconds – and soon be walking down a path through the remnants of Bracken Hills Wood and into Gledhow Valley Woods, a Regionally Important Geological Site (RIGS).
Gledhow Valley Woods
Gledhow is thus a suburb of contrasts and contradictions; it includes Grade II listed buildings, an ‘estate’ of Edwardian housing from the turn of the 20th century, Brackenwood Estate (built in the 1960s in the ‘Garden City’ suburban style), and ‘ordinary’ housing (like ours) from the 1950s onwards; there are trees, woodlands, allotments and old stone quarries set alongside the normal infrastructure of urban living – shops, supermarkets, churches, schools, a carwash, medical practices and bus stops; and on its easterly boundary (a walk of only 15 minutes for us) there’s Roundhay Park, one of the biggest city parks in Europe, which includes two lakes, part of the ‘Forest of Leeds’, Roundhay Gorge and …
Oh, I’ll tell you about the park properly at a later date.
There are geological and historical reasons why Gledhow and nearby Roundhay are so full of character (and luck plays an important part too) and that’s another topic that I’ll go on to explore more fully but, for now, I’d simply like to give you a flavour of the place that I’m proud to call ‘home’.